Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  In the one study testing . . .: Jonathan S. Weiss, Charles N. Ellis, John T. Headington, Theresa Tincoff, Ted A. Hamilton, and John J. Voorhees, “Topical Tretinoin Improves Photoaged Skin,” Journal of American Medical Association, 259, no. 4 (Jan. 22-29, 1988): 527-52.

  Needless to say, . . .: Holub, “Retin-A.”

  In one year, Retin-A sales . . .: Susan Duffy Benway, “Youth for Sale: Anti-Aging Is the Hottest Thing in Cosmetics,” Barron’s, Dec. 22, 1986, p. 24.

  That’s what her maker . . .: “Breck Hair Care,” news release from “Breck ’88” press kit.

  She was born . . .: “What Ever Happened to the Breck Girl?” Breck promotional literature, 1988.

  It was management’s feeling . . .”: Personal interview with Gerard Matthews, Feb. 1988.

  She’s back and more . . .: The revival of the term “The Breck Girl” set off a new round of stinging criticism from female journalists who covered the event and angry letters from women. The company finally relented the following year and renamed her “The Breck Woman.”

  “These militant feminists . . .”: Personal interview with Robert Anderson, 1988.

  “We didn’t want . . .”: Personal interview with Gerard Matthews, Feb. 1988.

  Anderson concurred . . .: Robert Anderson, “My Impressions of the Search,” Breck press kit.

  I was busy at my . . .”: Personal interview with Cecilia Gouge, May 1988. (Subsequent Gouge quotes are from interview.)

  Anderson called off . . .: “Cecilia Gouge Becomes the New Breck Girl,” and “New Breck Girl Combines Career, Motherhood—And She Baits Her Own Hook,” Breck press kit, 1987.

  Breck did not pay . . .: Personal interviews with Cecilia Gouge and Breck publicist Susan McCabe, 1988.

  “Cecilia came back . . .”: Personal interview with Joe Gouge, May 1988. (Subsequent Gouge quotes are from interview.)

  The next year . . .: “Breck Announces Sales Increase and Line Extensions for 1988,” 1988 press release.

  “My wife is forty but . . .”: Personal interview with Robert Harvey and personal observations at the Bohemian Club, 1988. (Subsequent Harvey quotes are from interview.) 225 “Good Housekeeping . . .”: Personal interview with one of Harvey’s patientcounselors, who asked not to be identified, 1988.

  “It just got worse . . .”: Personal interview with one of Harvey’s patients, who asked not to be identified because she preferred not to make public her decision to have breast implants, 1988.

  Starting in 1983 . . .: Lisa M. Krieger, “New Face of Plastic Surgery,” San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 1, 1989, p. A1; press kit from American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons Inc. and its Plastic Surgery Education Foundation.

  There is a body . . .”: Krieger, “New Face of Plastic Surgery,” p. A1.

  A single issue of . . .: Bardach, “The Dark Side of Cosmetic Surgery,” p. 24.

  Cosmetic surgery can even . . .: Ad entitled “Cosmetic Surgery Can Enhance Your Life,” The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 1988, p. 57.

  With liposuction, “you can feel . . .”: Ad in Los Angeles magazine, Feb. 1989.

  From Vogue to . . .: Teri Agins, “Boom in Busts,” The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 15, 1988, p. D1.

  “Go curvy . . .”: “Go Curvy!: The Right Inches/The Right Places,” Mademoiselle, Jan. 1988, p. 108.

  “Attention, front and center . . .”: “Breasts. . . the Bare Truth: A Beauty Report,” Mademoiselle, April 1988, p. 221.

  A feature in Ladies’ Home Journal . . .: Rita Seiff, “Getting Better All the Time,” Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1987, p. 20.

  TV talk shows . . .: “Good Morning Bay Areas” ’s Jan. 13, 1989, segment offered a cosmetic-surgery contest judged by local cosmetic surgeons; the finalists were women who showed the “most potential for positive change.” In Dec. 1988, “Donahue” named a plastic-surgery patient “The Perfect Woman.” See Ryan Murphy, “It’s Not Easy Being Perfect,” San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 14, 1989, p. D1. For radio stations, see Barbara Lippert, “Vanna Doesn’t Speak,” Adweek, July 6, 1987, p. 10.

  Even Ms. deemed . . .: Wendy Kaminer, “Of Face Lifts and Feminism,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 1988, p. A23.

