Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Women’s contradictory circumstances in the ’50s—rising economic participation coupled with an embattled and diminished cultural stature—is the central paradox of women under a backlash. At the turn of the century, concerted efforts by university presidents, politicians, and business leaders to purge women from the campus and the office also failed; between 1870 and 1910 both the proportion of college women and the proportion of working women doubled. We should not, therefore, gauge a backlash by losses in women’s numbers in the job market, but by attacks on women’s rights and opportunities within that market, attacks that serve to stall and set back true economic equality. As a 1985 AFL-CIO report on workers’ rights observed of women’s dubious progress in the ’80s job market: “The number of working women has grown to about 50 million today, but there has been no similar growth in their economic status.”

  To understand why a backlash works in this contrary manner, we need to go back to our tilted corkscrew model of female progress. In any time of backlash, cultural anxiety inevitably centers on two pressure points in that spiral, demographic trends that act like two arrows pushing against the spiral, causing it to lean in the direction of women’s advancement, but also becoming the foci of the backlash’s greatest wrath.

  A woman’s claim to her own paycheck is one of these arrows. The proportion of women in the paid labor force has been rising with little interruption since the Victorian era. In a society where income is the measure of social strength and authority, women’s growing presence in the labor force can’t help but mitigate women’s secondary standing. But it hasn’t brought full equality. Instead, with each turn of the spiral, the culture simply redoubles its resistance, if not by returning women to the kitchen, then by making the hours spent away from their stoves as inequitable and intolerable as possible: pushing women into the worst occupations, paying them the lowest wages, laying them off first and promoting them last, refusing to offer child care or family leave, and subjecting them to harassment.

  The other straight arrow pressing against but never piercing the backlash corkscrew is a woman’s control over her own fertility—and it, too, sets up the same paradox between private behavior and public attitudes. As Henry Adams said of the furor over women’s increasing propensity to limit family growth in his day, “[T]he surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the other.” With the exception of the postwar baby boom, the number of childbirths per household has gradually declined in the last century. The ability to limit family size has certainly improved women’s situation, but it, too, has only inspired countervailing social campaigns to regulate pregnant women’s behavior and stigmatize the childless. In periods of backlash, birth control becomes less available, abortion is restricted, and women who avail themselves of it are painted as “selfish” or “immoral.”

  The 1970s women’s movement made its most substantial progress on the twin fronts of employment and fertility—forging historic and record numbers of equal employment and anti-discrimination policies, forcing open the doors to lucrative and elite “male” professions, and ultimately helping to legalize abortion. And now, once again, as the backlash crests and breaks, it crashes hardest on these two shores—dismantling the federal apparatus for enforcing equal opportunity, gutting crucial legal rulings for working women, undermining abortion rights, halting birth control research, and promulgating “fetal protection” and “fetal rights” policies that have shut women out of lucrative jobs, caused them to undergo invasive obstetric surgeries against their will, and thrown “bad” mothers in jail.

  • • •

  THE ATTACK on women’s rights that has developed in the last decade is perhaps most remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon at all. The press has largely ignored the mounting evidence of a backlash—and promoted the “evidence” that the backlash invented instead. The media have circulated make-believe data on marriage and infertility that linked women’s progress to marital and fertility setbacks, or unquestioningly passed along misleading government and private reports that concealed increasing inequities and injustice—such as the Labor Department’s claim that women’s wage gap has suddenly narrowed or the EEOC’s claim that sexual harassment on the job is declining or a Justice Department report that rape rates are static.

  In place of factual reporting on the political erosion in women’s lives, the mass media have offered us fictional accounts of women “cocooning,” a so-called new social trend in which the Good Housekeeping-created “New Traditionalist” gladly retreats to her domestic shell. Cocooning is little more than a resurgence of the 1950s “back-to-the-home movement,” itself a creation of advertisers and, in turn, a recycled version of the Victorian fantasy that a new “cult of domesticity” was bringing droves of women home. Not surprisingly, the cocooning lady has been invented and exalted by the same institutions that have sustained the heaviest financial hit from women’s increasingly non-cocooning habits. Traditional women’s magazine publishers, television programmers, and the marketers of fashion, beauty, and household goods have all played central roles—all merchandisers who still believe they need “feminine passivity” and full-time homemaking to sell their wares. They have saluted and sold the New Traditionalist’s virtuous surrender time and again—in promotional tributes heralding the so-called return of the “new” Clairol Girl, the “new” Breck Girl, the new hearth angel of Victoria magazine, and the new lady of leisure in the catalogs of Victoria’s Secret.

