EVERY SO OFTEN that perennial media topic “Whither the women’s movement?” gets trotted out for examination, or rather for exorcism—“Wither the women’s movement” might be a more accurate rendering of press sentiments. When it does, my phone often rings and a mildly irritated reporter asks, or rather huffs, the inevitable question: “Is there still a backlash?”
Because the reporter’s query is more of a complaint (“Aren’t you done with this feminism business by now?”), it’s hard not to respond in kind (“Aren’t you sick of this let’s-attack-feminism business by now?”). Yet when I sat down to consider how to introduce the book I first published 15 years ago, I found myself bedeviled by a version of that same question: Is there a backlash? Still?
The answer, unfortunately, is no.
“Unfortunately,” because it turns out there are some things worse than backlash.
Back in the ’80s, the slightest sign that women were exercising their independence set the culture hounds to baying. Were young women deferring nuptials for higher education? “You’re more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to kiss a groom!” the newsweeklies howled. Were older women postponing childbirth to pursue work they cared about? “Your biological clock will strike midnight, and you’ll turn into a barren pumpkin!” the “lifestyle” media mavens screeched. Were single women breaking courtship rules and taking the sexual initiative? “You’ll turn into a psycho-killer and meet your maker in an overflowing bathtub!” the Hollywood mullahs decreed.
Ah, the good old days.
The backlash scolds are less in evidence now, so much less that to grouse about the few remaining haranguers would seem to quibble with success. When was the last time a twisted single woman boiled a bunny in a feature film? We appear to have vanquished those daily amber alerts about the “man shortage,” the “infertility epidemic,” and the “dark side of divorce,” not to mention the Job-like plagues of nervous prostration, heart disease, alcoholism, hair loss, and adult acne that were once said to be afflicting every hard-charging “career woman.”
Yes, there are still the periodic reprimands, though generally they are presented as the products of a woman’s “choice.” The backlash is now said to be a strictly self-inflicted affair. That was the message of a front-page New York Times story on September 20, 2005 that asserted that “many” female undergraduates at Ivy League colleges planned to junk their high-priced educations and stay home to tend to their babies. (“I don’t mind the status quo,” a Yale sophomore cheerfully told the Times. “I don’t see why I have to go against it.”) “Choice” was also the point of the New York Times Magazine cover story on October 26, 2003, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” which asserted that many female careerists were foregoing their fat salaries (though not their husbands’) in favor of the stroller-pushing suburban life. (“I don’t want to be famous,” one opt-outer told the Times. “I don’t want to conquer the world.”) And that was the theme struck in a “60 Minutes” report in April 2002 that held that “more and more” professional women were berating themselves for their “choice” and cashing in their life’s savings for infertility treatments.
But these let’s-turn-back-the-clock appeals in the media lack the adamancy of the backlash “trend” stories of the ’80s. The New York Times nervously hedged in its article on the Ivy League future homemakers, conceding that “changing attitudes are difficult to quantify.” (Indeed, the results of the newspaper’s e-mail survey of female students turned out to be hopelessly flawed, as a number of commentators later pointed out.) The author of the New York Times Magazine’s “Opt-Out Revolution” conceded that her conclusions were “not a scientific sample.” Even the writer of Atlantic’s March 2004 cover-story attack on working mothers who hire nannies, Caitlin Flanagan, confessed that she, too, employed a nanny.
The ’80s-style carpet bombing of emancipated women appears to have been called off. What we hear now seems to be nothing more than random sniper fire. We’re told that feminism has faded into the background because its aims have largely been achieved. We’re told that young women don’t identify with feminism anymore because they don’t need to. As the young Yale undergraduate said in the Times, there’s nothing left to “go against.”
On paper, at least, the undergrad appears to have a point. Women have made slow but steady gains in the last 25 years. They now represent nearly 60 percent of undergraduates, two-thirds of journalism school enrollments, and half of medical and law school students. The pay gap between men and women has narrowed by about a dozen percentage points in the last couple of decades (although 60 percent of that “improvement” is actually due to a decline in men’s real earnings, not a rise in women’s wages). About 15 percent of congressmen are congresswomen, hardly what you’d cll representative democracy but better than the mere 3 percent who were female in the House and Senate in 1979. Women own about 38 percent of all businesses (although most are small and struggling businesses in the service sector). And 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies have at least one woman on their boards (albeit in most cases just one woman).
