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                                                                                IDEAS, Page 50

COVER STORIES

The War Against Feminism


In popular culture, in politics -- and among ordinary women
-- a backlash has hit the women's movement. Two unexpected best
sellers explain why and raise the alarm.

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Priscilla
Painton/New York and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago


    This winter's surprise hit movie offers no marquee names
and no special effects, only a small cup of poison for maternal
peace of mind. In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Rebecca De
Mornay plays the Nanny from Hell, who insinuates herself into
the home of a trusting family only to wreak havoc on it. In the
weeks after the film climbed to No. 1, earning a stunning $65
million, magazines and newspapers have scurried to find
real-life examples of psycho-nannies, which in turn drove home
the not-so-subtle message that women who work and leave child
rearing to others are courting disaster and had best hurry home.

    Any movie that confounds expectations invites commentators
to think Big Thoughts about its surprise appeal. In this case,
one set of critics proclaims that the movie reveals the
ambivalence that women especially feel about having to balance
work and family. But another chorus of critics is offering its
own interpretation, wrapped in a warning: that this movie is
part of a decade-long attack against feminism intended to roll
back the gains of the women's movement and convince women that
their newfound liberation is the source of all their
unhappiness. And therein lies the bigger story.

    The idea that progress produces a backlash is hardly new
-- one need only look at Detroit's gracious response to Japan's
economic success. But when the issue is the status of American
womanhood, this line of argument follows a swollen stream of
trend stories that declare feminism shuddered and died sometime
during the Reagan era. Many headlines of the '80s called
feminism THE GREAT EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED and announced that
America had graduated to a postfeminist age of Mommy Tracks,
garter belts and men beating drums in the woods. Only in 1991,
a year defined by date-rape trials, harassment hearings,
abortion battles and gender wars, did the popular media begin
to acknowledge that relations between the sexes were not as
settled as they seemed.

    Into this rhetorical arena comes Susan Faludi, 32, a
soft-spoken, sharp-penned, Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter for
the Wall Street Journal who spent four years writing Backlash:
The Undeclared War Against American Women, published by Crown
in October. In 552 crowded pages, Faludi constructs a thesis out
of alarming though sometimes selective use of statistics bound
together with ideological glue, designed to explain why many
women turned against feminism in the 1980s. Not only has her
book become an unexpected best seller; it has also become a
staple topic on the op-ed pages, one of those landmark books
that shape the opinions of America's opinion shapers.

    More interesting still, after months halfway down the
best-seller list, Faludi moves to No. 2 this week -- right
behind a new book by Gloria Steinem. Many critics dismissed
Revolution from Within, Steinem's treatise on the political
implications of the self-esteem movement, as an exercise in
squishy new-age thumb-sucking. But as she tours shopping malls,
Steinem is being mobbed by crowds that, according to one
bookstore owner, exceed those of Oliver North and Vanna White,
the backlash icons of American manhood and womanhood. Something
must have happened in the climate of relations between men and
women for these books to have such an impact.

    What readers may be looking for is an explanation for why,
as reported by a TIME/CNN poll last month, 63% of Ameriwomen do
not consider themselves feminists. The answer according to
Faludi is not that women are finally free and equal and don't
need a movement anymore; or that feminism's leaders, for all
their efforts, somehow alienated their constituency; or that
finally having choices allows women the luxury of second
thoughts. Instead, she argues, women reject feminism because of
a backlash against it -- a highly effective, often insidious
campaign to discredit its goals, distort its message and make
women question whether they really want equality after all.

    Throughout history, Faludi argues, any time women tried to
loosen their corsets and breathe more freely, they met with a
suffocating counterattack. In the 1980s this backlash surfaced
in the Reagan White House, the courts, Hollywood and, above all,
the mass media, whose collective message to women went something
like this: Feminism is your worst enemy. All this freedom is
making you miserable, unmarriageable, infertile, unstable. Go
home, bake a cake, quit pounding on the doors of public life,
and all your troubles will go away.