  The very choice of the word “cocooning” should suggest to us the trend’s fantastical nature. A cocoon is a husk sloughed upon maturity; butterflies don’t return to their chrysalis—nor to a larval state. The cultural myth of cocooning suggests an adult woman who has regressed in her life cycle, returned to a gestational stage. It maps the road back from the feminist journey, which was once aptly defined by a turn-of-the-century writer as “the attempt of women to grow up.” Cocooning’s infantile imagery, furthermore, bears a vindictive subtext, by promoting a retreat from female adulthood at the very time when the largest proportion of the female population is entering middle age. Feminine youth is elevated when women can least ascend its pedestal; cocooning urges women to become little girls, then mocks them mercilessly for the impossibility of that venture.

  The false feminine vision that has been unfurled by contemporary popular culture in the last decade is a sort of vast velveteen curtain that hides women’s reality while claiming to be its mirror. It has not made women cocoon or become New Traditionalists. But its thick drapery has both concealed the political assault on women’s rights and become the impossible standard by which American women are asked to judge themselves. Its false front has encouraged each woman to doubt herself for not matching the image in the mass-produced mirror, instead of doubting the validity of the mirror itself and pressing to discover what its nonreflective surface hides.

  As the backlash has gained power, instead of fighting and exposing its force, many women’s groups and individual women have become caught up with fitting into its fabricated backdrop. Feminist-minded institutions founded a decade earlier, from The First Women’s Bank to Options for Women, camouflaged their intent with new, neutral-sounding names; women in politics have claimed they are now only interested in “family issues,” not women’s rights; and career women with Ivy League degrees have eschewed the feminist label for public consumption. Instead of assailing injustice, many women have learned to adjust to it. Instead of getting angry, they have become depressed. Instead of uniting their prodigious numbers, they have splintered and turned their pain and frustration inward, some in starkly physical ways.

  In turn, this female adjustment process to backlash pressures has yielded record profits for the many “professionals” who have rushed in to exploit and exacerbate it: advice writers and pop therapists, matchmaking consultants, plastic surgeons, and infertility specialists have both fueled and cashed in on women’s anxiety and pani
c under the backlash. Millions of women have sought relief from their distress, only to wind up in the all-popular counseling of the era where women learn not to raise their voices but to lower their expectations and “surrender” to their “higher power.”

  The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation. In Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 Broadway hit The Heidi Chronicles, her heroine, Heidi Holland, delivers a speech that would become one of the most quoted lines by women writing about the female experience in the ’80s: “I feel stranded, and I thought the point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded,” the once feminist art historian says. “I thought we were all in this together.” As women’s collective quest for equal rights smacks into the backlash’s wall of resistance, it breaks into a million pieces, each shard a separate woman’s life. The backlash has ushered in not the cozy feeling of “family togetherness,” as advertisers have described it, but the chilling realization that it is now every woman for herself. “I’m alone,” a secretary confides in an article surveying contemporary women, an article that is filled with such laments. “I know a lot of people [are] dealing with the same problems, but I guess we’re just dealing with them by ourselves.” Both young and old women, nonideological undergraduates and feminist activists alike, have felt the pain of this new isolation—and the sense of powerlessness it has bred. “I feel abandoned,” an older feminist writes in the letters column of Ms., “as if we were all members of a club that they have suddenly quit.” “We don’t feel angry, we feel helpless,” a young woman bursts out at a college panel on women’s status.

  The loss of a collective spirit has proven far more debilitating to American women than what is commonly characterized as the overly taxing experience of a liberated life. Backlash-era conventional wisdom blames the women’s movement for American women’s “exhaustion.” The feminists have pushed forward too fast, backlash pundits say; they have brought too much change too soon and have worn women out. But the malaise and enervation that women are feeling today aren’t induced by the speed of liberation but by its stagnation. The feminist revolution has petered out, leaving so many women discouraged and paralyzed by the knowledge that, once again, the possibility for real progress has been foreclosed.

  When one is feeling stranded, finding a safe harbor inevitably becomes a more compelling course than bucking social currents. Keeping the peace with the particular man in one’s life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture. Saying one is “not a feminist” (even while supporting quietly every item of the feminist platform) seems the most prudent, self-protective strategy. Ultimately in such conditions, the impulse to remedy social injustice can become not only secondary but silent. “In a state of feeling alone,” as feminist writer Susan Griffin has said, “the knowledge of oppression remains mute.”

  To expect each woman, in such a time of isolation and crushing conformism, to brave a solitary feminist stand is asking too much. “If I were to overcome the conventions,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero.” Under the backlash, even a heroine can lose her nerve, as the social climate raises the stakes to an unbearable degree and as the backlash rhetoric drives home, time and again, the terrible penalties that will befall a pioneering woman who flouts convention. In the last decade, all the warnings and threats about the “consequences” and “costs” of feminist aspiration have had their desired effect. By 1989, almost half the women in a New York Times poll on women’s status said they now feared they had sacrificed too much for their gains. The maximum price that their culture had forced them to pay for minimal progress, they said, was just too high.

