Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  In the quietist ’80s, the advice book and therapy couch may have been the only sources of relief left to women who were feeling demoralized. In an era that offered little hope of real social or political change, the possibility of changing oneself was the one remaining way held out to American women to improve their lot. And there was much that these advice writers and counselors could have done, even more so under the backlash, to bolster bombarded female egos and provide solace and support for women who were feeling increasingly alone and overwhelmed. Certainly, many counselors in the ’80s provided useful and much-needed aid and comfort. But the advice experts with the highest media profiles in the decade were not among them. These representatives of the psychology profession managed to reinforce female isolation more than relieve it. They helped to inflame anxieties women already had about their worth and place in the world. In the guise of self-help, the experts issued only demands and dictates about how women should behave to win a man, rather than dispensing therapeutic tools and encouragement that women could have used to help themselves.

  Instead of assisting women to override the backlash, the advice experts helped to lock it in female minds and hearts—by urging women to interpret all of the backlash’s pressures as simply “their” problem. While of course many of the psychological problems that women (and men) struggle with are highly individualized and idiosyncratic—people seek counseling for many reasons, of which socialization of women is, obviously, only one—the counselors who dominated ’80s advice bookshelves recognized no outside factors in their analysis and treatment of women. Backlash psychology turned a blind eye to all the social forces that had converged on women in the last decade—all the put-downs from mass media and Hollywood, all the verbal attacks from religious and political leaders, all the frightening reports from scholars and “experts,” and all the rage, whether in the form of firebombings of women’s clinics or sexual harassment or rape. These popular psychologists failed to factor in or even acknowledge the sort of psychic damage that a prolonged cultural onslaught was capable of inflicting on its tar gets. Nor, needless to say, did they contemplate the psychological difficulties that the other sex might be having in this decade, adjusting to the changes in women’s roles. Advice books directed at men just weren’t marketable enough to make that therapeutic enterprise worthwhile.

  The abuse that women had experienced in the ’80s, the advice manuals decreed by the end of the decade, must be self-inflicted. Rather than ask why so many women had become the object of rising male wrath, they concluded that these women must simply be courting punishment. One popular psychology tome after another unveiled an updated version of the masochistic female psyche—couched, of course, in the language of women’s liberation. And while many of the works were trivial—the product of pop-therapy trends that come and go like fashions in the bookstores—the regressive vision of the female mind that these books endorsed would ultimately surface in a far more damaging context, in the most important reference manual of professional psychiatry.

  STAGE ONE: FEMINIST-TAMING THERAPY

  Get “power” by “surrendering” and “submitting” to your man’s every whim, a leading ’80s self-help manual advises in typical feminist-sounding rhetoric. Don’t talk back, because a ladylike silence will “enhance” your “self-respect” and “feeling of mastery.” “Take charge . . . of your courtship,” suggests another popular text. “Overcome obstacles,” so you can get married. The pseudofeminist title of one 1989 advice book puts it most succinctly: Women Who Marry Down and End Up Having It All.

  While the backlash therapy books may be written in feminist ink, they blot out the most basic precept of feminist therapy—that both social and personal growth are important, necessary, and mutually reinforcing. This is a view that was supported, albeit in a rather degraded, commercialized form, in the leading self-help manuals of the ’70s; in 1975, The New Assertive Woman issued an “Everywoman’s Bill Of Rights” that called for “the right to be treated with respect” and “the right to be listened to and taken seriously.” The ’80s advice writers, by contrast, seemed to go out of their way to urge women to stop challenging social constraints and to keep their thoughts to themselves—to learn to fit the mold rather than break it.

