SUSAN FALUDI BACKLASH The Undeclared War Against American Women m

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message got out. In the end, it is the good, stay-at-home wife who lays the evil harridan to rest.

Are women "taking over"?

If the silver screen was killing working women, real life was marginalizing them and then covering it up by claiming that women "had it all." Newspapers reported that the pay gap between women and men was closing, based on one flawed survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The reality was that the gap was widening.

Headlines blared that women were "taking over" in every male-dominated arena, from college department chairs to corporate boardrooms to the factory floor. Sadly, just the opposite was true. The number of women in traditionally female jobs increased from 67 percent to 71 percent between 1976 and 1986.

Even when women were able to break into male-dominated workplaces, they faced new dangers. Faludi reports on the women at the American Cyanamid factory in Willow Island, W.V. In 1973, the federal government threatened American Cyanamid with legal action if it didn't begin hiring women for its chemical production lines; 36 women were hired between 1974 and 1976. From the outset, these women faced daily harassment and taunting from their male co-workers, and little or no support from the company.

In 1978, the company unveiled a fetalworkers. In 1979, OSHA fined the company $10,000 for violations of worker safety, and specifically cited the protection plan as a workplace hazard. But instead of cleaning up the plant or scrapping the fetal protection policy, American Cyanamid shut down the factory. After less than three years, the women lost the very jobs they had been sterilized to keep.

Avoids class analysis

Unlike much backlash reporting, which quotes anonymous sources or questionable studies to prove its point, the studies, polls and sources cited in "Backlash" are painstakingly documented. In fact, Faludi points out that readers should suspect articles that refer to "many women" or "most people" to buttress an argument. Most likely, such pieces are written not to report reliable information, but to influence public opinion.

Unfortunately, "Backlash" is weak on explaining the who and why of the backlash because its analysis avoids recognizing the existence of social classes. Despite Faludi's assertion that the backlash is not the result of an organized conspiracy, her lack of a class analysis leads her to misidentify the perpetrators of the backlash as an amorphous collection of televangelists and religious demogogues who want to oppress women merely because they hate them.

Faludi pinpoints the emergence of SOCIALIST point of its emergence.

For instance, Faludi doesn't understand that the feminist movement is a wing of the larger working-class movement. By presenting feminism as an isolated social phenomenon, she also isolates the effect of the backlash against women from the backlashes against other segments of the working class.

Women have not been the only victims of the backlash of the 1980s. Both Blacks and the labor movement have suffered tremendous economic setbacks and cultural backlashes. But Faludi ignores this completely. If the backlash has been most fiercely directed against women, it is because the feminist movement has been the most organized and effective segment of the working class in the past decade.

Divided against ourselves

Faludi also ignores the economic timing of the current backlash. While backlashes occur when one segment of the working class is perceived to be gaining power, Faludi fails to see that such periods also take place when the ruling class is facing an economic crisis. In such periods of crisis, the ruling class intensifies sexism and racism to keep the working class divided against itself. When workers fight each other-rather than joining forces to fight the bosses—the bosses consolidate their power over them.

The reality is that there has been a decades-long sustained assault on the rights of all working people, not just women. In order to fight the assault, all working people will need to join together. Faludi's anti-male bias tends to confuse women as to who the enemy is, and contributes to the divisions between women and men.

Moreover, Faludi centers the backlash in the 1980s; that is, during the Reagan/Bush administration. The implication is that if theré had been a Democrat as president, there either would not have been a backlash, or it would not have been so vicious. Faludi consistently blames the policies of the Reagan administration for eroding women's rights, while she completely ignores the role of the Democratic-controlled Congress and state legislatures.

In reality, the backlash has no specific party affiliation it doesn't need one. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are anti-working class and anti-women, and would employ a backlash if it were economically necessary to do so.

Faludi's lack of class analysis leaves her without the ability to propose solutions. Recently, when she appeared on "The Dennis Miller Show," Faludi suggested that the only way to stop the erosion of women's rights was to change the cultural definitions of feminine and masculine.

However, social roles and attitudes don't change independently of social transformation. In order to eradicate the oppression of women (or of any other segment of the working class), we must eradicate the system of capitalism that depends on the oppression of women for its very survival.

"Backlash" is full of useful, interesting, and frightening evidence of the counterassault on women's rights. Even with her limited analysis, Faludi has written a valuable resource for women.

I suggest that all feminist activists read "Backlash" to confirm what we've already suspected —we're not paranoid, they really are out to get us. However, activists should also read some socialist feminist analysis to understand who "they" are.

ACTION MARCH 1992 5

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DRAPIST DE ICTIM TIlL AMEN not VICTIMZE THE MEN NO Tony Ryanternal's information. In the last few months, publications such as Everywoman and Our Bodies Ourselves were removed from the Dublin city council central library because they contained information on abortion.

In 1983, the dominant bourgeois political parties were experiencing political instability as a result of the mass struggle and the election victories of the H-Block-Armagh campaign around the hunger strikers.

Challenged from the left, the main political parties were looking to the right for stability. Fianna Fáil, the main nationalist bourgeois party, after brief consultation with SPUC, readily agreed to hold a referendum on an anti-abortion amendment to the constitution. They hoped to gain votes on a Catholic nationalist conservative ticket. Today, however, populist Catholic nationalism has run its course.

Since 1983, the oppressed—women, youth, the rural poor and the working class—have experienced massive unemployment, emigration, diminishing civil rights, and other setbacks.

These have led to an unprecedented level of political instability and alienation from the two main political parties, as attested by the election of Mary Robinson, a woman with progressive views on social issues, as president, and the sizeable votes for the left parties.

SPUC, LIFE, and other anti-abortion groups today are contributing to the political instability. They are damaging Ireland's image in Europe. The politicians who once courted them now want to take their distance from them, as does the Church.

International pressure on gov't.

Because of the case, the Irish government is confronted with a problem with regard to