Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

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  GILDER’S EARLY books won him a niche as an antifeminist media pundit, but not the readership he craved. The sales figures declined through the ’70s: twelve thousand for Sexual Suicide, seven thousand for Naked Nomads, and a whopping six hundred for Visible Man. “It’s the world’s leading loser for a career move,” Gilder sighs. (Men and Marriage, on the other hand, printed in the midst of the backlash, sold more than thirty thousand copies—even though the book was only available by mail order.)

  But in 1981, Gilder finally became a literary success by harnessing his career to Ronald Reagan’s. Checking his liberal Republican leanings with his feminist past (as a young Ripon charter member, he had co-authored a book mocking this “Class-B” movie star), Gilder became a Reagan speechwriter, helped script Reagan’s acceptance address, and, most famously, produced a book that would blueprint the new administration’s supply-side economics and budget-cutting scheme—a scheme that, notably, took a disproportionate and devastating hit on female heads of household. While Wealth and Poverty was most widely characterized at the time as a broadside against liberals and their legacy, what went less recognized was the book’s attack on members of another political group: this Gilder work delivered more than a few kicks in the pants to feminists and their handiwork, too.

  Overnight, the unheralded and unwealthy free-lance writer became the intellectual darling of the Reagan administration—and went from poverty to wealth. Reagan’s men acted as indefatigable patrons and publicity agents for Wealth and Poverty: Reagan campaign chairman William Casey supplied financial support during the writing stages and Reagan’s budget director David Stockman peddled the book and even proposed handing it out to cabinet members in front of the press. All the promotion paid off: Wealth and Poverty sold more than a million copies.

  While book critics at the time focused exclusively on Wealth and Poverty’s economic message, Gilder continued his war on independent women in its pages. In fact, he widened it. Wealth and Poverty blames the women’s movement not only for single men’s failure to marry but for married men’s failure to prosper. When wives march purposefully to work, the book charges, they reduce their husbands to useless cripples: “The man has the gradually sinking feeling that his role as provider, the definitive male activity from the primal days of the hunt through the industrial revolution and on into modern life, has been largely seized from him.” The women’s movement, in Gilder’s view, has undercut the male provider twice—first, directly, by encouraging women to work, and then, indirectly, by championing social welfare programs that allow wives to survive without their husbands. First, feminists horned in on men’s role as breadwinners, he writes, then they saw to it that men were “cuckolded by the compassionate state.”

  At the same time that Gilder was bemoaning the loss of traditional manhood in society at large, he was finally laying claim to a version of it for himself. At last, he had scored in the marriage game and found a wife. Nini was, as he described her, a traditional-minded woman who drew a thinner paycheck than he, and Gilder hoped to keep it that way. As he asserted in Men and Marriage, he didn’t want his wife “to feel she is unequal to me if she earns less money than I do, or unequal to the careerist women I meet in my work.” To be sure, she didn’t quite live up to his helpmate ideal. When they met, he concedes later, she had a career as an architectural historian. And even after they wed, she remained active in her field, writing several books. But maybe this aging prince had considered his marital odds—and decided he’d better settle for what he could get.

  ALLAN BLOOM: A REFUGEE FROM THE FEMINIST OCCUPATION

  Ostensibly about the decline in American education, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind dedicates page after page to an assault on the women’s movement. Whether he’s deploring the state of scholarship, the emasculating tendencies of music, or the transience of student relationships, the baleful influence he identifies is always the same: the feminist transformation of society that has filled women with demands and desires and depleted men of vim and vigor. “The latest enemy of the vitality of the classic texts is feminism,” he writes; concerted attacks on the literary canon from ’60s student radicals and minorities pale in comparison, he says. Even the sexual revolution, Bloom’s other bête noire, is cast as a mere warm-up exercise to the “grimmer” rule of feminist tyranny. “The July 14 of the sexual revolution,” he writes, “was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancient Regime and the onset of the Terror.”

  Very little in Bloom’s treatise actually pertains to slipping educational standards; very much space, on the other hand, is devoted to a prolonged rant against the rising female Terror. “The feminist project,” he warns, has unleashed “a multitude of properly indignant censors equipped with loudspeakers and inquisitional tribunals” and “a man pays a high price” for violating their edicts. “Feminism has triumphed over the family,” led to “the suppression of modesty,” rearranged sex roles “using force,” made it so a woman “can easily satisfy her desires and does not invest her emotions in exclusive relationships,” and enabled women to bear children “on the female’s terms with or without fathers.” In short, feminism has freed women from the dictates of the male will “so that [women] can live as they please”—a development that this scholar deems a serious problem.

