Backlash

by Susan Faludi

  Compassion seemed only appropriate given that, as Sullivan’s report amply demonstrated, a single woman’s life is a gallery of horrors:

  Day One—“Singles have to go to industries to provide them with some way to meet people.”

  Day Two—“Today, we’ll look at singles and sex, how the fatal disease AIDS is redefining some of their choices.” (A gory clip from the singles bar—hopping movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar follows, with Sullivan’s advisory voice-over: “Indiscriminate dating can be dangerous. In this case it killed.”)

  Day Three—“Single parents can be sexual, but . . . better think twice [unless] you want your child to sleep around with anyone when they get older.”

  Day Four—“Today we’ll have a more positive outlook for you . . .” followed by: “But there are some overwhelming concerns. One is economics. It’s not that easy on a single income to buy a home. [And] there is an overwhelming and a very saddened concern about the AIDS virus, and that this deadly disease is changing the sexual habits of singles.”

  When all was said and done, Sullivan could only find one “positive” development in single women’s lives: they could now sign themselves up to the “self registry” in Bloomingdale’s—just like a bride. But even here, her co-host Charles Gibson chimed in with the downside: “I’m not sure who goes out to buy you presents if you’re not getting married.”

  Despite the title, “Single in America,” the network program never addressed the status of single men. The omission was typical. The promotional literature for ABC’s “After the Sexual Revolution” actually promised to discuss the impact on men. But it never did. Asked to explain the omission later, co-host Richard Threlkeld says, “There wasn’t any time. We only had three hours.”

  When the press did manage to fit the single man into its busy schedule, it was not to extend condolences. On the cover of the New YorkTimes Sunday magazine, a single man luxuriated in his well-appointed bachelor pad. Reclining on his parquet floor, his electric guitar by his side, he was casually reading a book and enjoying (much to the joy of the magazine’s cigarette advertisers, no doubt) a smoke. WHY WED? was the headline. Inside, the story’s author Trip Gabriel clucked patronizingly about the “worries” of “the army of single women in their thirties.” Of single men, however, he had this to say: “I was impressed by the men I talked with” and “I came away thinking bachelorhood a viable choice.” Even the men who seemed to be avoiding women altogether earned his praise. He saw nothing wrong, for example, with a thirty-year-old man who recoiled from Saturday night dates because “Sunday’s my game day.” Nor did he wonder about a thirty-five-year-old single sports photographer who told him, “To me, relationships always seemed very stifling.” Instead, Gabriel praised his bachelorhood as a “mature decision.”

  Having whipped single women into high marital panic—or “nuptialitis,” as one columnist called it—the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic. In what amounted to an enormous dose of free publicity for the matchmaking and bridal industries, the media helped peddle exorbitant miracle cures for the mentally, and statistically, handicapped single women—with scores of stories on $1,000 “How to Marry the Man of Your Choice” workshops, $4,600 dating service memberships that guaranteed marriage within three years, and $25,000 matchmaking consultations. “Time is running out for single people,” a San Francisco Chronicle columnist (himself an aging bachelor) advised, and then turned his column over to a dating service owner who was anxious to promote her new business: “There’s a terrific scramble going on now,” she alerted single women, “and in two years there just isn’t going to be anyone left out there. There aren’t going to be all these great surplus older guys.” The media even offered their own coaching and counseling assistance. New York trotted out inspirational role models—single women who managed to marry after forty. “When they really decided to set their sights on a marriageable man,” the article, entitled “Brides at Last,” declared, “they found one.” USA Today even played doctor, offering a special hot line for troubled singles—with psychologists working the phones. The telephone monitors confessed to being “startled” at the results: lovelorn male callers outnumbered women—by two to one.

  Women’s magazines rose most grandly to the occasion. Nuptialitis was, after all, their specialty. Cosmopolitan’s February 1989 issue offered an eleven-page guide to oiling the husband trap, under the businesslike title “How to Close the Deal.” The magazine lectured, “You’ve read the statistics: More women than men practically everywhere but San Quentin. . . . You have to tidy up your act. Starting right now.” Its get-married-quick pointers were all on loan from the last backlash’s advice books. Among them: pretend to be less sexually experienced than you are, play up your knitting and cooking skills, let him do most of the talking, and be “extremely accepting.” At Mademoiselle, similar 1950s-style words of wisdom were on tap: the magazine promoted “The Return of Hard-to-Get,” advised women to guard their “dating reputation,” and reminded them, “Smart Cookies Don’t Phone First.” And a New Woman cover story by Dr. Joyce Brothers offered some old advice for gold-band hunters: “Why You Shouldn’t Move In with Your Lover.”