    Faludi's book has set off firecrackers across the
political battlefield. Conservatives applaud her when she
exposes the intellectual laziness of the mainstream press;
liberals cheer when she exposes the hypocrisy of conservatives
who put their own children in day care so they can travel around
the country telling women to be homemakers. And the press loves
covering itself and hearing about its power. Columnist John
McLaughlin, no special friend of the women's movement, called
Faludi "the best thinker of the year," and the National Book
Critics Circle just handed her its prize for nonfiction.

    Faludi makes an unlikely polemicist. Smart, shy, with a
self-deprecating manner, she claims to be more comfortable in
front of a terminal than a camera. An alumna of Harvard, the
Miami Herald and the Atlanta Constitution, she has left the Wall
Street Journal -- where she won a Pulitzer Prize last year for
a Journal story tracing the human cost of the $5.65 billion
leveraged buyout of Safeway -- in order to handle the flood of
speaking requests her book has generated.

    A cynic -- Faludi, for one -- might argue that the
messenger herself makes the message easier to hear. With her
schoolgirl demeanor and easy eloquence, Faludi defies many
unfair but well-embedded stereotypes about feminists. PEOPLE
magazine photographed her riding her bike in San Francisco and
posing beneath a tree with her boyfriend, Dr. Peter Small. The
timing of the book helped too, coming just when the Senate and
the American media rediscovered sexual harassment and when
puzzled talk-show hosts were groping for a new vocabulary to
capture the outrage that women expressed. Had the book been
published back in the spring when it was scheduled, Faludi says
with a laugh, "it would have dropped like a stone. We were in
the middle of a war, it was boys' time. Fall was girls' time
because of Anita Hill."

    But the main reason for the book's success is the
resonance of the questions Faludi raises. Were all the movies
and television shows and advertisements that featured blissful
mothers and frazzled career women intended, either consciously
or subconsciously, to sow doubts in women's minds about their
real goals? Or, as her critics counter, did the mass media
merely pick up on concerns that already existed and touch a
nerve that had been rubbed raw by a generation of out-of-touch
feminist leaders?

    Behind the Backlash

    "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what
feminism is," wrote Rebecca West in 1913. "I only know that
people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that
differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute." Decades
later, for millions of American women the label remains
slippery. During the feminist revolution of the 1970s, it was
understood as an effort to secure for women the economic,
political and social rights and protections that men have always
enjoyed. It was about opening doors, not shoving women through
them.

    But in the 1980s that understanding of the term seemed to
disappear. In the decade's dismissive shorthand, feminism came
to mean denigrating motherhood, pursuing selfish goals and
wearing a suit. Whereas feminism was hip and fashionable in the
'70s, antifeminism became socially acceptable in the '80s. First
the fundamentalist right, then the White House -- and
ultimately Hollywood, television and many journalists -- held
feminism responsible for "every woe besetting women," Faludi
writes, "from mental depression to meager savings accounts, from
teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexions."

    The "family values" agenda was the rhetorical basis on
which Reagan and Bush and scores of other Republicans swept into
office, thanks to the votes of millions of women as well as men.
Feminism, meanwhile, lost many of its government sponsors.
Support for the Equal Rights Amendment reached 60% in 1981, only
to be defeated the following year; the number of women seeking
out battered-women's shelters soared, but federal funding shrank
and the Office of Domestic Violence was shut down. Complaints
of sexual harassment climbed 70% between 1981 and 1989, but a
congressional study found that caseworkers were rarely bothering
to investigate before dismissing the charges.

    But it was not simply this overt partisan assault that
created the backlash. According to Faludi, women came to condemn
the movement because they heard from messengers they trusted
that it was responsible for their pain. When the source of
attack claims neutrality, offers statistics, cites an expert,
the message carries even more weight.

    Her chronicle of the backlash began in 1986, after major
magazines and newspapers trumpeted stories on an unpublished
Harvard-Yale marriage study. The researchers claimed that a
college-educated woman of 30 had only a 20% chance of finding
a husband; by age 35 it was 5%, by 40 she was "more likely to
be killed by a terrorist" than make it to the altar, in
Newsweek's memorable analogy. Reading the article on an airplane
on the way to a friend's wedding, Faludi recalls, "I hadn't been
worrying about marriage, but suddenly I felt glum and grouchy."