  Bloom’s was only the most notorious of many “decline of America” tomes that hit the bookstores in the late ’80s. Like the producers of a similar outpouring in the late 19th century, the learned authors of these alarmist texts wrote darkly of America’s dropping educational scores, deteriorating moral values, and flagging economic prowess—and, one way or another, they found a way to blame feminism, at least partially, for these national tribulations. In The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch sees “the unwholesomeness . . . of our way of life” highlighted in the feminist insistence on “freedom of choice,” the feminist challenge to traditional marriage, and the feminist “propaganda for unlimited abortion.” In Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, Roger Kimball indicts the women’s movement in the very first page. “Radical feminism,” he warns, is “the single biggest challenge to the canon.” Feminist studies has become “the dominant voice in the humanities departments of many of our best colleges and universities,” to the grave detriment of American intellectual life. Feminist scholars are intimidating universities into hiring other feminists, and “their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study.” By 1991 in California, about one hundred professors who shared this view had formed the California Association of Scholars; the group railed against women’s studies programs, claimed that efforts to enroll and hire women and minorities were destroying academic standards, and rallied round University of California anthropology professor Vincent Sarich, who had incensed female and minority students with his denunciations of affirmative action and his “scholarly” speculation that women had smaller brains than men.

  A few years after Bloom’s The Closing of the American Minds publication, the author not only stands by his indictment of feminism, he now says his celebrated 1987 best-seller “underestimated” the problem. Feminism “has become infinitely more powerful,” he maintains. And nowhere are the feminists ruling with more iron-fisted authority than the American campus, where their views have become “really a kind of orthodoxy” and those who don’t toe their line are liable to “get shut down.”

  The fifty-seven-year-old Plato scholar teaches at the University of Chicago, where he has retreated to the conservative, and practically all-male, bunker of the Committee on Social Thought (which had only one woman on its faculty): “I’m protected in my eccentric ivory tower,” he says. “It’s worse in the departments.” When venturing outside the committee’s demilitarized zone, he treads warily. “It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t in the universities how extraordinary it is,” he says, comparing his lot to a shell-shocked refugee b
earing atrocity stories: “I’m like one of the first people out of Cambodia.”

  According to Bloom’s report from the front, feminists have invaded every academic sanctuary—a view shared by the many male scholars denouncing “political correctness” in the early ’90s. “One finds it in all the various departments. They have made tremendous changes in courses. But more than that, in the old established courses with traditionalist books, a huge number [of professors] are teaching from that point of view. You study American history now, and what is America but the history of the enslavement of women! There’s no question but it’s become the doctrine.”

  The feminists rule because they have the numbers. “This terrific attack on the curriculum is fundamentally by the feminists because the feminists have been the most successful,” Bloom says. “There was this great push to hire women no matter what, and women have really achieved and they’re there now. And the simple fact is, you get a majority with a certain interpretive opinion and they think everybody is incompetent and they hire their own.”

  Bloom’s conviction that most faculty jobs and publication rights are now reserved for feminist women is shared by many of his conservative, as well as liberal, male colleagues on campus. But it is a conviction based on fear, not fact. Women, feminist or otherwise, account for a mere 10 percent of the tenured faculty at all four-year institutions (and a mere 3 to 4 percent at Ivy League colleges)—a rise of only 6 percent from the 1960s. Five times more women with Ph.D.’s are unemployed than men. Nor are feminist professorships overrunning campuses; only twelve women’s studies chairs exist nationwide. As for dominance in academic publications, a census taken of the roughly fifteen hundred articles published annually in journals of history, literature, education, philosophy, and anthropology found that only 7.4 percent of them dealt with women or women’s issues, a tiny 5 percent increase from the 1960s. In Bloom’s field, philosophy, the proportion of women’s issues articles was the tiniest of all, 2.7 percent—and had actually declined from a 1974 “peak” of 5.4 percent. If scholars like Bloom had fewer opportunities in their fields, financially motivated shifts in university priorities were more to blame than feminist studies. In the 1980s, one university after another cut liberal-arts budgets and poured their funds instead into the decade’s two on-campus growth industries: medical and business schools.

  Perhaps what troubled Bloom was not so much that the feminist-tainted American mind was closing—but that it was closing against him. In 1970, Bloom felt compelled to flee his Ivy League haven for Canada. “The guns at Cornell,” as he characterized the student uprising, drove him out. While only a very few of the guns were in women’s hands, they are the ones he most vividly recalls—and resents. “That’s when I began encountering the feminists,” he recalls of Cornell, which was one of the first college campuses to establish a women’s studies program. “The feminists started speaking very strongly. . . . Some of them are students who have since become well known. They were mostly women doing comparative literature who got a lot of attention.”

  While these women were building their careers and collecting their kudos, he felt exiled for ten bitter years at the University of Toronto. “I was lost,” he told a reporter later. Two years into his expatriate post, at the relatively young age of forty-one, he suffered a heart attack. Finally, after two years of negotiations, he received a faculty appointment at the University of Chicago. But even there he remained, in his word, a “nobody.” He even had great trouble getting The Closing of the American Mind published. Finally, he had to settle for a $10,000 advance.