  While the press was busy pressing single women into marriage, it was simultaneously ordering already married women to stay put. One effective holding action: spreading fear about life after divorce. In 1986, NBC ran a special report that focused exclusively on “the negative consequences of divorce.” Cosmopolitan offered a four-page feature wholly devoted to divorce’s drawbacks. “Singlehood seems so tempting when you’re wrangling bitterly,” it instructed. “But be forewarned: More and more marital veterans and experts in the field are cautioning potential divorcees to be wary—extremely wary—of eight common, dangerous delusions [about divorce].” For women, the press reported over and over again, broken wedding vows lead to severe depression, a life of loneliness, and an empty bank account.

  To stave off divorce, the media once more came to the rescue with friendly advice and stern moral lectures. CBS revived “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”—the old Ladies’ Home Journal feature—as a nationwide talk show in 1989, offering on-air reconciliation for couples with rocky relations. “How to Stay Married” was Newsweek’s offering—a 1987 cover story replete with uplifting case studies of born-again couples who had gone “right to the edge” before finding “salvation,” usually through a therapist’s divine intervention. Several marital counselors made promotional appearances in these pages, one hawking a sixteen-week marital improvement program—for newlyweds.

  “How times have changed!” Newsweek wrote. “Americans are taking marriage more seriously.” The magazine had no evidence that a marital boom was in progress. All it could produce was this flimsy statistic: an insignificant 0.2 percent drop in the divorce rate.

  INFERTILITY ILLNESS AND BABY FEVERS

  “Is this surge in infertility the yuppie disease of the ’80s?” NBC correspondent Maria Shriver asked in a 1987 special report. Could it be, she worried, turning to her lineup of experts, that barren wombs have become “The Curse of the Career Woman”? Her experts, infertility doctors hawking costly experimental cures, were only too happy to agree.

  By now, the trend journalists had it down; they barely needed an expert to point out the enemy. If it was a woman’s problem, then they knew women’s quest for independence and equality must be to blame. In the case of the “curse of the career woman,” the witch casting the spell must be carrying her own wallet—with, doubtless, a NOW membership card inside. The headlines made it clear why women’s wombs were drying up: “Having It All: Postponing Parenthood Exacts a Price” and “The Quiet Pain of Infertility: For the Success-Oriented, It’s a Bitter Pill.” As a New York Times columnist asserted, the infertile woman today is “a walking cliché” of the feminist generation, “a woman on the cusp of forty who put work ahead of motherhood.”

  Newsweek devoted two cover stories to the “trend of childlessness.” Between shots of lone
career women in corner offices and lone teddy bears in empty cribs, Newsweek warned that as many as 20 percent of women in their early to mid-thirties will end up with no babies of their own—and “those numbers will be even higher for women with high-powered careers, the experts say.” The expert that Newsweek used to support this point was none other than Harvard economist David Bloom, co-author of the infamous Harvard-Yale marriage study. Now he was saying that 30 percent of all female managers will wind up childless.

  Not to be upstaged in the motherhood department, Life issued its own special report, “Baby Craving,” which said that “millions” of career women will “pay a price for waiting.” Life produced photographic evidence: Mary Chase, a forty-two-year-old writer and producer, who stared contritely at an empty bassinet. In subsequent snapshots, Mary was examined by an infertility specialist, bared her back to an acupuncturist attempting to “stimulate the energy,” sought counsel from a male psychic claiming to have inspired one pregnancy, stood on her head in her underwear after having sex, and opened her mouth wide for husband Bill, who peered in and tried “to uncover early traumas that might block Mary’s ability to conceive.” The couple didn’t know the cause of their fertility troubles, so it was just as likely that Bill’s “early traumas”were the problem. (Infertility odds are the same for both sexes.) But the Life story never dealt with that possibility.