    She decided to write about "the marriage crunch," only to
discover what demographers already knew: the figures were based
on unorthodox calculations of unrepresentative samples. More men
than women were rushing out to dating services, and in the prime
marrying years of 24 to 34, there were 119 single men for every
100 single women. What bothered Faludi was not just that the
numbers were wrong; it was that many of the stories read like
morality tales, whispering threats about the cost of postponing
marriage in favor of having a career. Fear of spinsterhood
stormed into the popular culture, giving birth to a whole
generation of desperate movie heroines, frantic sitcom
spinsters, myriad self-help books.

    Struck by the eagerness of the media to hype dubious
scholarship, Faludi examined other trend stories to find their
hidden message. In 1982 the New England Journal of Medicine
urged women to re-evaluate their goals in light of findings that
a woman's fertility plunged after age 30. The tyranny of the
biological clock, warning women about putting work before
family, made front-page news; but the story was based on a
French study of women with infertile husbands who had tried to
get pregnant through artificial insemination -- hardly a
representative sample.

    Digging further, Faludi found that the rash of "toxic
day-care" stories, which instilled guilt among working women by
recounting the epidemic of abuse in day-care centers, masked the
fact that the vast majority of child abuse goes on in the home.
She also found fault with the stories about women with Harvard
M.B.A.s dropping out to go home and raise their children, the
Good Housekeeping ads of the New Traditionalist, the notion of
the Mommy Track; to her, they all implied that the postfeminist
woman was the one who had sampled having it all and preferred
to give most of it up. In fact, the pattern of the '80s was
dictated by economic reality: 69% of women 18 to 64 work today,
in contrast to 33% in 1950. "There may be women being laid off,
but they are not going home because they want to," says Karen
Nussbaum, executive director of 9 to 5, an advocacy group for
working women.

    But Faludi has a frustrating habit of pushing her case too
far, at times at the price of her own credibility. She rightly
slams journalists who distort data in order to promote what they
view as a larger truth; but in a number of instances, she can
be accused of the same tactics.

    On the infertility studies, for example, Faludi is right
to point out how the results of a small survey were
exaggerated. But there are indeed health risks that confront
older mothers. Faludi writes that contrary to popular belief,
"women under 35 now give birth to children with Down syndrome
at a higher rate than women over 35." This is not true. There
are more babies born with Down syndrome to women under 35, but
that is because there are more babies born to women under 35.
The risk of Down and other genetic abnormalities increases with
age, according to Gertrud Berkowitz, a Mount Sinai School of
Medicine professor, and it is misleading to mix rates with
absolute numbers.

    Likewise in her condemnation of the marriage study, Faludi
is right that there is no man shortage for young women. But
according to Barbara Lovenheim, who pored over census data for
her book Beating the Marriage Odds, the ratio begins to reverse
after 35: between the ages of 40 and 44, there are 75 single men
for every 100 unmarried women.

    Faludi demonstrates that the studies on the impact of
divorce greatly exaggerate the fall in the average woman's
living standard in the year after she leaves her husband. But
she adds that five years after divorce, most women's standard
of living has actually improved. She relegates to a footnote the
fact that this is because most have remarried.

    The wage gap, which Faludi says has barely improved since
1955, actually narrowed more quickly in the 1980s than it did
in the previous three decades, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. That the average woman now earns 71 cents for every
dollar a man earns is still inexcusable, but by downplaying
women's recent prog ress, Faludi risks undermining the message
that economic inequity is still a real problem.

    Although her handling of these facts makes Faludi an easy
target of backlash, it should not be an excuse to dismiss her
entire argument. "It's perfectly legitimate to point out errors
in any book that has a factoid in every sentence. I'm bound to
make mistakes," Faludi says. "But to dismiss the whole argument
is not right. We should be more focused on how we overcome the
backlash." As Ann Jones, an author and professor at Mount
Holyoke, argues, "The big picture is there, and the big picture
is accurate."

    The New Image of Womanhood

    The big picture of the backlash has more to do with the
messages that permeate everyday life, through television and
movies, through fashions and advertising. Naomi Wolf's book The
Beauty Myth got readers talking about why women starve
themselves, have breast implants, apply acid to their face to
peel off the wrinkles, and why fashion magazines came to favor
photo spreads of women wearing dog collars and chains and
penciled-on bruises. It is on issues of symbol and
representation that Faludi and the newly bred backlash theorists
have the most fun and start the liveliest arguments over who
really represented the Image of Woman in the 1980s.