  As Bloom sees it, the faculty feminists barred him from his rightful place of honor. “There’s a certain kind of ostracism if you don’t follow the doctrine,” and, because he dared to write that “the women’s movement is not founded on nature,” he says, he has been punished. “For that, I don’t get invited a lot of places. I can have none of the ordinary academic honors.”

  Even his female students won’t mind him. “I went to a theology class at a major theological school. . . . I came in just to discuss these issues and the entire class, which was eleven people, nine of them women, started calling [the presiding professor] a liar and a cheat for bringing me in.” He adds, “But that’s nothing, it really gets violent.” For example, he says, once he lectured at “a very important college” and the women in the audience actually got mad because he didn’t call on them during the question and answer period. One even accused him of “excluding women.”

  To Bloom’s way of thinking, it’s men like him who have been excluded. In The Closing of the American Mind, his lament about the “decay of the family” is, like the New Right’s, really a lament over lost traditional male authority in the home and in public life, an authority that he believes is violently under attack. He writes wistfully of the days when it was still believed that “the family is a sort of miniature body politic in which the husband’s will is the will of the whole.” He is upset about wives who cavalierly ditch their husbands under the liberalized divorce laws, and daughters who are under “less supervision in their relations with boys than at any time in history.”

  At times Bloom sounds almost nostalgic for the days when men were free to have their way with women without fear of censure. He suggests that talk of violence against women is . . . just talk. “Women, it is said,” he writes in Commentary, in a tone of high skepticism, “. . . are raped by their husbands as well as by strangers, they are sexually harassed by professors and employers at school and work.” And feminists, he writes with mounting irritation, want all these so-called crimes to be “legislated against and punished.” There’s one place, at least, where the traditional balance of sexual power is still preserved—pornographic magazines. Feminists are against pornography, he writes, not because they object to its humiliating and violent depictions of women but only “because it is a reminiscence of the old love relationship, which involved differentiated sexual roles.”

  A bachelor himself, Bloom harangues women most vigorously for their failure to wed; he repeatedly underscores the “inharmoniousness” of the “female career” and marriage. He writes that women are unhappy and “dogged by doubt” because their liberation has denied them love and marriage. It is the standard paradoxical backlash analysis he is offering, albeit in high-flown prose: young women’s battles have all “been won,” he writes, and they have emerged the loveless losers. “All our reforms have helped to strip the teeth of our gears, which therefore can no longer mesh.”

  But while Bloom suggests that feminism has cheated women, he soon reveals his underlying suspicion—that the women’s movement’s greatest victims are men. “And here is where the business turns nasty,” he writes, turning to what he calls the most “tyrannical” demand of feminism: that men should change, too (or rather, as Bloom’s book describes it, that “the souls of men . . . must be dismantled”). The consequence, he reports, is universal emasculation. When he surveys the modern-day campus, he sees only “spiritually detumescent” schoolboys and scholarly men who have become “old maid librarians.” When he contemplates modern-day society, he sees only the ruins of a male golden age: “There is nothing left of the reverence toward the father as the symbol of the divine on earth, the unquestioned bearer of authority.” He peers inside the crumbling male castle and beholds that even its innermost sanctum—the connubial bedroom—houses a hobbled stud. Modern men are beset with “nervousness about their sexual performance,” he writes. “In the past a man could hope to be admired for what he brought.” But now “he could be pretty sure that he was being compared and judged,” a “daunting” state of affairs that makes it “difficult for him to perform.”

  Feminism, Bloom argues, has not only denied men erections, it has decimated their basic identity, by dismantling the foundation on which that identity rests—the traditional family. The specter of the “decline of the family” appears to trouble Bloom not so much because he wants to preserve the cozy domestic joys but because he sees the famil
y as central to a male sense of self. “[A] man without family lands, or a family tradition for whose continuation he is responsible,” Bloom writes, invoking Tocqueville, is a man who will have trouble “seeing himself as an integral part of a past and a future, rather than an anonymous atom in a merely changing continuum.”

  The Closing of the American Mind is so packed with erudite and classical allusions that its critique of feminism appears to be grounded in Plato, not personal umbrage. But weed the Bloomian garden of its overcultivated metaphors, polysyllabic flourishes, and profuse quotations from the ancient Greek philosophers, Rousseau, Flaubert, and Shakespeare, and you’re left with a scholarly wasteland: no research, no evidence, not even a single quotation from a single living human being to support Bloom’s analysis of the contemporary situation between the sexes. The closest he comes is one reference to “overhearing” conversations between couples in restaurants. If scholarship is, in fact, in decline, then Bloom’s work isn’t going to save it.

  MICHAEL AND MARGARITA LEVIN: BOYS DON’T COOK AND GIRLS DON’T DO LONG DIVISION