  On no group of women did the self-help authors impress this message more strongly than the ones without wedding rings. The diagnosis was, underneath it all, little changed from the postwar era, when that era’s leading advice book—Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lund-berg’s Modern Women: The Lost Sex—declared all single women neurotics and proposed subsidized psychotherapy to get them married. In the ’80s, even advice experts more sympathetic to single women and the pressures they faced touted the same marital party line. In the popular 1988 advice book, If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?, counselor Susan Page acknowledges in her introduction that unwed women are contending with a social climate that is especially rough on them now; they are burdened by “the specific problems that our times have spawned, such as misogyny,” she writes. But she’s not interested in helping single women develop the self-confidence and internal strength they need to bear up under these antagonistic conditions. Nor does she propose that single women even question the culture’s marital marching orders. “I want to accept certain sociological and psychological factors as given [her emphasis],” she writes. “In this book we will not discuss why [her emphasis] these conditions are as they are, and we will not lament them.” What then should single women do to ease what Page calls the “Great Emotional Depression” that she says has descended on millions of them? Just change your single status, she proposes. She dispenses “strategies” only to make women more marketable for marriage.

  The ’80s backlash therapists firmly rejected another fundamental feminist principle—that men can, and should, change, too. “[L]ately it seems there is a rising tide of utter frustration among women concerning men,” Smart Women/Foolish Choices observes, and a lot of women “always end up feeling disappointed by men.” But Cowan and Kinder do not go on to consider what men might be doing to inspire such an outpouring of frustration, nor how men might change their behavior to make women feel better. Instead, the psychologists conclude that men are fine and any disappointment women feel is wholly self-generated. It’s not the men who are “inadequate,” the authors write; it’s just that the women’s “expectations are distorted.” Women are just “hypercritical” of men. All would be well if women only learned to “truly understand men” and their “need for mastery and career success.” Women would be happy if they only quit “pushing” the opposite sex to change and learned to “compromise.”

  Asked later what sort of compromises he had in mind, Kinder says: “Women could have their kids while they are still in college, and then, if they still want a career, they can do that after the kids are grown. You do have to make some sacrifices.” What about fathers “sacrificing” by taking some responsibility for their children? Kinder, whose wife stayed at home to raise their children, mulls it over. “Yeah, well that would solve the problem,” he says. “But men won’t do it. And it’s not our place to be saying things like that. We’re not social engineers.” Not, anyway, when it comes to men.

  Confronted with the antifeminist implications of their message, the backlash therapists almost always issue a denial. “We’re talking about broadening expectations, not settling for less, and that’s not just a play on words,” Cowan says. But it is exactly that—unless Cowan has already forgotten his own “Rules for Finding the Right Man” in Smart Women. Rule 8: “Fewer expectations lead to greater aliveness.”

  Some of the therapists attacking women’s liberation most forcefully claimed, in fact, to be proponents themselves. As many media-conscious therapists in the ’80s discovered, feminist-bashing “feminists” garnered the most airtime. Susan and Stephen Price, authors of the popular No More Lonely Nights: Overcoming the Hidden Fears That Keep You from Getting Married, were one such “feminist” husband-and-wife therapy
team who got a lot of press mileage plugging this backlash diagnosis of modern single women: “androphobia.” This “problem without a name,” they wrote, shamelessly stealing Friedan’s phrase, was a “deep-rooted intense fear of men” shared by most unmarried women over thirty, especially professional women. The cause: “You have been deeply influenced by feminism.”

  • • •

  “THESE OBSESSIVE androphobic fears are a major ingredient in women’s resistance to marriage today,” Stephen Price is saying in his Manhattan office, a few weeks after his appearance on the “Today” show. “Now that we’ve reached the end of the women’s movement, which is where our culture is today. . . .” Here he hesitates, then says, “We both, of course, feel very pro the gains of the women’s movement.”

  His wife, Susan, seated in the office’s other therapeutic armchair, nods vigorously. “We’re both feminists,” she says. “In fact, it was almost me being a feminist that kept me from seeing these hidden fears developing. As a therapist I encouraged women to pursue careers. But what happened is, women escaped into their careers and they didn’t put their energy into their relationships. Their feminist viewpoint became a trap.” But if careers hurt women psychologically, then why do professional women consistently rank highest, as we’ve seen, in virtually all measures of mental health? The Prices have no answer.