We should be pleased with our progress.
So why, as I survey the American gender landscape today, a landscape that has accommodated and to some extent been shaped by “liberated” women of my generation, do I feel so uneasy? Doesn’t the lack of conflict suggest that feminists routed their enemies? Isn’t this silence the silence after the battle, the silence of Agincourt?
Maybe. But something tells me we are elsewhere. Somewhere like Heraclea, that ancient Roman battlefield where King Pyrrhus famously bemoaned his blood-soaked win with the words, “Such another victory and we are undone!”
• • •
IN THE early ’90s, after the long despond of the Reagan years, American women shook off their torpor and began again to fight. The televised sexist spectacle of the Senate Judiciary Committee members mocking Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas proved one humiliation too many for female viewers to witness. After all this time, indignant women told each other across the nation, these men still “don’t get it.” Indignation led to anger, which led to mobilization, which, by the spring of 1992, led to a massive pro-choice demonstration in Washington (one of the largest protest rallies of any kind in the nation’s capital), the birth of dramatically effective feminist PACs like Emily’s List, and a record number of progressive women running for national office.
But women’s political awakening provoked instant political reprisal. The speakers at the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1992 couldn’t get off the subject, and their panic was evident in their hyperbole. A feminist army, they wailed, had invaded our culture, our TV sets (where a fictional woman was “mocking the importance of a father,” as Bush I’s running mate famously seethed on stage), our political system (where, as Pat Buchanan fulminated, the latest Democratic National Convention constituted “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American history”), and the hearts and minds of our women (whom feminists, the veep-candidate’s wife told the assembled, intended to strip of “their essential natures”).
The speakers weren’t wrong to worry. On Election Day, the “cross-dressers” prevailed. Senate victories went to Barbara Boxer, Dianne Fein-stein, Patty Murray, and Carol Moseley-Braun, women who had run not only on the Democratic ballot but under a feminist banner. In the House of Representatives, women’s numbers jumped from 28 to 47. The Democratic Party’s emphasis on defending women’s liberties—and the Republican Party’s attack on the same—also inspired an unprecedented 28 percent of GOP women to defect from their own party at the polls. As even the usually feminist-averse media had to concede, 1992 was shaping up to be the “Year of the Woman.”
The year proved short. In a matter of months, the right wing ushered in the modern misogynist version of the Thermidorian Reaction. Like their French forebears, whose mask of moderation concealed what turned out to be a power grab, the antifeminist counterrevolutionaries cloaked their ultimate intentions in “kinder, gentler” drapery. By forcing women’s concerns to the forefront of the political stage, feminists had helped elect a Democrat to the White House and had nearly barred the conservative choice for Supreme Court justice. Now the conservatives intended to stage a coup by beating the women’s movement at its own game. This time, they would do the cross-dressing. Casting themselves as the feminist defenders of female dignity, the right-wing architects promised to emancipate the nation’s women from the clutches of the Groper in Chief. And so it was that the greatest legal assault on liberalism in modern times would be mounted as a defense of women’s rights.
The showcased actors in this liberation masquerade were mostly women. And they weren’t the old antifeminist warrior queens. Phyllis Schlafly with her Eagle Forum blue-rinse set and Beverly LaHaye with her Concerned Women for America “ladies” played only supporting roles this time. The new script featured neocon women who claimed to be neofeminists. The neofems hailed from emancipatory-sounding organizations like the Independent Women’s Forum and the Network for Empowering Women (lavishly funded by the right-wing foundation troika of Scaife, Olin, and Bradley and staffed by graduates of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Bush I and II administrations). The neofems authored books with titles that suggested a slant toward women’s independence, like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Feminism Without Illusions or Christina Hoff Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (the latter also bankrolled by right-wing foundations). The neofems paraded their sexually liberated libidos before the titillated media. Ann Coulter with her omnipresent thighs on Fox News and Laura Ingraham in her leopard-print micromini on the cover of the New York Times Magazine positioned themselves as the next wave’s Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem—“a second revolution in the women’s movement,” as the Washington Times enthused, the progeny of “the 1970s feminists who burned their bras.”
