Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Susan Faludi

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Susan Faludi | A more likeable Elizabeth Wurtzel?

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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 79 reviews view larger image
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Faludi lays out a two-fold thesis in this aggressive work: First, despite the opinions of pop-psychologists and the mainstream media, career-minded women are generally not husband-starved loners on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Secondly, such beliefs are nothing more than anti-feminist propaganda pumped out by conservative research organizations with clear-cut ulterior motives. This backlash against the women's movement, she writes, "stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's positions have actually led to their downfall." Meticulously researched, Faludi's contribution to this tumultuous debate is monumental and it earned the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction.

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Most Important

This critical, detailed analysis of our culture reveals the way women are oppressed. T.V., books, and magazines represent the sexist ideas that still exist in some individuals minds and reinforce them. Politicians, media gurus, and celebrities also represent some sexist ideas. Read this book to learn them all.

A more likeable Elizabeth Wurtzel?

I found this book interesting and well written, but maybe a bit over the top. Listening to Ms. Faludi's recent interview on [...], she's an intelligent and likeable person. She's also not afraid to tell you what she thinks...for a good 500 pages. This is an apparently well researched book, but not being a scholar of feminism, I can't place it in its proper historical context. She seems to be trying to get a reaction out of people, however, with a bit of shock value, and I thought a journalist wasn't supposed to do that? It's fun to draw a comparison between Ms. Faludi and Elizabeth Wurtzel, who's the author of Prozac Nation and other controversial books. The two women: are similar in age, are Harvard graduates trained in journalism, are dare I say attractive, do not censor their speech (or at least their writings), seem to enjoy getting a reaction out of people, probably have plenty of detractors (Wurtzel certainly does), are feminists (slightly more overtly in the case of Ms. Faludi), had hugely successful books at a young age. Maybe the two are friends! Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

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Not what it's cracked up to be

Susan Faludi's "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women" clearly doesn't live up to its title. Despite its reputation, it is rife with obvious instances of cherry picking and the omission of well-known facts that would undermine the case she is trying to make. (She paints Republican administrations as being totally antithetical to the ambitions of women without mentioning Reagan's appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, which at the time was recognized as a HUGE deal. She also so fails to mention that the number of women in the first Bush administration was double that of Carter's, which she cites as a comparative golden age.) And she clearly practices many of the faults she so vigorously chides in others. For example, Faludi bitterly complains that an article about a Shere Hite study mentions her having punched a cab driver on the grounds that such personal attacks are irrelevant to her work. This does not prevent Faludi, when criticizing some of Betty Freidan's ideas from telling a completely gratuitous story about her having been appallingly rude to a fan.

But, more to the point, Faludi so-called "war against women" overwhelmingly consists of people who simply have different ideas about being a woman than she does or who, according to Faludi, simply misinterpret statistics. To be sure a lot of what Ms. Faludi cites is genuine bupkis. Faludi is right that there was no mass movement of women abandoning careers in order to "cocoon" in the safety of their homes. But she fails to demonstrate evil intent or effect. It's simply a case of lazy reporting and a few self-important twits confusing their own preconceived notions with factual reality--the latter being a thought crime of which feminists can hardly claim innocence. Some of her examples are laughable as when she gets put out over the fact that Victoria's Secret, a company in the business of selling fancy underwear, mounts a PR campaign trying to convince reporters that women are "choosing" to spend their hard earned dollars wearing expensive and uncomfortable undies that most people will never get to see. Oh, the horror.

Some of her complaints are downright bizarre. In her chapter on the movies she cites a film about the horrific public rape of a woman in a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that dozens of people watched without intervening, as being part of the backlash on the grounds that the film made the woman being raped look like a victim (!). Faludi's logic is that there were already too many movies that year in which women were portrayed as victims but, really, if you can't make an anti-rape movie without being accused of warring against women then perhaps it's time to take another look at this whole idea of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. As Superintendent Chalmers on "The Simpsons" so sagely put it: In for a dime. In for a dollar.

Another problem with the concept of there being a "war against women" is that fully half of the enemies cited by Faludi are women too. You might think she'd at least applaud the parity, but some people are impossible to please.

And despite all her cherry picking, Faludi doesn't seem to recognize when her own facts subvert the case she is trying to make.

Her section on George Gilder is one of the minority of places where Faludi gets her hands on someone who is an unambiguously trying to put women back in the kitchen (though she typically fails to mention that Time magazine, one of the organs she lumps among the baddies, named him the "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year"). As far as Guilder is concerned, the whole point of being a woman is to help men achieve their potential, even when their potential isn't anything to write home about and may even be nonexistent.

In another part of the book she describes the work of Robin Norwood a therapists who came up with the idea that women in bad relationships are addicted to them and it's basically all their fault if their lives suck never mind the brutes they're living with. These women go to twelve-step like meetings run by women therapists where they blame themselves about how rotten their lives are without any sort of useful feedback--and pay good money for the privilege to stay eternally stuck in the same sink hole.

But there are a couple of problems here. The first is that, again, there isn't anything in the book to indicate that Norwood or her fellow therapists are anything but sincerely deluded. Yes, what they are doing is harmful but that doesn't change the fact that they're honestly trying to help. It's just people being stupid.

But here's the capper: The most books Gilder ever sold according to Faludi was 30,000. Norwood's book, also according to Faludi, had sold over twenty million copies. That's not a backlash--it's a phenomenon. It isn't like Norwood had some evil marketing scheme to get tens of thousands of women into bad therapy. She decided she was on to something that managed to strike a nerve with millions of women who bought whole hog into this nefarious malarkey. What Faludi has actually demonstrated is how an awfully large number of women manage to hurt themselves. No patriarchal backlash required.

Faludi's book, like Ann Coulter's "Slander," was lavishly praised by the very institutions she was attacking. Obviously, then, they're both right.

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