“By the close of the decade, women could have constituted an immensely powerful voting bloc—if only women’s-rights and other progressive leaders had mobilized their vast numbers. But in the 1980s, the backlash in the capital kept this historic political opportunity for women in check—with a steady strafing of ostracism, hostility, and ridicule.”—Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 10—Ms. Smith Leaves Washington: The Backlash in National Politics.”
Michelle Goldberg (journalist and author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World): I read Backlash when it first came out, but rereading it now I’m struck by how the national rhetoric on women’s issues is a lot better, while the policies are so much worse.
Faludi writes with horror of Gary Bauer’s “recommendations” to save the family, a sort of temper tantrum of a memo he wrote on his way out of the Reagan administration: “Bauer’s ‘recommendations’ to save the family read more like a list of punishments for girls and mothers: bar young single mothers from public housing; revive old divorce laws to make it harder for women to break the wedding bonds; deny contraceptives to young women.” On two of those three points, the Right has actually made legislative progress!
Alex Pareene (executive editor at First Look Media): This is my first time reading Backlash, and it’s a really interesting time capsule of the sort of official end of proper Republican moderation on issues of reproductive rights/gender equity, etc.. It’s a time when someone like Bauer is hired to appease the New Right but not actually given much authority (to his chagrin).
Jamelle Bouie (staff writer at Slate): What’s interesting — and alarming, really — is that those are areas of continued concern for the social conservative Right. On contraceptives conservatives have made progress, but if I’m not mistaken there’s a movement to make divorces harder to obtain.
MG: It’s already happened in a couple of states — it’s called “covenant marriage.” When I was writing my first book, I went to a mass covenant marriage ceremony in Arkansas, hosted by Mike Huckabee and his wife, where he and an auditorium full of people converted their ordinary marriages into the new special kind that are legally much harder to get out of.
JB: And it really underscores the extent to which the various political “revolutions” of the 1980s and ’90s has reshaped the Republican Party in core, fundamental ways.
AP: The campaign to make divorce harder is also a sort of unspoken (or at least not spoken allowed in mixed company) secondary aim of the anti-same sex marriage campaign. This book is a great reminder of how often we’re just constantly re-litigating battles “we” all thought we’d “won.”
MG: But not even re-litigating — going backwards! It’s fascinating to realize that the GOP leadership was having the exact same conversations about the gender gap back then. The GOP chairman in 1988 said, “We are particularly vulnerable…among young women between the ages of 18 and 35 who work outside the home and particularly within that subgroup, those young women who are single parents.”
JB: The key difference is that then, there really was no need to do any substantial outreach, since single women were a relatively small part of the electorate. Now, they have to change something, but they’re too dependent on traditionalist voters to make a change, to say nothing of elected officials who have no interest in changing either way.
MG: Back then, the far-right takeover of the party wasn’t totally complete, so they were constantly throwing rhetorical bones to people like Bauer. Now, people like Bauer are the party, though they try (at least, they sometimes try) to mask it by jettisoning language about “openly radical feminist groups” and the “homosexual agenda.”
AP: It’s funny that they’ve had 25 years to figure out how to appeal to single women and they’ve come up with, “let’s try to make contraception harder to obtain, again.” Which is actually the GOP outreach strategy, to try to make demographic groups hostile to the GOP just go away.
MG: And they don’t really want to appeal to single women! To them, the existence of so many single women are part of the problem.
MG: One thing that’s missing in this chapter is any analysis of interplay between sexual resentment and racial resentment. I don’t want to knock Faludi for not being intersectional enough, since that term didn’t even exist when she was writing. Still, it’s striking that the words “welfare queen” don’t appear once in this chapter.
JB: Although, she hints at it. Her description of the attack on the Women’s Educational Equity Act Program includes this tidbit: “Human Events: National Conservative Weekly claimed it had “uncovered” such apparently offensive WEEA grants as an award to the Council on Interracial Books for Children.”
MG: Right, it’s clearly there beneath the surface — there’s no way to describe the tenor of right-wing politics, then or now, without talking about race. Although — and tell me if you disagree — I think one thing that has changed since this book was written is that the right tends to pick one anxiety at a time to really hammer on.
AP: I feel like Faludi could’ve gone in a bit more on the subtext of, say, Bauer’s remarks about how “we’re running at 1.8 children per woman,” which is “below replacement level,” which will have “serious consequences for free society.” There is a specific “we” there. This is barely coded stuff that still pops up in basically all far-right discussions of both black parenthood and immigration.
MG: Right, especially since I’m pretty sure that “average” American fertility back then was at or above replacement level. And that’s why race is so important to understand what was happening: simultaneous pressure on white women to have more children and on black women to have fewer.
AP: It’s maybe a bit far afield of Faludi’s thesis, but the Democratic Party’s retreat from speaking about women’s issues — which makes up the latter, post-Ferraro portion of this chapter — completely mirrors the party’s panicked abandonment of racial justice issues, for fear of being seen as “the Minority Party.”
