* In 1990, the socialist author Barbara Ehrenreich lauded Barr as someone who represented “the hopeless underclass of the female sex: polyester-clad, overweight occupants of the slow track; fast-food waitresses, factory workers, housewives, members of the invisible pink-collar army; the despised, the jilted, the underpaid.” By the same token, said Ehrenreich, Barr was a masterof “the kind of class-militant populism that the Democrats, most of them anyway, never seem to get right.”