  By 1988, the cosmetic . . .: Steven Findlay, “Buying the Perfect Body,” U.S. News and World Report, May 1, 1989, p. 68; Susan Jacoby, “Appearance Anxiety,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 28, 1988, p. 26.

  More than two million . . .: Krieger, “New Face,” p. A22.

  A 1987 survey . . .: “Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Study,” cited in Susan L. Wampler, “Mirror: The Changing Face of Beauty,” Indianapolis Business Journal, Feb. 19, 1990, III, p. 28.

  In 1988, a congressional . . .: A six-month investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Small Business Subcommittee; its findings were released in the spring of 1989.

  Other studies found . . .: Rita Freedman, Beauty Bound (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986) p. 213.

  Follow-up operations to correct . . .: Elizabeth Bennett, “Choice of Doctors May Determine Success in Quest for Youth and Beauty,” Houston Post, May 29, 1987, p. G1.

  For breast implants . . .: Sandra Blakeslee, “Breast Implant Surgery: More Facts Are Sought in the Battle Over Safety,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1989, p. B6.

  A 1987 study in . . .: John B. McCraw, Charles E. Horton, John A. I. Grossman, Ivor Kaplan, and Ann McMellin, “An Early Appraisal of the Methods of Tissue Expansion and the Transverse Rectus Abdominis Musculocutaneious Flap in Reconstruction of the Breast Following Mastectomy,” Annals of Plastic Surgery, 18, no. 2 (Feb. 1987): 93-113.

  In 1988, investigators . . .: Bardach, “Dark Side,” p. 54. In fact, no comprehensive epidemiological studies of breast implants had been conducted since the devices were first introduced in 1964.

  Contracture of scar tissue . . .: Ibid.; Blakeslee, “Breast Implant Surgery;” “Breast Implants Delay Diagnosis of Cancer,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 8, 1988; “Breast Implants Hinder X-Ray Mammography,” The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 1989, p. B1.

  In 1989, a Florida . . .: “Dying for Beauty,” Media Watch, 3 (Summer 1989): 2. 230 In 1982, the FDA . . .: Sybil Niden Goldrich, “Restoration Drama,” Ms., June 1988, p. 20.

  “The risk to humans . . .”: Warren E. Leary, “Silicone Implants Tied to Cancer in Test Rats,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1988, p. A8.

  Not until April 1991 . . .: Jean Seligmann, “The Hazards of Silicone,” Newsweek, April 29, 1991, p. 56

  To all these problems . . .: “Plastic Surgeons’ Society Issues Statement on Breast Implants,” news release from the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, Jan. 1988.

  Between 1984 and 1986 . . .: Data from American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, 1988; “Five-Year Updated Evaluation of Suction-Assisted Lipectomy,” paper prepared by the ASPRS Ad Hoc Committee on New Procedures, Sept. 30, 1987.

  The procedure also could . . .: “Five-Year Updated Evaluation of Suction-Assisted Lipectomy.”

  Furthermore, the plastic surgery . . .: Ibid.

  On March 30, 1987 . . .: Carrie Dolan, “Fat-cutting Gains Wide Popularity But Can Be Dangerous,” The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1987, p. A1; Bennett, “Choice of Doctors;” Fred Bonavita, “Pasadena Doctor’s License Revoked,” Houston Post, July 25, 1987, p. 1A.

  “This literature she got . . .”: Hope E. Paasch, “Widower Suing Doctor,” Houston Post, April 8, 1987, p. 3A.

  Ramirez operated . . .: Ibid.; Bonavita, “Pasadena Doctor.”

  By 1987, only five years . . .: “Five-Year Updated Evaluation of Suction-Assisted Lipectomy, pp. 8–11.

  A 1988 congressional subcommittee . . .: Laura Fraser, “Scar Wars,” This World, San Francisco Chronicle, May 20, 1990, p. 7.

  A woman in San Francisco . . .: Personal interview with a close friend of the woman who asked not to be identified, 1989.

  The society’s 1987 report . . .: “Five-Year Updated Evaluations of Suct
ion-Assisted Lipectomy,” p. 2.

  As even the report . . .: Ibid., p. 12.

  Vogue described . . .: Janice Kaplan, “Fix vs. Lift?” Vogue, Jan. 1985, p. 205.

  One Los Angeles plastic . . .: Bardach, “Dark Side,” p. 51.

