Susan Faludi
In a widely read 1991 book titled Backlash: The
Undeclared War Against American Women, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Susan Faludi described a powerful counterattack, or backlash, against the gains
American women had won in the 1960s and 1970s. In compelling detail, she showed
how the media consistently and inaccurately held the women's movement
responsible for every ill afflicting modem women-from infertility to eating
disorders to rising divorce rates to the 'man shortage." For example,
Faludi picked apart the statistics put forward by the media showing a drastic
decline in the chances for college-educated, unwed women over thirty to marry.
(In Newsweek's inflammatory-and inaccurate-headline, women over forty were.more
likely to be killed by a terrorist" than make it to the altar.) She also
demolished widely reported stories about an 'infertility epidemic" among
professional women who postpone childbearing or supposed trends of widespread
emotional "burnout" among career women. But in a backlash climate,
such accusations, even when untrue, seemed plausible. This selection from the introduction, entitled 'Blame It on
Feminism," shows the passion and conviction which which she argues her
case. .
The backlash is at once
sophisticated and banal, deceptively "progressive" and proudly
backward. . . .The backlash has succeeded in framing virtually the whole issue
of women's rights in its own language. Just as Reaganism shifted political
discourse far to the right and demonized liberalism, so the backlash convinced
the public that women's "liberation" was the true contemporary
American scourge-the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and
economic problems.
But what has made women unhappy in
the last decade is not their "equality"-which they don't yet have-but
the rising pressure to halt, and even reverse, women's quest for that equality.
. . . Identifying feminism as women's
enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women's equality,
simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash's central role and
recruiting women to attack their own cause.
. . .These outbreaks are backlashes
because they have always arisen in reaction to women's "progress,"
caused not simply by a bedrock of misogyny but by the specific efforts of
contemporary women to improve their status, efforts that have been interpreted
time and again by men--especially men grappling with real threats to their
economic and social well-being on other fronts-as spelling their own masculine
doom.
The
most recent round of backlash first surfaced in the late '70s on the fringes,
among the evangelical right. By the early '80s, the fundamentalist ideology had
shouldered its way into the White House. By the mid-'80s, as resistance to
women's rights acquired political and social acceptability, it passed into the
popular culture. And in every case, the timing coincided with signs that women
were believed to be on the verge of breakthrough. . . .
In
other words, the antifeminist backlash has been set off not by women's
achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might
win it. It is a preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the
finish line. "A backlash may be an indication that women really have had
an effect," feminist psychiatrist Dr. Jean Baker Miller has written,
"but backlashes occur when advances have been small, before changes are
sufficient to help many people. . . . It is almost as if the leaders of backlashes
use the fear of change as a threat before major change has occurred." In
the last decade, some women did make substantial advances before the backlash
hit, but millions of others were left behind, stranded. Some women now enjoy
the right to legal abortion-but not the 44 million women, from the indigent to
the military work force, who depend on the federal government for their medical
care. Some 19 million still remain in the typing pools or behind the department
store salescounters. (Contrary to popular myth about the
"have-it-all" baby-boom women, the largest percentage of women in
this generation remain typists and clerks.)
….. In 1986, while 41 percent of
upper-income women were claiming in the Gallup poll that they were not
feminists, only 26 percent of low-income women were making the same claim.
…. The force and furor of the backlash
churn beneath the surface, largely invisible to the public eye. On occasion in
the last decade, they have burst into view. We have seen New Right politicians
condemn women's independence, antiabortion protesters firebomb women's clinics,
fundamentalist preachers damn feminists as "whores" and
"witches." Other signs of the backlash's wrath, by their sheer
brutality, can push their way into public consciousness for a time-the sharp
increase in rape, for example, or the rise in pornography that depicts extreme
violence against women.
….The
backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some
central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of
their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its
workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the
manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance either; some
are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for
a "fresh" angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and
cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one
direction: they try to push women back into their "acceptable"
roles-whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive
love object.
Although the backlash is not an
organized movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the
lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it
harder to see-and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights
succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it
appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private,
when it lodges inside a woman's mind and turns her vision in- ward, until she
imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the
backlash, too--on herself.
In
the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers,
traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has
adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep concern." Its lips
profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the
mold around her ears. It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus
married women, working women versus homemakers, middle- versus working-class.
It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow
its rules, isolating those who don't. The backlash remarkets old myths about
women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its
own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper
underground.
Backlash
happens to be the title of a 1947 Hollywood movie in which a man frames his
wife for a murder he's committed. The backlash against women's rights works in
much the same way: its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it
perpetrates. The backlash line blames the women's movement for the
"feminization of poverty"--while the backlash's own instigators in
Washington
pushed through the budget cuts that helped impoverish millions of women, fought
pay equity proposals, and undermined equal opportunity laws. The backlash line
claims the women's movement cares nothing for children's rights-while its own
representatives in the capital and state legislatures have blocked one bill
after another to improve child care, slashed billions of dollars in federal aid
for children, and relaxed state licensing standards for day care centers. The
backlash line accuses the women's movement of creating a generation of unhappy
single and childless women-but its purveyors in the media are the ones guilty
of making single and childless women feel like circus freaks.
To blame feminism for women's
"lesser life" is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to
win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple
concept, despite repeated-and enormously effective-efforts to dress it up in
greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote
sardonically in 1913, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely
what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
The meaning of the word
"feminist" has not really changed since it first appeared in a book
review in the Athenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who
"has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence."
It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen's A Doll's House a
century ago, "Before everything else I'm a human being." It is the
simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women's Strike for
Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren't
decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a "special-interest
group." They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national
population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable
of participating in the world's events, as the other half. Feminism's agenda is
basic: It asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public
justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define
themselves-instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again,
by their culture and their men.
The fact that these are still such
incendiary notions should tell us that American women have a way to go before
they enter the promised land of equality.