Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women Read online

  In the years since feminism’s revival in the early 1970s, American women have sped across so much ground that we can scarcely recognize the lives our grandmothers lived. We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation. Under its thrall, American women now are in danger of fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy—keeping their lives but losing themselves.

  The bait-and-switch maneuver that the consumer market plays with feminism is long-standing. On Easter in 1929, a prominent ad man organized a “Freedom March” down Fifth Avenue to honor suffrage—by encouraging women to smoke. The American Tobacco Company’s publicist persuaded “a leading feminist” to head up the procession of women, who were all puffing on their “torches of freedom.” More recently, after the second wave of feminism, advertisers appealed to a female “revolutionary” spirit to retail everything from shampoo to nylons. Hanes even persuaded a NOW official to endorse its “liberating” pantyhose. That strategy was standard operating procedure by the time Backlash was published. I soon found myself fielding (and declining) multiple invitations from merchandisers to place my feminist seal of approval on brands of blue jeans, high heels, even breast implants.

  By now, though, the modern soft sell has moved far beyond such blatant plugs. We live in a time when the very fundaments of feminism have been recast in commercial terms—and rolled at our feet like three golden apples. The feminist ethic of economic independence has become the golden apple of buying power—a “power” that for most women yields little more than credit-card debt, an overstocked closet, and a hunger that never gets sated because it’s a hunger for something beyond the material. The feminist ethic of self-determination has turned into the golden apple of “self-improvement”—an improvement dedicated mostly to one’s physical appearance, self-esteem, and the fool’s errand of reclaiming one’s youth. And the feminist ethic of public agency has shape-shifted into the golden apple of publicity—the pursuit of a popularity that hinges not on how much one changes the world, but on how marvelously one fits into its harness.

  How much harder than combating right-wing recalcitrance is sailing past the mercantile sirens, especially when their only professed desire is to give women what we want, or even more. The sirens offer an enhanced form of feminism—New! Better! More Satisfying!—liberation fortified with the nutrients of success, sex appeal, celebrity, happiness. In other words, exactly what Madison Avenue originally coined as “having it all.” Who can resist such a come-on?

  But while women are distracted, we aren’t exactly duped. We sense what Tocqueville asserted centuries earlier: “I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones.” That sneaking suspicion lurks beneath those lifestyle stories about women “stepping off the fast track” or “having second thoughts” about their so-called liberation. It lies below the surface of the words of the ex-careerist in the Times’s “Opt-Out Revolution” story: “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want that kind of life.” The Times interpreted her lament as a rejection of feminism, which the article’s author claimed was all about “grabbing a fair share of power” and “standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law.” But fantasies of fame and world conquest aren’t feminist aspirations; they belong to the dreamscape of the marketplace.

  Which isn’t to say that the affluent women “opting out” in the Times’s article were throwing over materialist concerns; their “revolution” was nearly as pseudo as the right-wing women’s “liberation” movement. Nonetheless, haunting their distress is a disillusionment. And if they could find a way to express that discontent in political terms, it might lead them somewhere other than lost afternoons sipping lattes at Starbucks.

  A couple of years ago I was giving a talk on women’s status at Washington and Lee University. Afterward, an undergraduate buttonholed me to air an all-too-common grievance. “Feminism has been nothing but a burden for my generation,” she said. What did she mean by a burden? “You have to be this big achiever,” she told me. “You have to get the highest grades. You have to get the best LSAT scores. You have to get into the most prestigious law firm. It’s too much.” Too much, yet not enough. For the young woman was right, if that is what we mean by feminism. What is missing is the deeper promise of a woman’s revolution, a revolution that was never intended to champion cut-throat competition or winner-take-all ethics, a revolution that was abandoned on the road to economic opportunity. Women’s disillusionment comes from the half-gleaned truth that, while we have achieved economic gains, we have yet to find a way to turn those gains toward the larger and more meaningful goals of social change, responsible citizenship, the advancement of human creativity, the building of a mature and vital public world. We live within the confines of a social structure and according to cultural conventions that remain substantially intact from before the revolution. We have used our gains to gild our shackles, but not break them.

  But disillusionment is a start. Being disappointed is not the same as being defeated. The very fact that women feel cheated, the very fact that, when we survey the perfumed trappings of our world, we smell, however faintly, a rat, suggests that women are still in fighting form. We aren’t yet down for the count. The right-wing forces understand this fact better than we do. Which is why the right elevated women in their ranks in the first place—to oppose a threat they take very seriously, the threat posed by the larger goals of feminism. Conservative politicians no longer bother to defend the old antifeminist Maginot line; they aren’t trying to block women from universities, corporations, lines of credit, or representation on the Republican platform committee. They have ceded that territory. And in ceding it, in accepting women into formerly forbidden precincts, they have revealed that those precincts were only frontier outposts, not the innermost fortress, the citadel that holds the key to the patriarchal status quo. That status quo would keep women, no matter how many stock options or credit cards or congressional seats or board appointments they possess, in a political stalemate: We will accept you into our world as long as you agree to accept the world as it is. The opponents of women’s liberation are girding for the next assault by American women. They seem to believe it will be an assault on the world as it is. We can only hope they are right.

