Word: faludi
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Gilligan has been criticized for what Pulit zer Prize-winning author Susan Faludi, in her recent book, Backlash, calls "Victorian echoes...
...Gilligan may have left herself wide open to misinterpretation," Faludi wrote. "After disavowing generalizations about either sex, she seems to make them herself." Faludi also felt that the backgrounds and situations of the subjects Gilligan examined were not stressed enough. "Gilligan's 'studies' were not exactly drawn from ideal demographic samples," she wrote...
Zella Luria, a Tufts University psychology researcher who is cited in Faludi's book, agreed with her criticism. "I see no data to warrant the message that Carol Gilligan can tell us," Kuria said in an interview. "I find it psychologically very native to find that our experience is unencumbered knowledge we get from our innards...
...weakness of Backlash is that Faludi's efforts to disprove charges of women's unhappiness make the reader think that such ideas have no basis in reality--as if no working women are stressed, no children are abused by daycare providers, etc. Still, Faludi performs an important service--no one should accept flawed statistics and inaccurate theories as the boundaries of their lives...
Though 544 pages long, Backlash is anything but a dry treatise. Faludi's tour of 1980s America takes the reader from a Guess jeans photo shoot to the dinner table of a leading anti-abortion activist, providing a fascinating look at the making of U.S. society and culture. Anyone interested in how women are doing today--and especially anyone who thinks they are doing just fine--should read this book...