  In fact, the number of . . .: Statistics from American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. Between 1984 and 1986, the number of breast reconstructive procedures performed fell from 98,800 to 57,200, and the number of burn reconstruction operations slipped from 23,200 to 20,400. Overall, the number of all reconstructive (as opposed to aesthetic) procedures declined from 1,388,700 to 1,259,500.

  To me,” said plastic surgeon . . .: Rodney Tyler, “Doctor Vanity,” Special Report, Nov. 1989—Jan. 1990, p. 20. Wagner also performed cosmetic surgery on his mother, mother-in-law, and wife’s sister. This wasn’t just one doctor’s peculiarity. In a 1987 survey of plastic surgeons, nearly half of them said they remodeled their wives, mothers, and daughters.

  I just felt sick . . .”: Personal interview, 1988. (Subsequent quotes are from interview.)

  “I thought her idea . . .”: Personal interview with Patrick Netter, 1990.

  CHAPTER NINE. THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT

  “The politics of despair . . .”: Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) p. 3.

  I have hope . . .”: Personal interview with Paul Weyrich, 1988. (Subsequent Weyrich quotes are from interview unless otherwise noted.) As a New Right minister . . .: Personal interview with Edmund Haislmaier, Heritage Foundation fellow, who was present at this meeting, 1988.

  On the airwaves . . .: Arbitron’s 1981 study, “Prime Time Preachers,” found that their weekly audience fell from 21 to 20 million between 1977 and 1980; A. C. Nielsen’s 1980 “Report on Syndicated Programs” found that only two of the top ten independent TV preachers reached as many as 2 percent of the households in broadcast range. See John L. Kater, Jr., Christians on the Right (New York: The Seabury Press) p. 18; William Martin, “The Birth of a Media Myth,” Atlantic, June 1981, p. 9. As the decade progressed, support for TV ministers only eroded further: A 1987 Louis Harris poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed the electronic preachers were a more destructive than beneficial influence.

  Even at the . . .: Falwell overstated his viewership by 23.4 million people. See Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives (New York: A Delta Book, 1984) p. 83.

  A Harris poll found . . .: Louis Harris Poll, May 1987.

  “Backlash politics,” political . . .: Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, pp. 29–30.

  “America has largely . . .”: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965) pp. 23, 43.

  As Weyrich himself . . .: Thomas J. McIntyre with John C. Obert, The Fear Brokers (Philadelphia: The Pilgrim Press, 1979) p. 156.

  The New Right movement has . . .: Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, pp. 68, 73-74; Lipset and Raab, Politics of Unreason, p. 30.

  As Conservative Caucus . . .: McIntyre, The Fear Brokers, p. 156.

  In 1980, Weyrich . . .: Conservative Digest, 6, no. 6 (June 1980): 12, cited in Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,” Feminist Studies, 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 232.

  That same year . . .: Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Galilee, 1980) p. 151.

  One New Right group . . .: Charlene Spretnak, “The Christian Right’s ‘Holy War’ Against Feminism,” The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982) pp. 470-496; Walda Katz Fishman and Georgia E. Fuller, “Unraveling the Right-Wing Opposition to Women’s Equality;” Interchange, Report by Interchange Resource Center, Washington, D.C., 1981, p. 1; Marcia Fram, “ERA Foes Exploit ‘Women vs. Women’ Myth,” National Catbolic Reporter, July 30, 1982.

  The women’s liberation . . .”: Petchesky, “Antiabortion,” p. 211.

  In a 1989 survey . . .: “Women Shun Clergy’s Advice,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 14, 1989, p. B4.

  When a researcher . . .: “A Poll for Women: A Survey of Protestant Evangelical Opinion About Self-Image and Social Problems,” Feb.-May 1982. See Carol Virginia Pohli, “Church Closets and Back Doors: A Feminist View of Moral Majority Women,” Feminist Studies, 9, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 542.

  In their sermons . . .: Dan Morgan, “Evangelicals: A Force Divided, Political Involvement, Sophistication Growing,” Washington Post, Mar. 8, 1988, p. A1; Janet E. Burks, “Changing Roles of Women: Two Views, the Religious Right Moves Backward into History,” Sequoia, July-Aug. 1986, p. 9.

  “Wife beating is on . . .”: Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1987) pp. 155-56.

  In a smear campaign . . .: Conway and Siegelman, Holy Terror, pp. 275-76.

  They really came . . .”: Ibid., p. 276.

  Howard Phillips charged . . .: Leslie Wolfe, “The Unfinished Agenda: Women and Girls in Education,” Women’s Way Conference, Nov. 9, 1987, Philadelphia, Pa., p. 11.

