Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

654 Pages·2006·2.86 MB·English

by  Susan Faludi

ACCLAIM FOR
Backlash: The Undeclared War
“As groundbreaking . . . as its two important predecessors, Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique . . .
gripping.”
—LAURA SHAPIRO, Newsweek
“Fiery, scintillating . . . deserves the largest possible readership.”
—Booklist
“A landmark book.”—San Diego Union
“Spellbinding and frightening, this book is a wake-up call to the men as well as
the women who are struggling to build a gender-respectful society.”
—ROBERT REICH, author of The Work of Nations
Brilliant reportage . . . astunning debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews
—Chicago Tribune
“Enraging, enlightening, and invigorating, Backlash is, most of all, true.”—New
York Newsday
“Faludi argues with great passion and impressive research. . . . Backlash may
even be the catalyst for a new wave of activism.”
—Vanity Fair
“The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to help us
understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue, and to keep going.”
—ALICE WALKER
“Thought-provoking, inspiring, and truly groundbreaking, Backlash is a must-
read for women across the nation.”
—ELEANOR SMEAL, President, The Fund for the Feminist Majority
“Faludi gives so many examples of reporting skewed to emphasize the adverse
effects of independence and nontraditional roles for women, when ample
evidence exists that such effects are often transitory, that one is left with no
doubt that she is right.”
—DIANE JOHNSON, The New York Review of Books
“[Backlash is] wholly convincing and more than a little alarming.”
—The New Yorker
“Withering commentary . . . This eloquent, brilliantly argued book should be
read by everyone concerned about gender equality.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Smartly written, extraordinarily reported.”
—M magazine
“Backlash is a crucial book on a crucial subject. With great insight and wit,
Faludi identifies the obstacles to women’s equality and directs us toward more
promising responses.”
—DEBORAH L. RHODE, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, and former
Director, Institute on Women and Gender, Stanford
“If you believe . . . that equality is good for women, and that traditional gender
roles are mandated unfairly by culture, not nature, you’ll find this book a
valuable resource.”
—WENDY KAMINER, The Atlantic