  A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE . . . BUT WHOSE CRISIS?

  “And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity.”

  BETTY FRIEDAN, The Feminine Mystique

  This stirring proclamation, offered in the final page of Friedan’s classic work, is one prediction that never came to pass. Feminists have always optimistically figured that once they demonstrated the merits of their cause, male hostility to women’s rights would evaporate. They have always been disappointed. “I am sure the emancipated man is a myth sprung from our hope and eternal aspiration,” feminist Doris Stevens wrote wearily in the early 1900s. “There has been much accomplishment,” Margaret Culkin Banning wrote of women’s rights in 1935, “. . . and more than a few years have passed. But the resentment of men has not disappeared. Quietly it has grown and deepened.”

  When author Anthony Astrachan completed his seven-year study of American male attitudes in the 1980s, he found that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the men he surveyed “genuinely support women’s demands for independence and equality.” In 1988, the American Male Opinion Index, a poll of three thousand men conducted for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, found that less than one fourth of men supported the women’s movement, while the majority favored traditional roles for women. Sixty percent said wives with small children should stay home. Other studies examining male attitudes toward the women’s movement—of which, regrettably, there are few—suggest that the most substantial share of the growth in men’s support for feminism may have occurred in the first half of the ’70s, in that brief period when women’s “lib” was fashionable, and slowed since. As the American Male Opinion Index observed, while men in the ’80s continued to give lip service to such abstract matters of “fair play” as the right to equal pay, “when the issues change from social justice to personal applications, the consensus crumbles.” By the ’80s, as the poll results made evident, men were interpreting small advances in women’s rights as big, and complete, ones; they believed women had made major progress toward equality—while women believed the struggle was just beginning. This his-and-hers experience of the equal-rights campaign would soon generate a gulf between the sexes.

  At the same time that men were losing interest in feminist concerns, women were gaining and deepening theirs. During much of the ’70s, there had been little divergence between men and women in polling questions about changing sex roles, and men had even given slightly more support than women to such issues as the Equal Rights Amendment. But as women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman’s proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially. By the ’80s, as the polls showed, they outpaced men in their support for virtually every feminist position.

  The pressures of the backlash only served to reinforce and broaden the divide. As basic rights and opportunities for women became increasingly threatened, especially for female heads of households, the ranks of women favoring not just a feminist but a social-justice agenda swelled. Whether the question was affirmative action, the military buildup, or federal aid for health care, women were becoming more radical, men more conservative. This was especially apparent among younger women and men; it was younger men who gave the most support to Reagan. (Contrary to conventional wisdom, the rise of “the conservative youth” in the early ’80s was largely a one-gender phenomenon.) Even in the most liberal baby-boom populations, male and female attitudes were polarizing dramatically. A national survey of “progressive” baby boomers (defined as the 12 million who support social-change groups) found 60 percent of the women called themselves “radical” to “very liberal,” while 60 percent of the men titled themselves “moderate” to “conservative.” The pollsters identified one prime cause for this chasm: The majority of women surveyed said they felt the ’80s had been a “bad decade” for them (while the majority of men disagreed)—and they feared the next decade would be even worse.

  The divergence in men’s and women’s attitudes passed several benchmarks in 1980. For the first time in American history, a gender voting gap emerged over women’s rights issues. For the first time, polls found men less likely than women to support equal roles for the sexes in busine
ss and government, less likely to support the Equal Rights Amendment—and more likely to say they preferred the “traditional” family where the wife stayed home. Moreover, some signs began to surface that men’s support for women’s rights issues was not only lagging but might actually be eroding. A national poll found that men who “strongly agreed” that the family should be “traditional”—with the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the housewife—suddenly jumped four percentage points between 1986 and 1988, the first rise in nearly a decade. (The same year, it fell for women.) The American Male Opinion Index found that the proportion of men who fell into the group opposing changes in sex roles and other feminist objectives had risen from 48 percent in 1988 to 60 percent in 1990—and the group willing to adapt to these changes had shrunk from 52 percent to 40 percent.

  By the end of the decade, the National Opinion Research poll was finding that nearly twice the proportion of women as men thought a working mother could be just as good a parent as a mother who stayed home. In 1989, while a majority of women in the New York Times poll believed American society had not changed enough to grant women equality, only a minority of men agreed. A majority of the men were saying, however, that the women’s movement had “made things harder for men at home.” Just as in previous backlashes, American men’s discomfort with the feminist cause in the last decade has endured—and even “quietly grown and deepened.”