    This insidious new image, Faludi claims, was Hope
Steadman, the exalted, blissful, breast-feeding mother of thirty
something, who provided a postfeminist contrast to the "neurotic
spinster [and] ball-busting single career woman." Or Glenn
Close's character in Fatal Attraction, the crazed professional
temptress -- beautiful, successful and mad as a hatter, thanks
to the deafening tick of her biological clock. Or the Dress for
Success models who, in Faludi's lethal description, "trip down
the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves.
Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they
are, after all, empty."

    Faludi acknowledges the pres ence of strong female figures
in films, but she notes that their strength is often directed at
protecting their young, which even in a backlash era is an
acceptable female preoccupation. This takes care of Sigourney
Weaver in Aliens, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Jessica Lange
and Sally Field in Country and Places in the Heart. Overall,
Faludi finds that female characters were more likely to be
portrayed as obsessed with career at the expense of family
(Broadcast News), burning out from the rat race (Baby Boom),
abandoning their children (Three Men and a Baby) or exploring
the rewards of prostitution (Pretty Woman).

    It makes an interesting parlor game for contrarian readers
to provide the counterimages, ones that dispute Faludi's thesis
by showing that women were also often portrayed as strong and
fulfilled. Was Hope Steadman any more an archetype of the '80s
than Murphy Brown? The fashion press may have lauded Christian
Lacroix's baby-doll dresses, but real women ignored them in
favor of Donna Karan's comfortable professional clothes, or the
Gap's gender-neutral everyday wear. For every virulent
misogynist, such as Andrew Dice Clay or rappers with songs about
mutilating "bitches," there was a Sandra Bernhard, a Lily
Tomlin, above all a Roseanne Arnold.

    Faludi dispatches Roseanne and Madonna in one subclause of
a sentence, which deprives readers of what would surely have
been a lively discussion of two of the decade's most
influential symbols. Writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich have
praised Roseanne for helping root feminism in the family and
give it a raw eloquence. "Roseanne gave working-class feminism
a face," says Ehrenreich. "The typical image of a feminist in
the media has been the Murphy Brown type -- the very successful,
very slender, very perfectly organized professional woman. And
we didn't have a media image of another kind of feminist who,
obviously, is not slender or successful or organized."

    Madonna too became a symbol in the '80s of a maturing
feminism, at least in the eyes of flame-throwing author Camille
Paglia, who considers herself a feminist. "Madonna has enabled
the young women of the world to recover their sexuality and yet
to remain assertive, independent beings," Paglia says. "She was
able to fuse this overt and almost pornographic sexuality as a
woman with this dominant, managerial aptitude. It has been an
extraordinary influence on women."

    More broadly, Faludi's feminist critics view her book as
flawed and condescending because it treats women as victims,
passively accepting what the culture imposes on them. Chicago
Tribune columnist Joan Beck argued that "for all her feminist
tenets, Faludi sells women short. The millions of women who are
rethinking their full-time commitment to a job and are finding
their primary satisfactions in family are, in her view, silly
sheep being pushed back into the kitchen and the bedroom by men
who want them to stay subordinate."

    Conservative critics charge that Faludi falsely conjures
up a junta of antifeminists who conspired to force women to buy
lacy underwear, watch reactionary movies, quit their jobs, mind
the kids and do the laundry. "She chooses to invent a
malevolent conspiracy instead of railing against God and the
facts of nature," says author George Gilder, who describes
himself as "America's No. 1 antifeminist." On the contrary,
Gilder argues, the media and politicians are all in the
ideological thrall of the feminists, "because feminism and
sexual liberation are the religion of the intellectual class in
America." The reason more women do not hold elected office as
a result, he adds, is because "women don't vote for feminists.
The people don't want feminism. Only the elite does."

    Faludi, in fact, takes pains to make her targets more
subtle. "The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council
dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the
people who serve its ends often aware of their role," she
explains. "Some even consider themselves feminists."

