Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Susan Faludi

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Susan Faludi | Remains one of the most important books on women's issues of the past two decades

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Backlash: The Unde...

	Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women Susan Faludi Three Rivers Press, 2006 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 81 reviews view larger image
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a fascinating and eye-opening book!

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.

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Remains one of the most important books on women's issues of the past two decades

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.

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So little has changed

In going back and re-reading this book it was startling to find that with the ascendancy of a reactionary conservative movement how much of Faludi's book seemed up to date. The attacks on birth control availability, the steady restriction of abortion rights, the woman-hating policies of the Far Right---none of that changed. It only got worse.
Faludi did her research and it shows, in a series of portraits of various anti-feminists. There's the female mathmatician whose husband rants about how feminists are emasculating men----while he does the dishes and his sons demand hugs. The mathmatician, herself, appears to have a more practical than emotional reason for resenting feminists: she's the Queen Bee in a specialty not noted for its appeal to women, and she does't wnat other competitors. While all the opponents of feminism have some high falutin' excuses for their politics, their actual motives appear almost comically petty: there's Camille Paglia, who can't get published till she publishes an anti-feminist screed that apes conservative theories about rape (she asked for it) and makes her a darling of the Right: there's the wife of Tim La Haye, Beverly La Haye, the guy who writes those execrable Left Behind books, who talks a good game about children and family and so forth but who's on the road a great deal. There's the movie director who has a docile, placid wife and who despises anything else in a woman; there's the movie star who's sought treatment for sex addiction (not, presumably, masturbation addiction, but sex with women) revealing fears about how women might treat him if they had the same rights. Faludi covers everything thoroughly, especially the phenominon of 'twinning' stories designed to keep women insecure and men smug. For example: women are told that they have to get married and have kids, while men get told that there's lots of desperate babes out there, so they don't have to worry. What no one but Faludi mentions is that marriage is a very good deal for men but not so for women.

An amazing work, and a valueable reference. It's a shame she hasn't written more books.

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Well argued, well written

While some of the examples Susan Faludi uses to support her idea - that feminism is experiencing a backlash and women's rights are under attack more than ever - are a bit dated, her essential point remains shockingly valid.

What was most disturbing to discover was the subtleness by which feminist gains are undermined: in film, conversation, advertisements, in education and the workplace. This is no liberal rant, but rather a thoughtful, detailed critical analysis of our culture.

As a previous reviewer points out, television references are a bit of a stretch, and seem even more dated with the passage of time since the book's initial publication. Nonetheless I found Faludi's comments and observations dead-on. It is a disturbing and thought-provoking read. Recommended.

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