Word: faludi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...
What readers may be looking for is an explanation for why, as reported by a TIME/CNN poll last month, 63% of American women 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...
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...