"Backlash"-compelling testimony on the erosion of women's rights

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"Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," by Susan Faludi. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York. 1991.

"In dispensing its spoils, women's liberation has given my generation high incomes, our own cigarette, the option of single parenthood, rape crisis centers, personal lines of credit, free love, and female gynecologists," wrote Mona Charen, a young law student, in an article called "The Feminist Mistaked" published by The National Review.

"In return," Charen continues, "it has effectively robbed us of one thing upon which the happiness of most women rests—men."

According to a recent book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi, Charen has succinctly enunciated the dilemma for women in the "post-feminist" era. If women have achieved equality, why are we so miserable? The answer proposed by Charen-and a host of others-is that women weren't meant to be equal. When feminism told us we were, it gave us false hopes that, when dashed, resulted in misery.

As Faludi documents in "Backlash," however, women's misery is not due to their attainment of equality, but to the prolonged denial of equality. Faludi asserts that the past decade has seen a powerful counterassault—a backlash—against a handful of feminist gains and victories. She calls this counterassault the "Big Lie" because it turns reality upside down and proclaims that women's liberation has led to women's downfall.

Backłashes are not new in American history. Several backlashes against women's improved statusor even the perception of improved status have taken place since colonial times. Always, the backlashes begin before the gains of the feminist movement are significant enough to make structural changes. Always, the backlash's message is that the "unnatural" autonomy of women will lead to their psychological misery.

However, the rise of mass media and mass marketing in the last century has increased the effectiveness of the current backlash. Because the feminist movement of the 1970s made its most substantial progress in the areas of economic and reproductive freedom, the current backlash is eroding these areas of women's rights with the most force.

"Backlash" is a surprisingly easy book to read, both because of its structure and its cogent style. Faludi lays out her basic argument in the first chapter, and each subsequent chapter expands upon the evidence and effects of various aspects of the counterassault on feminism. Some of her most fascinating chapters discuss the role of women in the anti-feminist movement, the hatred of women in the fashion industry, and the "neocons" of anti-women pop psychology.

Women in film

Because one way to measure the erosion of women's social status is to monitor how popular culture depicts women, Faludi spends an entire chapter on the changing images of women in film. What she finds is disturbing, although not surprising.

In the 1970s, Hollywood movies projected strong, independent, happy women who either escaped from the oppression of marriage or avoided it altogether. A few celebrated and popular movies of the time included "Julia," a tale of a fiercely independent and political woman; "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," a story of a woman's rebirth; and "My Brilliant Career," an affirmation that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

By painful contrast, Hollywood in the 1980s decided that women without men (and children) were sick, twisted, deformed, or dead. Even movies with admirable female characters-like "Tender Mercies," "Moonstruck," and "Terms of Endearment"-depicted them in decidely domestic situations with their triumphs coming solely from vanquishing threats to the homefront.

The quintessential backlash movie is "Fatal Attraction." This 1987 thriller centered on a woman so psychologically disfigured by her lack of husband and child that she sets out to destroy the idyllic domesticity of a man with whom she had a casual affair. Faludi reports that the ending to "Fatal Attraction" was actually rewritten because the director wasn't satisfied that the single-career gal committed suicide she had to be killed to make sure his protection policy that prevented women of child-bearing age from working on the production line. The policy was based on studies that showed exposure to the toxics on the production line would cause birth defects. Rather than cleaning up the workplace for both men and women, the company required women to be surgically sterilized—"neutered," as company pamphlets called it—in order to keep their jobs.

Five out of seven women working in one production department underwent the surgery—suffering depression, alienation, and further harassment from their male cocurrent backlash in the late 1970s to the fringes of the evangelical right, and portrays its steady growth into mainstream prominence under the Reagan administration. "If the contemporary backlash had a birthplace," she writes, "it was within the ranks of the New Right, where it first took shape as a movement with a clear ideological agenda."

In Faludi's analysis, the rise of Religious Right demagogues in the 1980s was similar to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Father Coughlin's movement in the 1920s and '30s. Each time, the growth of these regressive movements coincided with signs that an oppressed group was believed to be on the verge of a breakthrough. Each time, while these regressive elements may not have been responsible for the backlash, they carried it out and benefited from it.

In essense, what Faludi defines is the rise of fascism and its role in pushing backward the gains of the working class. However, because she fails to understand the relationship of fascism to the decline of capitalism, she completely misses the