  In spite of their pro-feminist claims, the Prices seem to oppose every feminist tenet, from economic independence to sexual freedom. In their book and in their counseling sessions, they advise women to refrain not only from initiating sex but from having sex at all before marriage. “If the woman is sexually aggressive, the man might put her in the category of someone to go to bed with, period,” Susan Price says. Evidence? “Fatal Attraction may be over-drawn in some ways, but you can really see that operating there,” she says.

  Unlike authentically feminist therapists, the Prices don’t consider, much less confront, other forces at work in women’s lives. They reinforce the era’s isolation of single women by encouraging their female readers to see themselves as defective units, alone and isolated only by their own aberrant behavior. They advise women to “deal with your own personal crisis: What might you [their emphasis] be doing to make intimacy with a man impossible? What attitudes are keeping you [their emphasis] unavailable for marriage?” The primary offending attitude that the book singles out: an insistence on respect and equal treatment from one’s mate. “The desire to avoid a submissive status in relationship to men can lead you into a loveless life,” they assert. Again, there is no analysis of the attitudes of men, much less proposals for altering them. If a man mistreats a woman, she probably asked for it. “A resistant woman picks a resistant man,” Susan Price says. “What we help single women to see is how what they think is a problem with the man is really something inside them.” Don’t men play any role in difficult relationships? “Probably it is a fifty-fifty proposition,” Stephen Price concedes, shrugging. “But this book is focused on women—for the purpose of clarity.”

  While they don’t actually support a feminist vision, the Prices are happy to appropriate the movement’s activist language to promote their own agenda. They urge women to “take control” of their love lives by scaling back their career aspirations and to “gain power” over potential husbands by remaining celibate. “It’s Up to You to Get Married,” the manual instructs, this being the only arena, apparently, in which it’s okay for women to take the initiative.

  Androphobia may have a scientific ring, but it’s not based on scientific research—or any research at all. “We just knew it was a phobia,” Stephen Price says flatly. How? “Well, because there’s an avoidance there.” Pressed to explain what that means, Stephen Price falls silent. Finally, he says: “A lot of the dynamics of phobia are hidden. That’s how we know it’s a phobia. It’s very hidden.”

  This invisible phobia turned the Prices into very visible “marriage gurus,” as they now call themselves. “We are inundated,” Susan Price says happily. “We’ve been doing three radio shows a week. Women are calling up saying, what’s your [marriage] success rate? We do sessions by phone. We have women flying in from out west. And we get so many letters from women saying they read our book and they realize now how they did it to themselves. They are grateful.”

  It turns out that Susan Price does actually support feminist principles in one way—for herself. “When we first married, Steve couldn’t understand my need for my own career and not wanting to be a home-maker,” she recalls. “I got jobs [to support him] while he was in graduate school. He was being groomed for a career and what was I doing?” First she became a schoolteacher, but she didn’t find it fulfilling enough. “I decided I wanted to be a therapist. So I went back to graduate school. The kids were still babies at the time. We hired a lot of babysitters and put them in a lot of nursery schools.” Was any of this a mistake? “Oh, no. I love what I do.”

  TONI GRANT: SURRENDER INTO WOMANHOOD

  The “media’s number one psychologist” drums her pink nails impatiently against a countertop at the KFI-AM radio station in Los Angeles; a live installment of “The Dr. Toni Grant Show,” the first and soon nationwide on-air therapy program with millions of listeners, is in progress on this summer evening in 1988. The current caller is getting on Grant’s nerves. Carol is talking about her husband: he’s been spending family money that she believes he should invest in their two little girls. She told him so, several times. A big mistake, in Grant’s opinion—challenging one’s husband is a sure sign of a “feminist-infected” woman.

