Customer Reviews

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I just received "Stiffed" (also by Susan Faludi) in the mail today, so before getting started on that, I thought I'd take a look at "Backlash" again, & remember how it had felt to read it.

It's been quite a few years since I first came to "Backlash", & back then, I remember that it had made a strong impression on me. It turns out that it was a lasting impression, since, reading parts of the book again now, I see that there are points that have stuck with me & formed parts of arguments I myself use sometimes in conversations! The book is not dated, in my opinion, even though it was written in the 80s. Also, the book may be specifically addressing US society, but the basic arguments apply to European countries, as well.

The basic premise of the book you probably know, so I'll just briefly say that it has to do with the backlash that has risen against feminism & its achievements. You could state it like this: Feminism takes 1 step forward & then gets forced to take 1 step back. After reading "Backlash" the first time around, I remember thinking how clear & logical (& true to my experience here in Greece) is Susan Faludi's argument. Lots of people (mostly men, but women too) are threatened by womens' advancements. So they chose the easy way out: they deride feminism, laugh at "lesbian / ugly / man-hating" etc etc feminists & fail to see that feminism is nothing more than the wish for equality between the sexes: not sameness. But equality.

Susan Faludi painstakingly finds evidence that supports her basic argument, & presents loads & loads of research & interviews to prove her point. There are 2 things that I found a little disappointing: one is the harshness of some of her characterizations: I understand what she's trying to do, she's trying to make some of the "backlash movers & shakers" come alive, with vivid writing & many examples. But sometimes her descriptions are purely cruel, & over the top. People are not one-dimensional as she sometimes shows them to be. Second thing I (kind of) didn't like was the extreme length of the book. It did get tiring at times, & did overdo some of the arguments by repeating & repeating them. But maybe her goal was achieved, since these basic arguments have stayed with me for so many years!!

All in all, a landmark book in women studies / feminism, & an interesting book even today, in 2002, quite a few years after its first appearance in bookstores.

I am a male reader who, prior to having read this book, believed that gender was one front on which a great deal of social progress had been made. Reading Faludi's book made me realize how wrong I was. I was amazed at how often I found myself thinking to myself, "Wow, I had never thought of that. That makes sense." I would recommend this book to anyone as a primer of the state of gender equality (or inequality)in America.

I picked up this book mainly because I hadn't lived through the 80s and wondered what liberal groups were talking about when they referred to the regressions of women's rights during that period. Backlash deals with the thoughts and trends in the 80s and the effect they had on women.

Many people here (who may or may not have actually read this book) say that Faludi's book is full of man-bashing diatribe. Actually, though, Faludi focuses more on the relationship between men and women in society, and the main problem with men in general she has is the idea of masculinity which requires domination and superiority in the workplace and home to feel secure. No one should feel that their gender identity is being taken away from them just because the other gender wants to participate in the same activites.

Another good point she makes is the double-standard of views on marraige, children, and careers. While women are told that they must get married and have children or else they are a "failure," and once these children are born they must sacrifice their careers and independence, it is viewed as desirable for men to be away from their children all day, and men's time unmarried and childless is "the good life."

Whether you are sympathetic to feminism or think it's dangerous, you should read this era-defining book.

... and a very large one back. It wasn't supposed to happen this way, of course. Those of us involved in the social revolutions of the `60's thought "history" would move in a very straight line forward, all the injustices would be remedied, and marijuana would be legalized in Iowa, no later than 1976 (per an article in Scanlan's Magazine [now long defunct] in 1971). The last election underlined that "we" did better on civil rights than some of the other "causes," though Iowa did just legalize same-sex marriages. We sure didn't learn anything from Vietnam, repeating it all over again in Southwest Asia. And Ms. Faludi documents in excruciating, and painful to read details that large step back, and the forces that made it so, the "backlash." No question that she is angry; there is a lot to be angry about. She is occasionally vitriolic, and yes, perhaps some stats are "cherry-picked" to support her arguments, and occasionally she even verves a little too clause to Andrea Dworkin for my comfort.

