It’s an incredible honor to have such a roster of serious minds reading Backlash so intelligently and rigorously (and wittily) almost a quarter-century after its publication. No author could ask for a better anniversary party.
I’ve been delighting in the many sharp observations, provocations, and plain old good writing. (Irin on the shrinking Internet conversation: “high-fiving the person from your hometown who watched the same basic cable programming as you did the same summer, self-recognition as a form of temporary bonding.” Amanda on The Other Woman: “tethered to a host shell of female empowerment, selling a sheen of female friendship and female revenge to female audiences.” Tressie on commodified feminism: “Is there a point in which you can be a mass movement without being mass-ified? Can we have a pleasure in our movements without selling the pleasure as a movement?”)
To address the essential questions first: Yep, Lena, I love Prime Suspect (the British version, that is, with Helen Mirren). Marisa, you’ll be glad to hear that I, too, can be made “quite happy” by finding the perfect cocktail dress (though maybe not at H&M).
But I digress. You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree with some points here more than others. I’m going to resist the temptation to respond to every criticism. Readers should be free to mull over a book without the writer dictating reactions; no author should volunteer to be the arbiter of her book’s reception. But (you knew a “but” was coming…) the discussion has provoked a few thoughts on my part that I’d like to share for further mulling.
First, I’m amused by the idea that I wrote this book as a “prestige” move—to “force” upon the world my “#backlash” brand. Was I eager for my book to be read? Well, of course. But if I was looking to short-circuit my way to the 1991 equivalent of going viral, I’d have been wiser to pursue other “branding” opportunities — like an anti-feminist rant. As it happened, my proposal for Backlash met with a resounding lack of interest in publishing circles. The book was turned down by every house but one, and received a small advance. My determined and devoted agent tried everything, including pitching the book as “a female In Search of Excellence” (a long-running bestseller then)—with both of us praying no one would ask what that meant. In the end, the one person who was interested was Betty Prashker, editor in chief at Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer (while at Doubleday, she published Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics). But even on the eve of publication, a marketing executive at Crown (a fan of Robert Bly’s Iron John) told me that the book would flop because 1992 would be, and I quote, “The Year of the Man.” (Oops.)
Second, I would plead — and plead on behalf of every author of every book — that a writer should be able to write a particular book, as opposed to every possible book on the subject. The triage involved in that was a major task at the time, and, trust me, I remain in constant second-guessing mode about the merits of what I included and what I left out. I’m completely receptive to the idea that, in terms of the phenomenon I explored, there’s much more to be written and perspectives to examine (and, in particular, much to be said on the subject of race, a bigger issue that I want to address in a moment). But I’m not worried that by presenting the backlash dynamic I mistook the intent of big institutions for their effects on women at the time. A number of you said the book, as Anna put it, “fails to produce any proof of widespread or systemic psychic harm.” How to measure psychic harm? Interviewing women on the street to gauge their psyches? I did explore the more quantifiable effects on women’s economic and reproductive status (in the last section of the book) — and, as we’re all too aware, those effects were, and continue to be, dire. In any event, the reality of the emotional distress that the backlash caused was evident in the book’s reception and in the thousands of letters I received from women. The most typical first line of those letters: “I thought I was the only one who felt this way.”
On a related theme, I was sorry to hear resurrected the old, and contradictory, complaint that the book (1) casts women as “sheep” who blindly follow the culture’s dictates (not true, as the many examples in the book of women fighting those dictates demonstrate) and (2) disproves its own thesis by pointing to examples of women’s resistance. The relationship between a culture’s bullying tactics and the behavior of the people on the receiving end of that assault is never simple — and full-throated grassroots resistance to the culture’s battering rams in no way renders the battering benign. Black Americans have fought passionately, time out of mind, against a racist culture — that hardly means racism isn’t an actual problem, with institutional roots, and hasn’t left hideous scars. I was documenting an attack, not a surrender.
Speaking of race… Could I have done more to write about how the conditions of women of color played into the backlash in ’80s America? Yes. Do I wish I had explored the intersections in more detail? Yes, again. At the same time, this was specifically a book about how society’s public institutions — media, Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Capitol Hill, etc. — browbeat women by telling them that feminism had been bad for them and that their rising equality was the source of their misery. These institutions were overwhelmingly white, and their message was tailored to intimidate a certain demographic. As Jamilah points out about the messages black women receive: “I don’t think we have been told that we would be happier if we abandoned the whole liberated woman bit so much as we’ve been ordered to just get our shit together and serve our men.”