  GRANT: Why don’t you stop doing that? CAROL: Because it bothers me.

  GRANT: Well that’s not a reason. . . . You’re not getting away with anything. And you will know that when he starts to cheat on you and he starts to stay away from home, he stops sleeping with you, he stops talking to you. . . . Learning to hold your tongue, especially when love is the object, is what you need to learn.

  Carol promises to keep her mouth shut. Not all Grant’s listeners need to be chided; many have studied closely her best-selling advice book, Being a Woman: Fulfilling Your Femininity and Finding Love, and taken the teachings to heart. Caller Lee Ann is a case in point. At fifty-seven, Lee Ann describes herself as a “strong, independent person,” a textiles design instructor who returned to college to get her teaching credentials after her divorce. She tells Grant that the current man in her life, just like her ex-husband, expects her to shoulder all the duties at home. She wonders, having heard about Grant’s book, whether she’s to blame for his domestic unhelpfulness by failing to act “feminine” enough.

  That’s right, Grant says: “If you come across as tremendously competent . . . [men] will make you the man.” A man may “admire” her strength, but he won’t be “inspired” to “cherish her and adore her and make mad passionate love to her.” Grant recommends that Lee Ann “look within,” find that “frail” feminine girl inside and put her on display. Her fragility will “thrill” him—apparently enough to make him take out the trash.

  Grant dates her own transformation to 1981, when she started “re-searching being single,” as she put it during her publicity tour. She knew something about the topic from personal experience: she had divorced her husband seven years earlier and been single ever since. She had many prospective grooms, including several prominent Hollywood publicists and producers, whom she turned down. Grant seemed to enjoy, even advertise, her independent lifestyle. In 1984, she marched into a Hollywood Halloween party dressed as Wonder Woman. In 1985, she told a reporter that she relished her single status. In 1986, she told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that while she eschewed the “feminist” label, “I’d like to represent the best of what feminists want for women, equal rights and such.” When the interviewer asked her, “Haven’t you always been more fulfilled by career than family?” she replied, “Certainly.” Long after the book was published, she was calling herself a “passionate advocate” of women’s rights. “Of course I’m a fe
minist,” she says. “How could I be anything but? . . . I’ve led a life of accomplishment. . . . I was in school until I was twenty-seven. . . . I was the sole support for two kids, a home, two cars. I’m an independent, highly educated woman. If I’m not a feminist, who is?”

  Her book, however, reflects the prevailing backlash ethos rather than her personal experience. As she herself boasts, the book is selling well because of “perfect timing”—“It really fits the trends for women right now.” This is counseling guided by market, not psychological, research. “You have to write a book with a point of view,” she says. “You can’t spend pages and pages talking about how [you’re] a feminist.”

  Nonetheless, Grant maintains that it was her review of the professional literature that made her reassess her view of independent career women. Her singles research took her first to Freud, whose work, she writes in Being a Woman, brought home to her this concept: “Biology is destiny.” That’s when she began to sour on the modern working woman, who is “often going against her nature” and “her monthly periods.” Then she investigated Jung, and from his works she gleaned that equality turns a woman into an Amazon, “constantly armed and ready for battle,” and makes her “severely neurotic in her denial of her biological clock.” She drew from contemporary scholars, too. Her book cites Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice—as proof that Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of sex roles is “absurd” and that the quest for romance, not legal rights, “is the essense of being a woman.”

  Grant’s analysis all adds up to this insight: the new assertive woman is abnormal precisely because she asserts herself. A “normal” woman passively allows a man to shape her experience, for good or ill. “What, really, is ‘masochism’?” Grant asks in Being a Woman. “Most people associate masochism with pleasure and pain, images being conjured up of the abused and abuser.” But in her view, masochism is just the naturally feminine “desire to endure pain rather than inflict it; to relinquish control rather than seize it.” And so, she concludes, “In this sense, certainly, most women are indeed masochistic.”