“…In the compressed history of the United States, backlashes have surfaced with striking frequency and intensity—and they have evolved their most subtle means of persuasion. In a nation where class distinctions are weak, or at least submerged, maybe it’s little wonder that gender status is more highly prized and hotly defended. If the American man can claim no ancestral coat of arms on which to elevate himself from the masses, perhaps he can fashion his sex into a sort of pedigree. In America, too, successfully persuading women to collaborate in their own subjugation is a tradition of particularly long standing.” —Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 3—Origins of a Reaction: Backlash Movers, Shakers, and Thinkers.”
Joan Walsh (editor-at-large at Salon): Ladies first!
I’ll kick this off with a confession: I didn’t really like Backlash when it came out, and I basically just skimmed it back then, so I’m glad I’m reading it again—for real this time. I’m much more impressed.
Why didn’t I like it then? Well, I was recently married, I had a small daughter, and I thought Faludi was one-dimensional about why so many women were struggling around issues of motherhood and marriage, and why we felt feminism hadn’t quite prepared us for the struggle; we learned how to be independent, not interdependent. I wrote about it a lot for a while, and looking back, I was wrong about some things.
For instance, I really thought childcare had been marginalized on the feminist agenda, or at best relegated to a minor issue. I knew almost nothing about the feminists behind the 1972 Comprehensive Child Development Act, which Richard Nixon vetoed, even though it passed the Senate 63-17. That was a harbinger of the backlash to come, designed to reverse not only the gains of feminism, but the social welfare state. (Faludi is actually very good in pointing out that it was not feminism, but the backlash to feminism, which left working-class women high and dry when it came to social support that would have made it possible to combine working with motherhood.)
So rereading it 22 years later, better informed about not just feminism but American politics, I respect it more. Its power is in the depth of its cultural and political case studies. From that awful marriage study that she debunked at the time, to the disappearance of strong single female heroines in television and movies—we went from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd; from An Unmarried Woman to Fatal Attraction—Faludi shows the ways women were deprived of strong, independent role models and even worse, taught that independence wasn’t just freakish but dangerous. I wonder if my own psyche wasn’t recoiling from the truth of what she was revealing at the time.
That said: Chapter 3 reminds me why I didn’t like it. It’s painting with too broad a brush and its almost anecdotal evidence about earlier backlashes makes me distrust her. If you look in the notes, she’s relying on respected but by necessarily wide-lens surveys of the history of feminism, working women, unionism—and thus she lacks the specificity that elsewhere makes Backlash work. She’d have been better off with one paragraph, citing books on those earlier reactions to American feminism, rather than trying to pretend that she was persuasively linking this backlash to those that came before.
Let me just take one example: She romps through the history of the early 20th century and celebrates victories for women, including the establishment of the National Women’s Party and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. But later, in a development she dates to the ’20s, she claims that era’s backlash led to new “protective legislation” on working women, designed to take back those earlier advances.
This is wrong. Debates over protective legislation for working women began much earlier, and you can find feminists, unionists, and the wider progressive movement on both sides of the issue. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire helped inspire the New Deal; it also led to protections for women, for mothers, and for children in the workplace. Some backers of protective legislation wanted to limit options for women; others came from the progressive impulse, trying to carve out some early protection from the demands of industrial capitalism, first for women and children and eventually for men, too. The ILGWU was always divided over it, supporting some protective legislation as part of a much more comprehensive and radical set of worker rights. In fact, I’d argue that progressives helped carve out the realm of “family,” which Faludi argues has been almost exclusively harmful to women, by agitating for restrictions on child labor, and yes, early protections for working women.
At any rate, these are old, complicated debates, and they can’t be reduced to “feminism” vs. “backlash.” Knowing that history, I think, made me distrust Faludi on then-current debates, where I think she was more frequently correct.
Thoughts?
Richard Yeselson (a freelance writer who lives in Washington, D.C.): I think Backlash still resonates because we still see the cultural and gendered anxieties of straight men playing out in our politics and culture in pretty much every way imaginable, from the moronic mutterings of politicians about abortion to the misogynist “art” of predatory fashion photographers, to the horrific shootings of women by demented, sexually thwarted men. Social media exemplifies and facilitates this psycho-sexual rage in a way that Faludi, of course, could not chronicle in the early nineties. But, yeah, it’s everywhere today as then, and Faludi’s strength is to cast a wide lens.
And she’s a relentless researcher, a fluent writer, and a terrific interviewer, particularly of conservative women. (Although she is unable to really account for what clearly drives her crazy—that there are so damn many of them!) But her work doesn’t hang together. As Joan writes, Faludi—apt choice of words here—“romps” through decades of history. She sees and describes reactionary gender formations, but she doesn’t really have a cogent theory as to why and when they occur when they do—or perhaps she has too many theories.