The same male conservatives who had been desperate to rein in women’s political advances were happy to elevate their sister travelers—as long as it was to posts where they could rein in other women’s political advances. As Tanya Melich noted in The Republican War Against Women, Newt Gingrich took pains to fill the lead slot and five of the top seven posts in the National Republican Congressional Committee with female faces. And the strategy paid off. In 19101, in a mirror image of the Democrats in ’92, six new Republican female candidates, all of whom opposed abortion rights and were cultivated by the New Right, landed seats in the House of Representatives. That same year, one of Gingrich’s favorites, Republican congresswoman Susan Molinari, sponsored a piece of legislation that was to be essential to the attack on the Clinton presidency. The bill allowed courts to pry into the consensual sexual history of defendants in civil cases involving sexual assault—and the wording defined sexual assault so broadly that it encompassed unwanted touching. This was the very offense that Paula Jones would allege in her sexual-harassment civil suit against Clinton. And this was the law that Judge Susan Webber Wright invoked when she ordered Clinton to testify about his other consensual dalliances. Molinari, intentionally or not, laid the trap that sprang for impeachment.
• • •
WHILE THE right wing and its sleeper cell of pod feminists were busy hijacking feminism and crashing it into the Oval Office, what were the rest of the nation’s women doing? Fighting back? Taking to the streets? Campaigning for another slate of genuinely feminist candidates? Alas, they were running in a very different race. As it happened, the right wing wasn’t the only demographic pursuing a distorted version of feminism. So was much of mainstream female America.
Which is why, as I say, there are some things worse than backlash.
The race American women were running was one that students of Ovid’s Metamorphoses might find familiar. “You may have heard about a girl who could outrun the swiftest men,” Venus recounts in Ovid’s “The Story of Atalanta.” When the fleet and fair Atalanta consults the oracle on her future marital status, she is warned to steer clear of wedlock. “Avoid that habit!” the oracle instructs. “Still, I know you will not: you will keep your life, and lose yourself.” Atalanta manages to maintain her independence for a while, by arranging races where she outruns her suitors. Until the god Hippomenes takes up Atalanta’s challenge to catch her in a race. Hippomenes conspires with Venus, who arms him with three golden apples. On race day, as Atalanta pulls ahead, Hippomenes rolls the golden apples, one by one, in her path. Distracted, she slows to scoop up the glittering fruit, and cedes her front-runner status. Atalanta, who’d met every direct confrontation she ever faced, trades her freedom for baubles.
In the years since feminism’s revival in the early 1970s, American women have sped across so much ground that we can scarcely recognize the lives our grandmothers lived. We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation. Under its thrall, American women now are in danger of fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy—keeping their lives but losing themselves.
The bait-and-switch maneuver that the consumer market plays with feminism is long-standing. On Easter in 1929, a prominent ad man organized a “Freedom March” down Fifth Avenue to honor suffrage—by encouraging women to smoke. The American Tobacco Company’s publicist persuaded “a leading feminist” to head up the procession of women, who were all puffing on their “torches of freedom.” More recently, after the second wave of feminism, advertisers appealed to a female “revolutionary” spirit to retail everything from shampoo to nylons. Hanes even persuaded a NOW official to endorse its “liberating” pantyhose. That strategy was standard operating procedure by the time Backlash was published. I soon found myself fielding (and declining) multiple invitations from merchandisers to place my feminist seal of approval on brands of blue jeans, high heels, even breast implants.