    Why the Backlash Worked

    If American women perceive a backlash against their
progress, it is probably due more to what they encountered at
work than on the screen or in the newspapers. The persistent
recession pitted men and women against one another in a battle
over job quotas that threw all the issues of economic fairness
into bold relief. "Women, after all, and minorities are the
first to lose jobs," observes Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a black
political leader in Los Angeles. "So there is what you might
call a new militancy among women."

    It was the showdown between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
that unveiled the depth of passion that women still feel about
discrimination in private and public life. The fact that a
majority of women as well as men wound up disbelieving Hill did
not change the fact that the episode was a defining moment in
the backlash debate. The National Women's Political Caucus
placed an ad in the New York Times and in one week raised
$85,000 from 1,300 people, far exceeding any of the caucus'
previous ads or mailings. "Anita Hill focused attention on the
fact that there were no women on that Senate panel making
decisions about people's lives," says Harriett Woods, president
of the caucus. "Hill-Thomas opened it up like a volcano
erupting." The episode allowed feminists and others to make the
point loud and clear, and with visual aids, that women are not
to blame for their troubles, that the women's movement still has
a role to play and that powerful forces will be fighting back.

    But the question remains of why so many women with
firsthand experience of discrimination still refuse to call
themselves feminists. There is something in the label that a lot
of women, especially young ones, reject even as they acknowledge
how much the movement increased the opportunities available to
them. Younger women "think of feminists as women who burn bras
and don't shave their legs," says Pat Schroeder, dean of
Capitol Hill's 29 Congresswomen. "They think of us as the
Amazons of the '60s. The facts have no relation to it, but it's
become conventional wisdom."

    Will the shortage of young women in the movement cause
feminism to fade away because it can't replenish its troops?
Gloria Steinem says no. Young women have never provided
feminism's shock troops, she says, and to assume otherwise
reflects a male model of activism that has never applied to
women. "I wasn't a feminist in my 20s either," she says. Where
men tend to get more conservative as they get older, "it's
always been the older women who are more radical than the
younger women." Her reasoning is that young men have nothing to
lose by being rebellious. "Women have more social power when
they're young, and also they haven't experienced what's wrong
with the world yet. They haven't been in the labor force. Aging,
hitting the middle-management ceiling happens 10 years later.
The red-hot center of feminism has never been on campus -- it
was always somewhere else."

    The rejection of the label may, as Faludi argues,
demonstrate the insidious effects of the backlash. But it may
also reflect the failures of the movement. Paula Kamen, 24,
author of Feminist Fatale, is a fan of Faludi's. But she urges
that "in this age, the women's movement has to look in the
mirror." Like some other critics, Kamen thinks that Backlash
lets the women's movement off too easily. "It isn't all media
conspiracy."

    Large majorities of women have consistently credited
feminism with improving their lives and winning them access to
public life, jobs, credit and educational opportunities. But
that access brought hard choices. "When women were all outsiders
and men were all insiders, the goals were easy," says Boston
Globe columnist Ellen Goodman. "Barriers were broken. But
changes that depended on new social policy never were made. The
part of the change that would make it easier for women to work
never got put in place. We still don't have child care or family
medical leave. Today women are working very hard, and they are
tired."

    Contrary to Faludi's backlash thesis, the signs that women
are having second thoughts are not purely an invention of the
media. In 1985, given the choice between having a job or staying
home to care for the family, 51% of women preferred to work,
according to the Roper Organization; by 1991 that number fell
to 43%, and 53% said they would rather stay home. It is
certainly possible to see this self-questioning not as a sign
of weakness but as a sign of strength. "It's not a sense of
defeat. But it's saying, `I have many possibilities, and this
is just what I prefer,' " contends Karlyn Keene, a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute.

    Any social commentator who shatters myths and exposes
hypocrisy has performed a useful service, and Faludi is no
exception. She has inspired men and women to take a new look at
the messages they absorb, messages that act as barriers to
understanding or to justice. But it is also appropriate to
argue, as founding feminist Betty Friedan does, that feminism
also needs to "transcend sexual politics and anger against men
to express a new vision of family and community. We must go from
wallowing in the victim's state to mobilizing the new power of
women and men for a larger political agenda on the priorities
of life. We need to confront the polarization. We're at a
dangerous time." Such conciliatory rhetoric is not backsliding.
It too is a call to arms.