Faludi too glibly connects different historical moments of “backlash”—from the second half of the 19th century (a kind of amorphous 50-year period), the twenties, the post-World War II, and today’s post-second-wave feminism—but the circumstances are so different that she can’t construct a plausible causal model. Her remarks about the 19th century are just that, a thin sketch which she fattens up with some customary misogynist references from the period. But she barely alludes to what the backlash is responding too—the militant first-wave suffragists who chose to split from their early alliance with African American advocates like Frederick Douglass. Without understanding the contours and weaknesses of that movement, we can’t really understand what opportunities it had and might have missed. Throughout the chapter, Faludi doesn’t link feminist politics to other social justice movements with which they often coalesced (or argued).
So in this crucial chapter—the big chronological overview—there is little structural logic that links historical actors to their political choices. Thus, on page 72 and 73, Faludi describes post-second-wave women of the ’80s as, rather than becoming “angry,” becoming “depressed” and “turning their pain and frustration inward,” lacking the power of community, and finally reduced to “every woman for herself.” Women facing this time of “isolation and crushing conformism” cannot be expected, as individuals, to have the guts needed to fight the backlash. Like the protagonist in Wendy Wasserstein’s emblematic play of the era, The Heidi Chronicles, most women choose private “solutions” (in her case, having a child) rather than public activism.
Yet just a couple pages later, Faludi describes women during the ’80s as growing ever more militant: “Whether the question was affirmative action, the military buildup, or federal aid for health care, women were becoming more radical, men more conservative.” How could these cowed, exhausted women at the same time support more radical change?
Faludi also wishes to provide a macroeconomic foundation to the causes of the modern backlash, but, again, her own words undo her. She argues that polling indicates that being a “good provider” is the most important standard by which men measure what it truly means to be a man. So when deindustrialization, recession, and declining unionism occur in the late ’70s and ’80s, working men’s inability to meet their own standard for manhood trigger an angry resentment against the ascent of women. (She immediately concedes polical/economic/cultural male elites, less vulnerable to economic turbulence, actually drive the backlash.) This sounds like it makes intuitive sense, but later, in chapter 9, Faludi dates the modern post-second-wave backlash to the passage of the ERA in Congress in 1972 and Roe vs. Wade in 1973. I think Faludi is right here; yes, this is the moment where the backlash gathers its strength—especially when linked to an alliance (the first of its kind in American history) between the gender-norming Catholic Church, and rank and file, mostly Southern white evangelicals. But all of that happens before the economic dislocations of the later ’70s and ’80s.
Moreover, in the previous two backlashes Faludi describes (both after World War I and World War II), the economy mostly boomed. The “Roaring Twenties”, save for a terrible depression in the farm sector, indeed roared, even as Faludi reminds us that the prescriptions of gender roles emerged in such events as the Miss America contest, founded in 1920. But, if the providers were mostly still providing then, what caused the ’20s backlash, which included, for example, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan (and a reactionary cadre of Klan women), none of which she has anything to say about? Or was the definition of manhood different for most men in the twenties than it became in the modern era? Similarly, following World War II, unionization reached its all-time peak of about 35 percent—working-class (white) men never had it so good—yet women lost their higher paid factory jobs and were reduced to either low-paid clerical work or returned to the household. Economics has something to do with all of this, but if you read Faludi, you end up more confused than enlightened as to exactly how.
There’s also a kind of cranky Frankfurtian suspicion of popular culture that runs through Backlash and to which she specifically refers in Chapter 3. As she writes in that chapter: “….mass media and mass marketing—two institutions that have…proved more effective devices for constraining women’s aspirations than coercive laws and punishments.” This sounds like a crude model of “false consciousness” force fed to malleable women. But popular cultural documents are themselves too self-contradictory and ambiguous to “work” in such seamlessly reactionary ways. This is not to say that every Madonna song of the time was “subversive,” only that there is an often unpredictable interaction between popular culture and its “readers.” Just three years after Backlash, Susan Douglas, in Where the Girls Are, persuasively argued that women like herself who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s were actually inspired and empowered by the seemingly fatuous (and sexist!) popular culture of the day, including television shows like Charlie’s Angels. People tend to grab what they need and want from popular culture—something that moves and inspires them in sometimes progressive directions—and effectively edit out the rest. Oddly—and, yes, admittedly, disconcertingly—they sometimes do that with even the most “obviously” sexist (or racist or homophobic or just plain idiotic) stuff.
So I see a lot of problems with this chapter and how some of its ramifications relate to the rest of the book. But one thing I really liked at the end of the chapter is how Faludi’s deep skepticism about popular culture and advertising guides her to a key point: She gets how what we now sometimes call “choose your choice” feminism (the “right” to be as reactionary or conventional as you wanna be) ties together with a vague, lazily generic libertarianism that can cut in either the direction of social justice (support for same sex marriage, suspicion about the national security state, rethinking prison sentences for drug use) or revanchist reaction (opposition to universal health insurance, cynicism about the earned expertise of scientists and intellectuals, a contempt for poor people who, presumably, have the choice, if deserving, to be as rich as they wish). As Faludi sharply puts it, “[Women’s] circumstances, are, at least in mainstream culture, almost always portrayed as her ‘choice’; it is important not only that she wear rib crushing garments but that she lace them up herself.” This is the kernel of a key insight about how we may have even less social solidarity today than our vast, heterogeneous country has had in the past. I might want to jump from Faludi to Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, or several recent essays by Mark Lilla and Nancy Fraser to think more deeply about this, but Faludi, in 1991, presciently grasped what today, is even a more pervasive expression of our political culture.