It is the layer upon layer of real anecdotes that is a major strength of this book. Consider: "Joel Steinberg's attorney claimed that the notorious batterer and child beater had been destroyed by `hysterical feminists.' And even errant Colonel Oliver North blamed his legal troubles in the Iran-Contra affair on "an arrogant army of ultramilitant feminists." One of the intellectual architects of the backlash is a philosophy professor, Michael Levin, and in his book, said: "...I would no more pander to the reader by straining to praise rape crisis centers than I would strain to praise the punctuality of trains under Mussolini were I discussing fascism." Faludi commands a solid historical perspective throughout the book, noting that in 1948, when the United Nations issued a statement supporting equal rights for women, the United States government was the only one of 22 American nations that wouldn't sign it. (So much for that machismo culture south of the border!) And on page 202, she notes that "...the late Victorian beauty press had warned women that their quest for higher education and employment was causing `a general lapse of attractiveness' and `spoiling complexions.'" Plus ca change... the Kinsey Institute reported that American women have more negative feeling about their body than in other culture surveyed.

I decided to read the "nerves that were hit," all 17 (to date) 1-star reviews, and not a single one chooses a single quote, and any stated fact, and says that Faludi was wrong. No, by in large, they prefer to review through innuendo.

Faludi divides her polemic (and cri de Coeur!) into four major parts. I found the middle two, concerning the backlash in the popular culture, and the one of the origins of the backlash the most fascinating. I still remember how the "statistic" that a "a 35-year old, college educated unmarried woman" had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married." Widely repeated, wildly incorrect, and rarely challenged, particularly the motives of those that spread such anecdotes,(who are promoting two "backlashes" at once). Faludi, rightly in my opinion, reserves her real vitriol for those movers and shakers, like the Heritage Foundation.

She wrote this book almost 20 years ago, and unfortunately it remains overwhelmingly valid today. I'd love to have her update on how the popular presses' "concern" for the fate of women in the Muslim world continues to serve as an immense distraction for the question of why we cannot pass the Equal Rights Amendment in this country. Perhaps I'll find out when I read her "The Terror Dream." "Backlash" remains an excellent, painful read.

Susan Faludi's justly acclaimed 1991 work sought to document the extreme overreaction to the rather modest gains made on behalf of women in the seventies. Right wing and backlash writers and pundits often talk as if women had set up a new female regime that ruthlessly oppressed men, when in fact the advances that women had made were minimal at most. But even the backlash attempted to take back even those modest gains in the eighties, and the efforts continued in the nineties and into the new century.

The only real complaint that I have with the book is that it was very much of its time. I don't mean that there was a backlash then but no backlash today, but that it documented the backlash, as it existed at the end of the eighties. It would be great if the book could somehow be updated to take account of the changes since then. Nonetheless, in identifying the backlash and then recurring tendency of any advances of women to be greeted by an excessive backlash, Faludi has made a permanent contribution to American social and political thought. And she has raised as few others the question of why these overreacting backlashers feel so incredibly threatened by even small gains by women. Although Faludi doesn't raise this idea, I think linguist George Lakoff has in his recent work provided some insights into this. In MORAL POLITICS: HOW LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES THINK, Lakoff shows how the language that liberals and conservatives use evoke two competing moral conceptions of the state and society. Liberals, he argues, use the language of the nurturing parent, while conservatives employ the language of the stern father. Lakoff argues that liberals are more gender neutral in their conceptions, while for conservatives father truly does know best. He goes on to illustrate how most of the tinderbox issues for conservatives--abortion, in which a woman takes control over her reproductive destiny instead of having the father control things; or gay marriage, which violates the conservative image of a male exercising control over a woman--violates their stern father conception of American political life. I think this is remarkably compatible with everything that Faludi says in this book.