To that degree, the “welfare queen” canard, the demonizing of black single mothers receiving welfare, wasn’t a case of the culture telling black women that they were miserable because they were too liberated. In fact, the message wasn’t aimed at black women; it was aimed at white voters. White politicians were projecting racist sentiments to prove their racist bona fides to a white racist electorate. In that regard, the “welfare queens” slur was of a piece with Bush I’s cynical deployment of the Willie Horton ad and, later, on the liberal end, with Bill Clinton’s staged outburst against Sister Souljah. It’s bad, but it isn’t backlash. Salamishah’s example of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous denunciation of black “matriarchs” is more compelling — Moynihan’s claim that strong black women were emasculating the men in their lives is part of the antifeminist trope that women can only rise by breaking the backs of their men. Does the 1980s backlash rhetoric constitute a “retooling” of early ’60s rhetoric aimed at black women? Not sure, but it would be extremely interesting to investigate the connection more deeply.
As for why I didn’t draw on Ebony or Essence in the media and popular-culture sections of the book: I did, in fact, investigate both of these publications, along with other black-oriented women’s and general-interest magazines. Tellingly, I did not find the same type or level of backlash manipulation there. (Other forms of manipulation, for sure.) This is a divergence that I wish I’d elaborated on in Backlash. I suspect we didn’t see the same antifeminist blitz in black media because the common enemy of white oppression changed the dynamic — there was a tacit solidarity in the pages of black publications. While some black men certainly argued (and still do) that women’s advancement put them at a disadvantage, I didn’t see black media gleefully playing up divisions between black men and women (which would have been “airing dirty laundry in public”) the way that white media were eagerly trying to inflame animus toward “liberated” white women. Did the effects of the backlash spare black women? No, most certainly not — and in the final section of the book (despite inaccurate assertions that I’m concerned only with white affairs), I discuss some of the ways women of color bore the brunt of backlash-era rollbacks, both economically and reproductively. When gains in the pay gap stalled, black women’s gains stalled the most, and Hispanic women’s actually reversed. When the rates of women lacking prenatal care rose in the ’80s, black women’s rates rose the highest.
I will leave to another day — or another round of reading club? — a fuller response to some of the other questions and disputations raised in this wide-ranging discussion. Could I have presented a more nuanced portrait of protective legislation? Yes. Is the lack of discussion of welfare reform (when the book came out five years before the Welfare Reform Act) a troubling omission? Am I suffering from “cranky Frankfurtian suspicion of popular culture”? Don’t know, but if I had business cards, I’d like that on there: “Susan Faludi, crabby feminist, cranky Frankfurtian.”
Let’s instead move on to an issue so many of you raised and that I think about all the time: Where are we now? Has the backlash abated, leaving women better off today, or has it just morphed into something slicker, more hidden, more insidious?
In my introduction to the 15th-anniversary edition of Backlash, I came down on the latter side of that equation, and, as we approach the 25th, I don’t see much to challenge that view, even as some women do make gains. Roxane had a nice formulation of the ’80s vs. now: “Wow, that was such a different time…. Wow, very little has changed.” I doubt this audience needs me to itemize The Troubles: the draconian attacks on abortion (and now, contraception); the ongoing right-wing body block to any legislation essential to real gender equality; the pathetically tiny improvements in women’s inroads into positions of real power and authority; the soaring rates of sexual assault everywhere from the campus to the military; and on and on.
And for all the Pantene “empowerment” ads and Beyoncé feminism moments and ForbesWoman-esque online outlets, popular culture and media are still pretty darn unfriendly to female power. As Rebecca says, there are “a million ways that this fear mongering still exists.” The media still shortchanges women as writers and sources. (See the VIDA Count, the Op-ed Project, et al.) And still keeps in play those irritating “trend” stories about the costs of liberation. (Check out The New York Times Magazine’s cover story last February, “Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?,” a Valentine’s Day face-slap to working women with all the hallmarks of a backlash trend story: anecdotes with no real names, authorities of dubious authority (“couples’ experts”?), and the use of a study with out-of-date and nebulous data. Plus ça change…
As many of you note, the current backlash often comes cloaked in pro-woman rhetoric — right-wing women claiming to be mama-grizzly feminists; botox ads offering women “freedom of expression”; antiabortion crusaders pretending to be a girl’s best friend. Katha’s keen observation bears repeating: “Today’s anti-choice movement has evolved: Women are more visible both in the leadership and the rank-and-file, there’s less explicit misogyny, more ‘concern’ for women’s well-being, more fake feminism. It’s been quite a successful makeover.”