By now, though, the modern soft sell has moved far beyond such blatant plugs. We live in a time when the very fundaments of feminism have been recast in commercial terms—and rolled at our feet like three golden apples. The feminist ethic of economic independence has become the golden apple of buying power—a “power” that for most women yields little more than credit-card debt, an overstocked closet, and a hunger that never gets sated because it’s a hunger for something beyond the material. The feminist ethic of self-determination has turned into the golden apple of “self-improvement”—an improvement dedicated mostly to one’s physical appearance, self-esteem, and the fool’s errand of reclaiming one’s youth. And the feminist ethic of public agency has shape-shifted into the golden apple of publicity—the pursuit of a popularity that hinges not on how much one changes the world, but on how marvelously one fits into its harness.
How much harder than combating right-wing recalcitrance is sailing past the mercantile sirens, especially when their only professed desire is to give women what we want, or even more. The sirens offer an enhanced form of feminism—New! Better! More Satisfying!—liberation fortified with the nutrients of success, sex appeal, celebrity, happiness. In other words, exactly what Madison Avenue originally coined as “having it all.” Who can resist such a come-on?
But while women are distracted, we aren’t exactly duped. We sense what Tocqueville asserted centuries earlier: “I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones.” That sneaking suspicion lurks beneath those lifestyle stories about women “stepping off the fast track” or “having second thoughts” about their so-called liberation. It lies below the surface of the words of the ex-careerist in the Times’s “Opt-Out Revolution” story: “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want that kind of life.” The Times interpreted her lament as a rejection of feminism, which the article’s author claimed was all about “grabbing a fair share of power” and “standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law.” But fantasies of fame and world conquest aren’t feminist aspirations; they belong to the dreamscape of the marketplace.
Which isn’t to say that the affluent women “opting out” in the Times’s article were throwing over materialist concerns; their “revolution” was nearly as pseudo as the right-wing women’s “liberation” movement. Nonetheless, haunting their distress is a disillusionment. And if they could find a way to express that discontent in political terms, it might lead them somewhere other than lost afternoons sipping lattes at Starbucks.
A couple of years ago I was giving a talk on women’s status at Washington and Lee University. Afterward, an undergraduate buttonholed me to air an all-too-common grievance. “Feminism has been nothing but a burden for my generation,” she said. What did she mean by a burden? “You have to be this big achiever,” she told me. “You have to get the highest grades. You have to get the best LSAT scores. You have to get into the most prestigious law firm. It’s too much.” Too much, yet not enough. For the young woman was right, if that is what we mean by feminism. What is missing is the deeper promise of a woman’s revolution, a revolution that was never intended to champion cut-throat competition or winner-take-all ethics, a revolution that was abandoned on the road to economic opportunity. Women’s disillusionment comes from the half-gleaned truth that, while we have achieved economic gains, we have yet to find a way to turn those gains toward the larger and more meaningful goals of social change, responsible citizenship, the advancement of human creativity, the building of a mature and vital public world. We live within the confines of a social structure and according to cultural conventions that remain substantially intact from before the revolution. We have used our gains to gild our shackles, but not break them.
But disillusionment is a start. Being disappointed is not the same as being defeated. The very fact that women feel cheated, the very fact that, when we survey the perfumed trappings of our world, we smell, however faintly, a rat, suggests that women are still in fighting form. We aren’t yet down for the count. The right-wing forces understand this fact better than we do. Which is why the right elevated women in their ranks in the first place—to oppose a threat they take very seriously, the threat posed by the larger goals of feminism. Conservative politicians no longer bother to defend the old antifeminist Maginot line; they aren’t trying to block women from universities, corporations, lines of credit, or representation on the Republican platform committee. They have ceded that territory. And in ceding it, in accepting women into formerly forbidden precincts, they have revealed that those precincts were only frontier outposts, not the innermost fortress, the citadel that holds the key to the patriarchal status quo. That status quo would keep women, no matter how many stock options or credit cards or congressional seats or board appointments they possess, in a political stalemate: We will accept you into our world as long as you agree to accept the world as it is. The opponents of women’s liberation are girding for the next assault by American women. They seem to believe it will be an assault on the world as it is. We can only hope they are right.
—SUSAN FALUDI
January 2006