To my mother, Marilyn Lanning Faludi
Contents
Preface to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
1 Introduction: Blame It on Feminism
PART ONE
Myths and Flashbacks
2 Man Shortages and Barren Wombs:
The Myths of the Backlash
3 Backlashes Then and Now
PART TWO
The Backlash in Popular Culture
4 The “Trends” of Antifeminism:
The Media and the Backlash
5 Fatal and Fetal Visions:
The Backlash in the Movies
6 Teen Angels and Unwed Witches:
The Backlash on TV
7 Dressing the Dolls: The Fashion Backlash
8 Beauty and the Backlash
PART THREE
Origins of a Reaction:
Backlash Movers, Shakers, and Thinkers
9 The Politics of Resentment:
The New Right’s War on Women
10 Ms. Smith Leaves Washington:
The Backlash in National Politics
11 The Backlash Brain Trust: From Neocons to Neofems
George Gilder: “America’s Number-One Antifeminist”
Allan Bloom: A Refugee from the Feminist Occupation
Michael and Margarita Levin: Boys Don’t Cook and Girls Don’t Do
Long Division
Warren Farrell: The Liberated Man Recants
Robert Bly: Turning “Yogurt Eaters” into “Wild Men”
Sylvia Ann Hewlett: The Neofeminist’s Lesser Work
Betty Friedan: Revisionism as a Marketing Tool
Carol Gilligan: Different Voices or Victorian Echoes?
PART FOUR
Backlashings: The Effects on Women’s Minds, Jobs, and Bodies
12 It’s All in Your Mind:
Popular Psychology Joins the Backlash
13 The Wages of the Backlash:
The Toll on Working Women
14 Reproductive Rights Under the Backlash:
The Invasion of Women’s Bodies
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
that perennial media topic “Whither the women’s
EVERY SO OFTEN
movement?” gets trotted out for examination, or rather for exorcism
—“Wither the women’s movement” might be a more accurate rendering
of press sentiments. When it does, my phone often rings and a mildly
irritated reporter asks, or rather huffs, the inevitable question: “Is there
still a backlash?”
Because the reporter’s query is more of a complaint (“Aren’t you done
with this feminism business by now?”), it’s hard not to respond in kind
(“Aren’t you sick of this let’s-attack-feminism business by now?”). Yet
when I sat down to consider how to introduce the book I first published
15 years ago, I found myself bedeviled by a version of that same
question: Is there a backlash? Still?
The answer, unfortunately, is no.
“Unfortunately,” because it turns out there are some things worse than
backlash.
Back in the ’80s, the slightest sign that women were exercising their
independence set the culture hounds to baying. Were young women
deferring nuptials for higher education? “You’re more likely to be killed
by a terrorist than to kiss a groom!” the newsweeklies howled. Were
older women postponing childbirth to pursue work they cared about?
“Your biological clock will strike midnight, and you’ll turn into a barren
pumpkin!” the “lifestyle” media mavens screeched. Were single women
breaking courtship rules and taking the sexual initiative? “You’ll turn
into a psycho-killer and meet your maker in an overflowing bathtub!”
the Hollywood mullahs decreed.
Ah, the good old days.
The backlash scolds are less in evidence now, so much less that to
grouse about the few remaining haranguers would seem to quibble with
success. When was the last time a twisted single woman boiled a bunny
in a feature film? We appear to have vanquished those daily amber alerts
about the “man shortage,” the “infertility epidemic,” and the “dark side
of divorce,” not to mention the Job-like plagues of nervous prostration,
heart disease, alcoholism, hair loss, and adult acne that were once said
to be afflicting every hard-charging “career woman.”
Yes, there are still the periodic reprimands, though generally they are
presented as the products of a woman’s “choice.” The backlash is now
said to be a strictly self-inflicted affair. That was the message of a front-
page New York Times story on September 20, 2005 that asserted that
“many” female undergraduates at Ivy League colleges planned to junk
their high-priced educations and stay home to tend to their babies. (“I
don’t mind the status quo,” a Yale sophomore cheerfully told the Times.
“I don’t see why I have to go against it.”) “Choice” was also the point of
the New York Times Magazine cover story on October 26, 2003, “The Opt-
Out Revolution,” which asserted that many female careerists were
foregoing their fat salaries (though not their husbands’) in favor of the
stroller-pushing suburban life. (“I don’t want to be famous,” one opt-
outer told the Times. “I don’t want to conquer the world.”) And that was
the theme struck in a “60 Minutes” report in April 2002 that held that
“more and more” professional women were berating themselves for their
“choice” and cashing in their life’s savings for infertility treatments.
But these let’s-turn-back-the-clock appeals in the media lack the
adamancy of the backlash “trend” stories of the ’80s. The New York
Times nervously hedged in its article on the Ivy League future
homemakers, conceding that “changing attitudes are difficult to
quantify.” (Indeed, the results of the newspaper’s e-mail survey of female
students turned out to be hopelessly flawed, as a number of
commentators later pointed out.) The author of the New York Times
Magazine’s “Opt-Out Revolution” conceded that her conclusions were
“not a scientific sample.” Even the writer of Atlantic’s March 2004 cover-
story attack on working mothers who hire nannies, Caitlin Flanagan,
confessed that she, too, employed a nanny.
The ’80s-style carpet bombing of emancipated women appears to have
been called off. What we hear now seems to be nothing more than
random sniper fire. We’re told that feminism has faded into the
background because its aims have largely been achieved. We’re told that
young women don’t identify with feminism anymore because they don’t
need to. As the young Yale undergraduate said in the Times, there’s
nothing left to “go against.”
On paper, at least, the undergrad appears to have a point. Women
have made slow but steady gains in the last 25 years. They now
represent nearly 60 percent of undergraduates, two-thirds of journalism
school enrollments, and half of medical and law school students. The pay
gap between men and women has narrowed by about a dozen
percentage points in the last couple of decades (although 60 percent of
that “improvement” is actually due to a decline in men’s real earnings,
not a rise in women’s wages). About 15 percent of congressmen are
congresswomen, hardly what you’d cll representative democracy but
better than the mere 3 percent who were female in the House and Senate
in 1979. Women own about 38 percent of all businesses (although most
are small and struggling businesses in the service sector). And 86 percent
of Fortune 500 companies have at least one woman on their boards
(albeit in most cases just one woman).
We should be pleased with our progress.
So why, as I survey the American gender landscape today, a landscape
that has accommodated and to some extent been shaped by “liberated”
women of my generation, do I feel so uneasy? Doesn’t the lack of conflict
suggest that feminists routed their enemies? Isn’t this silence the silence
after the battle, the silence of Agincourt?
Maybe. But something tells me we are elsewhere. Somewhere like
Heraclea, that ancient Roman battlefield where King Pyrrhus famously
bemoaned his blood-soaked win with the words, “Such another victory
and we are undone!”
• • •
I early ’90s, after the long despond of the Reagan years, American
N THE
women shook off their torpor and began again to fight. The televised
sexist spectacle of the Senate Judiciary Committee members mocking
Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas proved one humiliation too many for female
viewers to witness. After all this time, indignant women told each other
across the nation, these men still “don’t get it.” Indignation led to anger,
which led to mobilization, which, by the spring of 1992, led to a massive