On the upside, as backlash media messages have donned female-friendly guises, women have become more sophisticated at seeing through the masks. And, as Irin notes, a new generation of women “have more tools than ever for dissecting and subverting” antifeminist propaganda — the feminist blogosphere has used the Web to launch its own counteroffensive. How much traction can social media actually provide in advancing gender equality? I’ve been doing interviews this summer for a research project on women in digital media (and picked the brains of a number of you on this subject), and I came away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, women who come under attack online can count on feminist bloggers to rally to their defense. On the other hand, online female writers are coming under attack in horrifying new ways (as Amanda’s terrific piece “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” enumerates in hair-raising detail).
How much meaningful and lasting social change can one effect in the disembodied and fractured outer space of the Web? I’m not so hopeful. In the meantime, online female journalists are being paid poverty wages (when they are paid at all) and enduring 24/7 crazy-making working conditions that rarely allow for the thoroughgoing sort of dissections that “legacy” media, for all its failures, once made possible. Several of you kindly applauded the investigative reporting in Backlash. Keep in mind, I reported the book at a time when print journalism threw serious time and resources at such endeavors. Much of the reporting I did for Backlash was underwritten by my day job at the San Jose Mercury News, which allowed me to write many sections of the book as extremely long articles for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. (Remember Sunday magazines?) On the other hand, my legacy editors counseled me against writing a feminist book, which they predicted would damage my career as a “serious” reporter.
One of my biggest worries about our current times is the way in which pervasive self-congratulation about “how far we’ve come” elevates small successes while obscuring the dire economic straits of the vast majority of the female population. We compliment ourselves that our era is more enlightened, more progressive, more inclusive — even as gains that women thought they’d secured slip away. The U.S. female poverty rate is at historic levels, and whopping percentages of women are in low-wage jobs with few to no benefits and no hope for advancement. Forty percent of black and Hispanic female-headed households do not make enough money to meet their basic needs. Working-class occupations have actually become more gender-segregated since 1990, and are now as segregated as they were in 1950. Occupational segregation between white and black women has been rising since the ’90s, and wage inequality is ballooning between women with advanced educations and women with high school degrees or less.
For all the talk of intersectionality, we could sure use a lot more talk (and action) about gender and class at a time when income polarization is through the roof. Latoya writes that “sometimes I really wish more feminist energy was spent looking at the connections” between women’s rights and labor organizing. Me, too. The 1% feminism of Lean-In-type operations got a free ride for way too long, not just in the media but in the feminist media. I’ve vented my spleen at length on this subject, here and here. Safe to say, the revolution is not going to be ushered in by a TED talk at $6,000 a ticket.
This lack of interest in women’s basic bread-and-butter needs in the U.S. comes at the same time that, around the globe, an insurgent and grassroots feminism is putting the spotlight on exactly these concerns. (See, for instance, the 50,000 women in Bangladesh last year who took to the streets to demand a minimum wage of $100 a month, following the garment-factory building collapse near Dhaka that killed more than 1,000 workers, mostly women.)
In the course of this discussion, several of you pondered the many-headed Hydra of commodified feminism. Anna writes that, despite her fears that self-serving hucksterism is disfiguring the feminist cause, “I have more faith in feminist messaging, and in the ability of women to recognize and reject profit dressed up as politics, than I ever have before.” As a feminist messager, I have faith, too, but I suspect we’ll need a whole lot more than that to withstand the gale-force winds that are gathering. The landscape where feminism and capitalism commingle is riddled with land mines and trapdoors. We must take careful stock of what we’re up against. On that front, amen to Jamilah’s plea for a new volume of essays on the new wave of antifeminist attacks and the resistance to them. We need many such volumes.
Thank you all for being such thoughtful readers and ruminators.
Susan Faludi is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America.
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 Lena Dunham, Katha Pollitt, Jamilah Lemieux, Heather Havrilesky, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