  As in all trend stories, the data supporting the infertility epidemic were nonexistent, so the magazines had to fudge. “It’s hard to tell, but infertility may be on the rise,” Newsweek said. “There are few good statistical measures of how infertility has overtaken our lives,” Life said. Of course, plenty of good statistical measures existed; they just didn’t uphold the story of the “curse of the career woman.” Some magazine articles got around the lack of proof by simply shifting to the future tense. Mademoiselle, for example, offered this prediction—in upper-case type: THE INFERTILITY EPIDEMIC IS COMING. And a 1982 feature in the New York Times just cast aspersions on all skeptics. Women in their thirties who don’t believe their infertility odds are high must be suffering “on an emotional level” from “a need to deny the findings.”

  The week that this New York Times feature ran, women who subscribed to both the Times and Time magazine must have been bewildered. While the Times was busy bemoaning the empty wombs of thirty-plus professional women—it ran, in fact, two such stories that week—Time was burbling about all the inhabited ones. The newsweekly was pushing the other half of the trend pair: a baby boom-let. “Career women are opting for pregnancy and they are doing it in style,” the magazine cheered in its cover story entitled “The New Baby Bloom.” Once again, federal Census numbers didn’t bear Time out; the birthrate had not changed for more than a decade. But that was beside the point. The baby-boomlet trend was only a carrot for the infertility epidemic’s stick. Time made that clear when it complemented its boomlet story with this cautionary sidebar article: “The Medical Risks of Waiting.”

  To get around the lack of data, Time resorted to the familiar trend euphemisms: “More and more career women,” it asserted, “are choosing pregnancy before the clock strikes twelve.” Then it quickly directed readers’ attention to a handful of pregnant movie stars and media celebrities. Former “Charlie’s Angels” actress Jaclyn Smith and Princess Diana were expecting, so it must be a national phenomenon.

  Time wasn’t the only publication to substitute a few starlets for many numbers. McCall’s gushed over “Hollywood’s Late-Blooming Moms.” Vogue’s story on “baby fever” exulted over still another mom from the “Charlie’s Angels” set: “Motherhood is consuming Farrah Fawcett. All she wants to talk about is breast-feeding.” Reaching even farther afield for evidence of baby mania, the press made much of this bulletin from a zoo official claiming to communicate with a primate: “Koko the Gorilla Tells Keeper She Would Like to Have a Baby.” And, just as it had done with single women, the media sought to induce pregnancy with counseling and even prizes. Radio stations in Iowa and Florida sponsored “Breeder’s Cup” contests—a $1,000 savings bond, six months’ diaper service, and a crib to the first couple to conceive.

  The mythical “baby bloom” inspired even more florid tributes on the press’s editorial pages. The San Francisco Chronicle waxed eloquent:

  In our personal life, we must observe, we have noted an absolute blossoming of both marriages and of births to many women who seemed, not all that long ago, singlemindedly devoted to the pursuit of personal careers. It’s nice to hear again the sound of wedding bells and the gurgles of contented babies in the arms of their mothers.

  In less purply prose, the New York Times conveyed the same sentiments:

  Some college alumnae answered 25th reunion questionnaires with the almost-guilty admission that they were “only” wives and mothers. But before long, other women found that success at jobs traditionally held by men doesn’t infallibly produce a fulfilling life. Motherhood started to come back in style.

  If the articles didn’t increase the birthrate, they did increase women’s anxiety and guilt. “You can’t pick up a magazine without reading about another would-be-mom with a fertility problem that might have been less complicated if she had just started at an earlier age,” a young woman wrote in an op-ed essay in the New York Times, entitled “Motherhood’s Better Before Thirty.” She was upset, but not with the media for terrorizing women. She was mad at the older women who seemed to think it was safe to wait. “I believe it is my birthright to follow a more biologically sound reproductive schedule,” she sniffed, sounding suspiciously MBA-ish under those maternity clothes.

  Simply being able to recognize the media onslaught put that young writer ahead of a lot of other women readers who, wondering why they suddenly felt desperate, unworthy, and shameful for failing to reproduce on the media’s schedule, decided the signals were coming exclusively from their bodies, not their newspapers. “I wasn’t even thinking about having a child, and suddenly, when I was about thirty-four, it gripped me like a claw,” a woman confided in Vogue. “It was as if I had nothing to do with it, and these raging hormones were saying, ‘Do what you are supposed to do, which is reproduce.’ It was a physical feeling more than a mental feeling.”