So: Am I too hard a grader?
Richard Kim (executive editor of The Nation and co-editor of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare): Hi Joan and Rich, I’m so happy to be doing this with two of my favorite writers. But wow—tough room here!
I read Faludi’s Backlash in college. It was one of those bracing polemics—shot through with original insights but also a remarkable synthesis of feminist analysis—that permanently changed the conversation with the force and breadth of its argument. Rereading it now, I find there’s still a lot to like, largely because Faludi is a hell of a good writer and scarily (and depressingly) prescient about the shape of gender politics to come.
That said, you’re both right. The synthetic nature of Backlash undermines the rigor present in other parts of the book, and that flaw is nowhere more evident than in the historical sections of Chapter 3. There’s a rat-a-tat-tat nature to the prose here that’s annoying: Rosie the Riveter and Wonder Woman (yay!), but then, oh no, suburban patios and padded bras (boo!).
As Joan points out, a lot of this chapter breezily borrows from second-wave historical and cultural scholarship, but the academic attention to causality, periodization, and specificity is simply not there. (To be fair, some of those second-wave texts, particularly of a literary bent like Ann Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land, could read breezy too.) Both of you have called out historical inaccuracies in this regard. Joan notes that the protective legislation that Faludi dates to the ’20s backlash originated earlier in the Progressive Era and contained both reactionary and radical impulses. Rich observes that the second-wave backlash takes shape not in the Reagan ’80s, but rather in the nascent Christian right coalition during the ’70s—before the impact of deindustrialization was widely felt by the working-class men who, Faludi argues, blame feminism for the loss of their breadwinner status.
To these points—which seem right and fair to me—let me just add a meta-one. Faludi is working within the “wave” theory of feminism, writing before so-called “third-wave” feminists blew that construct up. This model traps her in a conceptual tidiness that the actual record cannot sustain. Instead of acknowledging that feminist progress and backlash occur unevenly across every period—that all history is overdetermined—she wraps everything in a “corkscrew model”: feminists make gains, reactionary forces push back; feminists make gains, reactionary forces push back.
There’s a certain brute and simplistic appeal to this model—and it sure feels true today—but it’s not a very good way of understanding historical change. It ignores differences across cultures and regions; it isolates feminism from other movements, and it fails to capture the more complex interactions between radical and reactionary tendencies. For example, the men’s rights activists that Faludi rightly critiques are not purely a product of the backlash to the second-wave. They spin off of the men’s liberation movement of the ’70s, which was an auxiliary to second-wave feminism and which was avowedly feminist in its (perhaps risible and narcissistic) intent to deconstruct masculinity. It was also informed by, among other things, the Black Panthers, self-help culture, and gay liberation. The politics here are complicated—and problematic! to say the least—but my point is that thinking of history as a series of waves or a corkscrew leaves out these surprising moments of overlap and continuity. It’s not that Faludi is wrong—the ’80s backlash really has been characterized by a crisis of masculinity that continues to this day (see Christina Hoff Sommers’s The War Against Boys or My Brother’s Keeper, for example). It’s just that hers is not the whole picture.
But okay—so what? Every book has its limitations, especially one as ambitious as Backlash. If Faludi is not quite consistent about the relationship between economic conditions and backlash politics—at one point she asserts that backlashes are exacerbated by weak class distinctions; later she much more convincingly argues that they are fueled by growing inequality and declining mobility—she is devastatingly spot-on about capitalism’s ability to redirect, co-opt, and neutralize feminism, as well as to profit from backlashes. There’s a straight line from her discussion of the New Traditionalist “cocooning” movement to today’s celebration of the stay-at-home mom, a role that is even more fetishized as two-income households have become an economic necessity. The winking, post-feminist ads marketing light beer as a feminist “choice” are the precedent to the ubiquitous American Apparel ads that figure sexual exploitation as some kind of feminist iconography. Also trenchant is Faludi’s scathing critique of the army of “advice writers and pop therapists, matchmaking consultants, plastic surgeons, and infertility specialists” that have risen to exploit women’s anxiety under backlash conditions—a theme she deliciously returns to in her Baffler piece on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In “movement.”
Faludi does not use the word neoliberalism, but that is the politico-economic terrain that she was, almost 25 years ago, presciently circling in on. Leave aside the historical argument, and read Chapter 3 (and the whole book) for how it captures the themes of atomization, consumerism, deregulation, and privatization writ large. At least to my mind, Backlash remains one of the best books on how both individual subjects and social movements are formed and warped by these trends.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlashresponse on Medium, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Lena Dunham, Anna Holmes, Aminatou Sow, Roxane Gay, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