The question is how crucial this book is in 2006, fifteen years after it was published. With the caveat that there have been important developments in the past decade and a half, I think the book remains as important as ever. One has to keep in mind that things have gotten both better and worse for women during that time. This in part reflects the fact that America has become increasingly polarized in almost everyway in the past couple of decades. The Religious Right has striven to move America more and more into the past, while an increasing number of people have come to consciously resist such regressive policies. But in identifying basic backlash tendencies this book has no real competitor. And the fact is that while her examples may stem from the eighties, we haven't yet escaped from the dark ages that began with the emergence of Reagan, though there are signs that the Bush administration might through its ill advised overreach on a host of issues be moving America more to the political center and away from the right.

One criticism that I would make is that Faludi has a tendency to funnel everything into her narrative of backlash. This is most apparent in her discussion of the film industry of the time. Bizarrely, she sees Ripley's motherly concern over the small girl in ALIENS as having ties to the backlash. In fact, I can envision no stronger female character in film from any decade than Ripley in that film. It is hard to see Ripley as incarnating many backlash values apart from her concern to protect the little girl, and if as Molly Haskell famously stated in the first line of FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE, "The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women's inferiority," then no female character gives the lie to the big line more than does Ripley. I remember seeing ALIENS for the first time; watching this incredibly strong female hero in action for the first time was very nearly overwhelming. There is only one way that Ripley can be recruited for a backlash narrative: if one is determined to do so. The ending passage of the book also indicates that a few things have been left out. Faludi states that despite the backlash, women (and I'd like to add that some of us guys who fully support women's rights) never really embraced the backlash messages. This implies that many examples of such resistance could have been provided. My guess is that Faludi felt that any examples of resistance or successes would have lessened the central message of the book.

If there were a sequel, would it see the backlash as continuing or lessening? As stated above, I think both. The Religious Right in particular has continued its assault on women, defending the stern father worldview that Lakoff detected, with God as the ultimate stern father (though many of us Christians prefer Christ the nurturing parent). Christian Dominionists, for instance, who exert more influence than one would wish through people like Pat Robertson, believe that women should be barred from working and should be required to stay home and care for the family (though this hardly addresses the fact that there are far more women than men, meaning that a significant number of women would have neither job nor family). The Bush administration's alliance with fundamentalist organizations has seen a sharp decline in sex education, family planning, and contraception (with the inevitable sharp increase in both unwanted teen pregnancies and abortions already showing up in statistics). On the political front it has been hard to find many successes for women in the past fifteen years, apart from the family leave act. Nonetheless, the past fifteen years has seen some remarkable changes culturally and socially. Faludi laments the images of women in eighties television, but the nineties and the early part of the 21st century saw an explosion of strong female characters, from Dana Scully to Xena to Buffy to Lorelei Gilmore. In fact, BUFFY in particular has inspired a host of very strong female characters, to the point that today no one thinks twice when confronted by a truly heroic female character. Veronica Mars would have been shockingly unique in 1991, but she is hardly unique in 2006. In computer gaming female characters are always presented as being as capable and as empowered as any male characters, and not just in the Lara Croft Tomb Raider games. In music we have seen a host of new very hard rocking female performers and bands, from Bikini Kill to Bratmobile to PJ Harvey to Sleater-Kinney. In other words, despite all that the backlash has tried to do, the most widespread of cultural images have been of female empowerment. Moving to the real world, women have continued to move into the work force and in education women now outnumber men in virtually every degree program that exists. Women outnumber men in law school and medical school and even match them in business school, while the total number of women in higher education tremendously outnumbers the number of men. Every indication is that women are becoming the educated gender in America. Politically, the gains have been minimal, but there is this to contemplate: despite the most stringent efforts by the Right to pack the courts and despite controlling all three branches of the federal government, it has been unable to implement its agenda for women. Though threatened and under assault, women's control of their sexual reproduction remains intact, and while the Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists fantasize of an all male workplace and all women staying at home at the hearth, even the vast majority of Christian fundamentalists would find such a notion utterly absurd. My own hope is that in the past twenty-five years we have weathered a conservative regressive movement. With it having failed to produce any positive things for the nation, there are signs America is wearying of the Religious Right. Recent polls show most Republicans feeling that the Religious Right has too much influence on their party. I could be wrong, but my prayer is that we have weathered the backlash and that we could be entering a period where the cultural and social gains that women have made despite the backlash will now take political forms as well.