  In the end, this would be the press’s greatest contribution to the backlash: not only dictating to women how they should feel, but persuading them that the voice barking orders was only their uterus talking.

  TRUE MS. CONFESSIONS

  While the media promoted the backlash, who covered it? The mainstream press wasn’t doing a very good job. The formerly quasi-feminist forum, the “Hers” column in the New York Times, was now printing stories on such politically charged topics as what it’s like to have a makeover, why a woman really wants a big engagement ring, and the restorative powers of bathtub cleaning. And many smaller-circulation feminist newspapers were closing up shop; even in the San Francisco Bay area, once a mecca for women’s rights periodicals, most of the publications had folded by 1989.

  Surely, however, women could still turn to the flagship of feminist journalism, Ms., for the real scoop on the backlash. But as the ’80s advanced, Ms.’s readers would find the magazine retreating almost as quickly as the culture around it.

  “We give you permission to have nicely plucked eyebrows,” Ms. chirped in the October 1989 issue, in a three-page feature on grooming. Also okay now, according to Ms.: uprooting unsightly hairs with painful electrolysis treatments and applying Accutane, a suspected carcinogen, to vanquish “adult acne.” All this from a magazine that used to be critical of the beauty industry.

  Although the magazine still investigated sexual harassment, domestic violence, the prescription-drug industry, and the treatment of women in third-world countries, the new management of Ms. in the late ’80s launched a regular fashion column, featured Hollywood stars on more than 25 percent of its covers, and delivered the really big news—pearls are back. The first magazine ever to run the pulpy face of a battered wife on the cover now p
ulled a photo of battered wife Hedda Nussbaum from its cover to pacify advertisers. (The cover that replaced it: a soft-focus shot of a naked woman.)

  What was most curious about Ms.’s escalation of celebrity reporting was that it occurred after the magazine jettisoned its nonprofit status—a course the editors took precisely so they could be “more political.” As a for-profit venture, Ms. could endorse candidates, founding editor Gloria Steinem told the press at the time of the changeover. Indeed, they did. And Anne Summers did start a Ms. bureau in Washington to cover national politics and produced numerous dispatches on the 1988 presidential election.

  When Summers took over from Steinem in 1987, she decided, much like Good Housekeeping’s editors, that Ms.’s image needed “updating.” What it seemed to add up to, though, was upscaling—a strategy the magazine’s previous management had already begun to embrace by the mid-’80s. Now that Ms. was a profit-making concern, the magazine was primarily interested in claiming women readers with high incomes. This point was stated clearly enough in the promotional literature it sent to potential advertisers, such as the one in 1986, which promised to deliver readers who “shop in gourmet stores more than anybody”—and later illustrated its pitch with a photo of a woman falling, upside down, off a couch, credit card and other signs of affluence spilling from her pockets. (It was, weirdly, the exact same pose that Connoisseur magazine used on its cover about the same time—for a story on expensive lingerie.)

  To further the upscale marketing of Ms., Summers hired a market research firm to conduct consumer focus groups around the country. Only women in households making more than $30,000 a year were invited. The researchers asked these women to assess women’s magazines currently on the market. Summers recalls, “They complained that the women’s magazines were patronizing and condescending. They were sick of reading about celebrities. They wanted a magazine that made them feel good, valued, honored.” Judging by the subsequent covers, Ms. paid scant attention to the women’s anti-celebrity sentiments. In her first five covers, Ms. Summers experimented with noncelebrities and with issues. The circulation dropped dramatically. By the sixth issue the celebrities began to return. But the magazine’s editor did take very seriously one comment the women made. “One of the things that emerged from the groups was that—especially in the young age groups—there was this incredible resistance to the word ‘feminist,’” Summers says. One might have thought Ms.’s whole mission was to tackle that resistance, to show women that “feminist” was a word they might embrace instead of fear, to explain how American culture had demonized that word precisely because it offered such potential power for women. The magazine could, in fact, have helped fight the backlash by exposing it, and driving home the point that feminism simply meant supporting women’s rights and choices. This was, after all, an agenda that the women in the focus group uniformly supported; every woman interviewed said she believed she shouldn’t have to choose between family and career.