  —SUSAN FALUDI

  January 2006

  1

  Introduction:

  Blame It on Feminism

  TO BE A WOMAN in America at the close of the 20th century—what good fortune. That’s what we keep hearing, anyway. The barricades have fallen, politicians assure us. Women have “made it,” Madison Avenue cheers. Women’s fight for equality has “largely been won,” Time magazine announces. Enroll at any university, join any law firm, apply for credit at any bank. Women have so many opportunities now, corporate leaders say, that we don’t really need equal opportunity policies. Women are so equal now, lawmakers say, that we no longer need an Equal Rights Amendment. Women have “so much,” former President Ronald Reagan says, that the White House no longer needs to appoint them to higher office. Even American Express ads are saluting a woman’s freedom to charge it. At last, women have received their full citizenship papers.

  And yet . . .

  Behind this celebration of the American woman’s victory, behind the news, cheerfully and endlessly repeated, that the struggle for women’s rights is won, another message flashes. You may be free and equal now, it says to women, but you have never been more miserable.

  This bulletin of despair is posted everywhere—at the newsstand, on the TV set, at the movies, in advertisements and doctors’ o
ffices and academic journals. Professional women are suffering “burnout” and succumbing to an “infertility epidemic.” Single women are grieving from a “man shortage.” The New York Times reports: Childless women are “depressed and confused” and their ranks are swelling. Newsweek says: Unwed women are “hysterical” and crumbling under a “profound crisis of confidence.” The health advice manuals inform: High-powered career women are stricken with unprecedented outbreaks of “stress disorders, ” hair loss, bad nerves, alcoholism, and even heart attacks. The psychology books advise: Independent women’s loneliness represents “a major mental health problem today.” Even founding feminist Betty Friedan has been spreading the word: she warns that women now suffer from a new identity crisis and “new ‘problems that have no name.’”

  How can American women be in so much trouble at the same time that they are supposed to be so blessed? If the status of women has never been higher, why is their emotional state so low? If women got what they asked for, what could possibly be the matter now?

  The prevailing wisdom of the past decade has supported one, and only one, answer to this riddle: it must be all that equality that’s causing all that pain. Women are unhappy precisely because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation. They have grabbed at the gold ring of independence, only to miss the one ring that really matters. They have gained control of their fertility, only to destroy it. They have pursued their own professional dreams—and lost out on the greatest female adventure. The women’s movement, as we are told time and again, has proved women’s own worst enemy.

  “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,” Mona Charen, a young law student, writes in the National Review, in an article titled “The Feminist Mistake.” “In return it has effectively robbed us of one thing upon which the happiness of most women rests—men.” The National Review is a conservative publication, but such charges against the women’s movement are not confined to its pages. “Our generation was the human sacrifice” to the women’s movement, Los Angeles Times feature writer Elizabeth Mehren contends in a Time cover story. Baby-boom women like her, she says, have been duped by feminism: “We believed the rhetoric.” In Newsweek, writer Kay Ebeling dubs feminism “The Great Experiment That Failed” and asserts “women in my generation, its perpetrators, are the casualties.” Even the beauty magazines are saying it: Harper’s Bazaar accuses the women’s movement of having “lost us [women] ground instead of gaining it.”

  In the last decade, publications from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to the Nation have issued a steady stream of indictments against the women’s movement, with such headlines as WHEN FEMINISM FAILED or THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN’S LIB. They hold the campaign for women’s equality responsible for nearly every woe besetting women, from mental depression to meager savings accounts, from teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexions. The “Today” show says women’s liberation is to blame for bag ladies. A guest columnist in the Baltimore Sun even proposes that feminists produced the rise in slasher movies. By making the “violence” of abortion more acceptable, the author reasons, women’s rights activists made it all right to show graphic murders on screen.

  At the same time, other outlets of popular culture have been forging the same connection: in Hollywood films, of which Fatal Attraction is only the most famous, emancipated women with condominiums of their own slink wild-eyed between bare walls, paying for their liberty with an empty bed, a barren womb. “My biological clock is ticking so loud it keeps me awake at night,” Sally Field cries in the film Surrender, as, in an all too common transformation in the cinema of the ’80s, an actress who once played scrappy working heroines is now showcased groveling for a groom. In prime-time television shows, from “thirtysomething” to “Family Man,” single, professional, and feminist women are humiliated, turned into harpies, or hit by nervous breakdowns; the wise ones recant their independent ways by the closing sequence. In popular novels, from Gail Parent’s A Sign of the Eighties to Stephen King’s Misery, unwed women shrink to sniveling spinsters or inflate to fire-breathing she-devils; renouncing all aspirations but marriage, they beg for wedding bands from strangers or swing sledgehammers at reluctant bachelors. We “blew it by waiting,” a typically remorseful careerist sobs in Freda Bright’s Singular Women; she and her sister professionals are “condemned to be childless forever.” Even Erica Jong’s high-flying independent heroine literally crashes by the end of the decade, as the author supplants Fear of Flying’s saucy Isadora Wing, a symbol of female sexual emancipation in the ’70s, with an embittered careerist-turned-recovering-“co-dependent” in Any Woman’s Blues—a book that is intended, as the narrator bluntly states, “to demonstrate what a dead end the so-called sexual revolution had become, and how desperate so-called free women were in the last few years of our decadent epoch.”

