Word: faludi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...