JB: Yes! I had that same thought. The irony of course is that, by that point, it was mostly too late. Democrats were already the “minority party” and the women’s party, at least in the national mind.
AP: Exactly. Much of the post-Mondale history of the Democratic Party is this Quixotic quest for the electoral support of the natural constituency of the Conservative Movement-era Republican Party, because those votes just Count More in the eyes of consultants and pundits.
MG: But that history began to change in 2008, when Obama did for the McGovern coalition when Reagan had done for Goldwater voters. And now Democrats are pretty eagerly embracing their identity as the women’s party. Though I’m curious about whether you think they’re doing the same with regard to minorities — I can see evidence for arguments on both sides.
JB: Whether or not Democrats claim themselves as the minority party seems to be hyperlocal. I imagine they definitely do in a place like Florida, where whites hardly vote for them in the first place. In Virginia, where white suburbanites are still an important part of the Democratic coalition, I’m not so sure. And generally, I don’t think any national Democrats would openly say or propose anything that suggests “special treatment” for minorities, hence the Obama administration’s quiet support for affirmative action. Or the fact that Holder is the only one who ever says anything regarding racial justice.
AP: Well, they’re simultaneously trying as hard as they can to get immigration reform passed while this Democratic administration also racks up record deportation numbers. I feel like that sorta sums up “how comfortable Democrats are with embracing their diverse constituency in 2014.”
If I could take us backwards a bit, though, a large part of this chapter deals with the anti-feminist crusade against the Women’s Educational Equity Act, a small Education Department program dedicated to giving out grants for non-sexist educational programs. The New Right hated this program, and its director, Leslie Wolfe, and the Reagan administration successfully defunded it and demoted Wolfe to “clerk-typist in the Office of Compensatory Education.”
A few administrations — including two two-term Democratic presidents — later, here’s how the WEEA is doing: “In 2003, the George W. Bush administration ended federal funds for WEEA’s Resource Center, a mechanism for collection and sharing of information about gender equity programs…The last documented funding for WEEA was in 2010.”
MG: Yes, that’s a perfect metaphor for how things have developed since this book came out. You don’t see feminist federal officials demonized in quite the same specific, personal way as Wolfe was. (Black and Latino federal officials are a different story — Wolfe basically got the Van Jones treatment, except they weren’t able to force Jones into some sort of degrading demotion, since he was an appointee.) But in terms of policy, the anti-feminist right has only gone from strength to strength post-Reagan.
AP: Yeah, the respectable conservatives are less likely to throw around “radical left-wing feminist” quite so often, but they’re still organized around the exact same agenda and remarkably patient about achieving it. I’m curious whether or to what extent you see echoes of how Ferraro was treated in the press (terribly!) and how modern pols like Elizabeth Warren have been. There’s less “she’s a radical abortionist secret lesbian,” maybe, but there is this recurring theme of accusing women of lacking intellectual rigor. (See also Sonia Sotomayor.)
Also, regarding Ferraro, the entire section about the press’ relentless investigation into her husband’s personal finances was most fascinating because it culminated in “a one-and-a-half-hour nationally televised news conference” in which she painstakingly went over her family’s tax returns. If only Mitt Romney had been a female Democratic politician in the 1980s! It was unreal to me. I honestly can’t imagine a woman politician being subjected to the same today, but maybe I’m not cynical enough.
MG: It’s hard to compare Ferraro to Warren because the scale is so different. If, inshallah, Warren ever runs for the White House, she’ll be savaged in much more personal terms then we’ve heard so far. I should also say that I think Ferraro’s husband’s tax returns were fair game. The problem isn’t that she had to release her family’s tax returns, but that Romney didn’t.
AP: Hm, I can imagine a similar scene playing out in a presidential campaign, but the difference is now there’s a partisan liberal press to counteract the partisan right-wing press that was feeding the Ferraro hysteria. It’d be contested in the mainstream press instead of the mainstream press merely following where the conservative press led them.
(Though I’m sure the editors of The Nation and other venerable liberal publications would point out that they did exist at the time, but no one listened to them.)
Can we talk about my favorite cameo in this chapter, which is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calling Mondale a “wimp” for choosing a gross girl as a running mate. At any point in the last 30 years of American history, you can choose almost any national issue or event, and there will be some example of Richard Cohen being just totally irredeemably awful about it.
JB: Haha, yes! I noticed that in my copy, underlined, and wrote a little “WTF.” Dude has to be the most chronically wrong pundit in the modern era.
AP: I wrote “LOL.”
MG: I wrote, “Reminder that Richard Cohen has been awful for decades!” We need more of the quote to do it justice — he said that Mondale had been “henpecked” and had succumbed to the “hectoring and — yes — threats of the organized women’s movement.”
AP: We all agree: The lesson of this chapter is that hardly anything has improved, especially Richard Cohen.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium/MSNBC.com, 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 Kathryn Joyce, Erin Gloria Ryan, Dave Weigel, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