Though BACKLASH is aging somewhat, this remains one of the most important books written on women's issues of the past couple of decades and continues to be an absolute must-read.

This compelling book systematically lays out the case for a post-80s backlash against feminism (firstly setting the scene in a wider historical context). This backlash is all the more insidious because (as in the past) it is not uprfront in its attacks, disguising its intentions by pretending to have women's interests at heart. It manipulates the media and uses many forms of subtle propaganda to get its message across: that feminism has failed, the women are better off when they are "free" to remain in the home, the career woman are burnt out and can't get husbands... and many other such widespread myths.

Such theories are proved to be not only misguided or biased but actually statistically untrue. Faludi is using FACTS, not just rhetoric. Opinions are not just stated, they are backed up with example after example, interviews and meticulous research. Of course Susan Faludi has an agenda... but so does any journalist, writer or documentary maker when they take a subject, it is not possible (nor desirable) to write without idealogy.

Everyone should read this book because we all need to understand how very much in the power of the media we are! Do we really imagine that the media is an independent entity? It's not, it's controlled by a handful of powerful individuals who pick and choose what they want to tell us, according to their own interests. This is not raving conspiracy theory, it's reality. Every citizen of a democracy has a responsibility to try to find out the truth of things, not just accept what they're spoonfed.

Of particular note are the comments on various films ("Fatal Attraction", "Three Men and a Baby"). We so often view movies as just entertainment, the fact is that they are as political and potentially didactic as any talk back radio host! We should always be questioning what a piece of "entertainment" is trying to tell us and why. I watch a lot of films and sometimes feel that a lot of my knowledge of life comes subconciously from this source... This is scary when I remember that films are merely one person's opinion, they are not reality and generally have little to do with the real world!

But even more important to me, is the message of this "Backlash" that feminism is (still) under attack. Feminism has become something of a dirty word. Some women are unwilling to admit to such a label saying "I agree with it in principal, but..." Women (and men) need to wake up and realise that feminists come in all sorts of guises and that feminism is at base simply the belief that women should have equal rights to men!

The most important myth that this book dispels is that feminism is over, or outlived its usefulness. There are some (Right-wing largely) who would argue that feminism has been a dismal failure for both men and women and society in general (leading to divorce, disharmony, gang warfare, earthquakes, whatever). There are others (some times even so-called feminists) who would say quite complacently that feminism had its day (back in the seventies presumably) and now we women can live as we like and it's all worked out well.

Particualarly when you look at the struggle for women's rights in an historical perspective (as in this book) it is easy to see how ridiculous both these attitudes are. Feminism has not 'failed' because it is not completed! It has not yet achieved it's goals. And after all it's scarcely a hundred years since the struggle was begun. Would you say that the civil rights movement is finished? Of course not because the evidence is all around you. As it is with Feminism.

Read this book if you are a thinking individual with an open mind! It was published some time ago now, but it's message is no less relavent now...

I would like to thank Susan Faludi personally for writing "Backlash", that I am still reading right now. I strongly suggest any woman and man to read it.

I am an Italian woman, 30 years old, with an aerospace engineering degree. Both my parents have always been working. My mother has been always working full-time and had been taking care of three kids at the same time (with the support of a nanny for a while). I don't know where she found the energies from, but I think she did a great work. I never felt neglected by Mom or abused by the nanny! I have been single most of my life because I did not want to give myself up "just for dating somebody", and I did not want to hide the fact that yes, I have a strong personality, a very intense cultural life and political ideals. Let's face it, some men are just not comfortable with that. I have been working for a while in Italy and I had to face the fact that industry shuns women with a higher degree, or relegates them to secondary roles, no matter what are their professionality and skills.