  Jerry Falwell seemed to . . .: Falwell, Listen, America! pp. 142-43, 157-64.

  Mandate for Leadership, . . .: Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration, ed. by Charles Heatherly (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1981) p. 180.

  Mandate for Leadership II . . .: Stuart M. Butler, Michael Sanera, and W. Bruce Weinrod, Mandate for Leadership II: Continuing the Conservative Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1984) p. 157. 246 And Cultural Conservatism . . .: Cultural Conservatism, Toward a New National Agenda (Lanham, Md.: Free Congress Foundation, 1987) p. 2.

  One need not wander . . .”: Ibid., p. 7.

  The publications list . . .: Family in America publications list, Rockford Institute, 1989.

  “Feminism kind of . . .”: Personal interview with Edmund Haislmaier, 1988.

  The act’s proposals . . .: Onalee McGraw, “The Family Protection Report: Symbol and Substance,” Moral Majority Report, Nov. 23, 1981, p. 4; Petchesky, Antiabortion, Antifeminism, pp. 224–25; Frances Fitzgerald, “The New Righteousness—Changing Our Laws, Your Life,” Vogue, Nov. 1981, p. 236.

  Under this provision . . .: Marilyn Power, “Women, the State and the Family,” p. 155.

  The Republican convention’s . . .: For an insightful discussion of this phenomenon, see Zilliah Eisenstein, “Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980,” Feminist Studies, 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 187.

  And their candidate . . .: Fishman and Fuller, “Unraveling the New-Right Opposition,” p. 1.

  Richard G. Hutcheson . . .: Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr., God in the White House (New York: Macmillan, 1988). Similarly skimpy attention is paid to the role of feminism in many other chronicles. See Samuel S. Hill and Dennis E. Owen, The New Religious Political Right in America (Nashville, Tenn.: Abindon, 1982); McIntyre, The Fear Brokers.

  “[T]he ‘hearth and home’ . . .”: Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Pantheon, 1980) p. 149. Petchesky, “Antiabortion,” footnote 2, p. 239.

  “We are different . . .”: McIntyre, Fear Brokers, p. 156.

  Reverend James Robison . . .: Conway and Siegelman, Holy Terror, pp. 60, 161.

  “Jesus was not . . .”: Kater, Christians, p. 38.

  Yet the fundamentalist . . .: “Because we have weak men,” he complained, “we have weak homes, and children from these homes will probably grow up to become weak parents leading even weaker homes.” Falwell, Listen, America! p. 129.

  “Paradoxically, conservatism . . .”: Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) p. 6.

  “For twenty years . . .”: Butler, Sanera, and Weinrod, Mandate for Leadership II
, p. 155.

  Before, the anti-ERA . . .: Fram, “ERA Foes Exploit ‘Women vs. Women’ Myth.”

  But now, Weyrich . . .: For an example of Weyrich’s use of this rhetorical tactic, see Conway and Siegelman, Holy Terror, p. 116. The New Right even renamed battered-women’s shelters “antifamily” institutions. See Barbara Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986) p. 206.

  In the ’20s, the Ku Klux . . .: Lipset and Raab, Politics of Unreason, p. 117.

  These “pro-life” advocates . . .: For atom bomb quote, see Conway and Siegelman, Holy Terror, p. 417.

  Under the banner . . .: Falwell, Listen, America! p. 129.

  “Women’s liberationists . . .”: Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New York: Jove/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) p. 72.

  “Feminism is more than . . .”: Beverly LaHaye, The Restless Woman (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984) p. 54.

  The woman who opposed . . .: See Carol Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schlafly (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1981).

  In her antifeminist treatise . . .: Schlafly, Positive Woman, pp. 40–41.

  All the women . . .: Schlafly, Positive Woman, pp. 12–13, 33–34, 49, 53–54.

  To her mind . . .: Ibid., p. 53.

  “The Positive Woman in America . . .”: Ibid., p. 33.

  It was the 1977 . . .: Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) p. 123; Ann Hulbert, “The Baltimore Bust,” The New Republic, June 28, 1980, p. 20. See also Beverly LaHaye, Who But a Woman? (New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984) pp. 25, 29, 43, 49. As LaHaye, founder of the New Right group Concerned Women for America, herself wrote, “I know this is going to sound unusual, but I am truly indebted to Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and other radical feminists for the existence of Concerned Women for America.” The 1977 convention, she noted, “opened my eyes and the eyes of other Christian women across the nation who were involved in it.”