  Popular psychology manuals peddle the same diagnosis for contemporary female distress. “Feminism, having promised her a stronger sense of her own identity, has given her little more than an identity crisis,” the best-selling advice manual Being a Woman asserts. The authors of the era’s self-help classic Smart Women/Foolish Choices proclaim that women’s distress was “an unfortunate consequence of feminism,” be cause “it created a myth among women that the apex of self-realization could be achieved only through autonomy, independence, and career.”

  In the Reagan and Bush years, government officials have needed no prompting to endorse this thesis. Reagan spokeswoman Faith Whittlesey declared feminism a “straitjacket” for women, in the White House’s only policy speech on the status of the American female population—entitled “Radical Feminism in Retreat.” Law enforcement officers and judges, too, have pointed a damning finger at feminism, claiming that they can chart a path from rising female independence to rising female pathology. As a California sheriff explained it to the press, “Women are enjoying a lot more freedom now, and as a result, they are committing more crimes.” The U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography even proposed that women’s professional advancement might be responsible for rising rape rates. With more women in college and at work now, the commission members reasoned in their report, women just have more opportunities to be raped.

  Some academics have signed on to the consensus, too—and they are the “experts” who have enjoyed the highest profiles on the media circuit. On network news and talk shows, they have advised millions of women that feminism has condemned them to “a lesser life.” Legal scholars have railed against “the equality trap.” Sociologists have claimed that “feminist-inspired” legislative reforms have stripped women of special “protections.” Economists have argued that well-paid working women have created “a less stable American family.” And demographers, with greatest fanfare, have legitimated the prevailing wisdom with so-called neutral data on sex ratios and fertility trends; they say they actually have the numbers to prove that equality doesn’t mix with marriage and motherhood.

  Finally, some “liberated” women themselves have joined the lamentations. In confessional accounts, works that invariably receive a hearty greeting from the publishing industry, “recovering Superwomen” tell all. In The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy, Megan Marshall, a Harvard-pedigreed writer, asserts that the feminist “Myth of Independence” has turned her generation into unloved and unhappy fast-trackers, “dehumanized” by careers and “uncertain of their gender identity.” Other diaries of mad Superwomen charge that “the hard-core feminist viewpoint,” as one of them puts it, has relegated educated executive achievers to solitary nights of frozen dinners and closet drinking. The triumph of equality, they report, has merely given women hives, stomach cramps, eye-twitching disorders, even comas.

  But what “equality” are all these authorities talking about?

  If American women are so
equal, why do they represent two-thirds of all poor adults? Why are nearly 75 percent of full-time working women making less than $20,000 a year, nearly double the male rate? Why are they still far more likely than men to live in poor housing and receive no health insurance, and twice as likely to draw no pension? Why does the average working woman’s salary still lag as far behind the average man’s as it did twenty years ago? Why does the average female college graduate today earn less than a man with no more than a high school diploma (just as she did in the ’50s)—and why does the average female high school graduate today earn less than a male high school dropout? Why do American women, in fact, face one of the worst gender-based pay gap in the developed world?

  If women have “made it,” then why are nearly 80 percent of working women still stuck in traditional “female” jobs—as secretaries, administrative “support” workers and salesclerks? And, conversely, why are they less than 8 percent of all federal and state judges, less than 6 percent of all law partners, and less than one half of 1 percent of top corporate managers? Why are there only three female state governors, two female U.S. senators, and two Fortune 500 chief executives? Why are only nineteen of the four thousand corporate officers and directors women—and why do more than half the boards of Fortune companies still lack even one female member?

  If women “have it all,” then why don’t they have the most basic requirements to achieve equality in the work force? Unlike virtually all other industrialized nations, the U.S. government still has no family-leave and child care programs—and more than 99 percent of American private employers don’t offer child care either. Though business leaders say they are aware of and deplore sex discrimination, corporate America has yet to make an honest effort toward eradicating it. In a 1990 national poll of chief executives at Fortune 1010 companies, more than 80 percent acknowledged that discrimination impedes female employees’ progress—yet, less than 1 percent of these same companies regarded remedying sex discrimination as a goal that their personnel departments should pursue. In fact, when the companies’ human resource officers were asked to rate their departments’ priorities, women’s advancement ranked last.