For years and years my mind has been bombarded by all the slogans mentioned in "Backlash". I fully recognized all of them while reading the book. I had believed them and decided to overlook them. They made me very unhappy, but I could just not give up. Would anybody cancel his/her personality because of what society says? I left Italy and came to United States to get a Ph.D. and find a more satisfying job. Here I met a man that fully supports my studies and is not afraid of my personality. He does not need to demean me to show that he is a "real man". We have been dating for three years, and when I'll have finished my Ph.D. and found a job, we'll get married. We will raise children together and none of us will leave work for this. Why am I writing this? Because I will be part of the "real" statistics, the ones that the media decided to overlook: a working woman that gets married when she is over 30, with a job and a private life, that is not depressed and is not obsessed by the "biological clock". I am deeply grateful to this book for showing me the constant backlash against women. This book is making me stronger, and it opened my eyes like nothing I read so far. I will be proud to say that I am a feminist, a fulfilled woman, and I am not ashamed of this.

Note: media backlash is not over at all. Just look at "Ally McBeal".

This book was especially a delight to read when it first came out over a decade ago, but its relevance has not changed.

Susan Faludi is a former Wall Street Journal (not exactly a "liberal bastion") reporter and well-trained journalist...her professionalism comes out very well in the writing. I loved the analysis of the film "Fatal Attraction" and also the profile of Robert Bly was very revealing if all true.

Would also recommend her more recent book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man" where she absolutely nails it: the chief oppressor of men is not women but other men, namely the ruthless and amoral men who currently run our corporations and by extension our government as well as popular mass culture and media.

The long and short of it: It's not racism or sexism, reverse or otherwise, that's destroying this great country but plutocratic and oligarchic CORPORATISM which has exploded and entrenched itself exponentially during the Bush Jr. regime.

Yes, that's an ECONOMIC CLASS analysis, precisely the one taboo subject in our allegedly "free" media and national discourse these days. Anyone who tries to bring up that subject nowadays is inevitably (in an knee-jerk, Pavlovian manner) smeared as a pointy-headed Stalinist, but there's the ugly truth.

Our nation desperately needs many more Susan Faludis to do the investigative and analytical work that our corporate media sold out on a long time ago.

Ten pages into the introduction, my heart was ice. I have been raised by a single mother and I watched her struggle through the misogynistic climate. Four hundred sixty page of facts, statistics, interviews and historical references describing this rage against women, laid out in a clear, organized fashion. Many reviewers have accused her of blaming some conspiracy when she clearly states that it was not an organized, strategical attack but a common belief that surfaced and resurfaced over the course of the decade. While the effects have dwindled, there are still veins of it in our society. There is nothing advocating violence, revolution, or any male bashing so please don't share your insecurities.

After finishing this dense 460-page book, I am amazed that this was my first excursion into the area of Woman's Studies, but I could not be happier with my choice. Backlash is a thought provoking comprehensive look at women and America in the 1980's. While the information and examples are dated, the underlying themes still resonate in today's society.

I take issue with those who label Faludi a "man-hater." She made a point to identify women who were part of the anti-feminist trends, which lends more weight to her theory of a backlash. When men were used as examples, it was for a good cause. I never thought Faludi was blaming or targeting men as the reason for the backlash, rather she focused on society as a whole.

A previous reviewer mentioned Faludi's use of specific examples weakened her argument, bringing her to the level of those she criticizes. While Faludi does use specific examples, she also stresses on having viable statistics to back her claims. Partial evidence of this can be found in the over 400 citations she utilized.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is curious to know more about the status of women in America. Speaking from personal experience, this is one of the few books that have made me view my world differently. I cannot think of higher praise.