A BACKLASH AGAINST WOMEN’S RIGHTS is nothing new in American history. Indeed, it’s a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the culture’s brief flowerings of feminism. “The progress of women’s rights in our culture, unlike other types of ‘progress,’ has always been strangely reversible,” American literature scholar Ann Douglas has observed. Women’s studies historians over the years have puzzled over the “halting gait,” the “fits and starts,” the “stop-go affair” of American feminism. “While men proceed on their developmental way, building on inherited traditions,” women’s historian Dale Spender writes, “women are confined to cycles of lost and found.”
Yet in the popular imagination, the history of women’s rights is more commonly charted as a flat dead line that, only twenty years ago, began a sharp and unprecedented incline. Ignoring the many peaks and valleys traversed in the endless march toward liberty, this mental map of American women’s progress presents instead a great plain of “traditional” womanhood, upon which women have roamed helplessly and “naturally,” the eternally passive subjects until the 1970s women’s movement came along. This map is in itself harmful to women’s rights; it presents women’s struggle for liberty as if it were a one-time event, a curious and even noxious by-product of a postmodern age. It is, as poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has described it, “the erasure of women’s political and historical past which makes each new generation of feminists appear as an abnormal excrescence on the face of time.”
An accurate charting of American women’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. The American woman is trapped on this asymptotic spiral, turning endlessly through the generations, drawing ever nearer to her destination without ever arriving. Each revolution promises to be “the revolution” that will free her from the orbit, that will grant her, finally, a full measure of human justice and dignity. But each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line. Each time, the American woman hears that she must wait a little longer, be a little more patient—her hour on the stage is not yet at hand. And worse yet, she may learn to accept her coerced deferral as her choice, even to flaunt it.
Whenever this spiral has swung closer to equality, women have believed their journey to be drawing to a close. “At the opening of the twentieth century,” suffragist Ida Husted Harper rejoiced, the female condition was “completely transformed in most respects.” Soon the country would have to open a Woman’s Museum, feminist Elsie Clews Parsons mused in 1913, just to prove “to a doubting posterity that once women were a distinct social class.” Still later, at the close of World War II, a female steelworker declared in a government survey, “The old theory that a woman’s place is in the home no longer exists. Those days are gone forever.”
Yet in each of these periods the celebrations were premature. This pattern of women’s hopes raised only to be dashed is peculiar neither to American history nor to modern times. Different kinds of backlashes against women’s mostly tiny gains—or against simply the perception that women were in the ascendancy—may be found in the rise of restrictive property laws and penalties for unwed and childless women of ancient Rome, the heresy judgements against female disciples of the early Christian Church, or the mass witch burnings of medieval Europe.
But in the compressed history of the United States, backlashes have surfaced with striking frequency and intensity—and they have evolved their most subtle means of persuasion. In a nation where class distinctions are weak, or at least submerged, maybe it’s little wonder that gender status is more highly prized and hotly defended. If the American man can claim no ancestral coat of arms on which to elevate himself from the masses, perhaps he can fashion his sex into a sort of pedigree. In America, too, successfully persuading women to collaborate in their own subjugation is a tradition of particularly long standing. White European women first entered the American colonies as “purchase brides,” shipped into Virginia and sold to bachelors for the price of transport. This transaction was billed not as servitude but choice because the brides were “sold with their own consent.” As a perplexed Alexis de Tocqueville ob served, the single woman in early 19th-century America seemed to have more freedom than her counterpart in Europe, yet also more determination to relinquish it in confining marriages: “It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle.” Such a trait would prove especially useful in the subsequent periodic campaigns to stymie women’s progress, as American women were encouraged to use what liberty they did have to promote their own diminishment. As scholar Cynthia Kinnard observes in her bibliographical survey of American antifeminist literature, about one-third of the articles and nearly half the books and pamphlets denouncing the campaign for women’s rights have issued from a female pen.
While American backlashes can be traced back to colonial times, the style of backlash that surfaced in the last decade has its roots most firmly in the last century. The Victorian era gave rise to mass media and mass marketing—two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women’s aspirations than coercive laws and punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, and claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests.
If we retrace the course of women’s rights back to the Victorian era, we wind up with a spiral that has made four revolutions. A struggle for women’s rights gained force in the mid-19th century, the early 1900s, the early 1940s, and the early 1970s. In each case, the struggle yielded to backlash.
The “woman movement” of the mid-19th century, launched at the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention and articulated most famously by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, pressed for suffrage and an array of liberties—education, jobs, marital and property rights, “voluntary motherhood,” health and dress reform. But by the end of the century, a cultural counterreaction crushed women’s appeals for justice. Women fell back before a barrage of warnings virtually identical to today’s, voiced by that era’s lineup of Ivy League scholars, religious leaders, medical experts, and press pundits. Educated women of this era, too, were said to be falling victim to a man shortage; “the redundancy of spinster gentlewomen,” in the parlance of the time, inspired debate in state legislatures and frenzied scholarly “research.” A marriage study even made the rounds in 1895, asserting that only 28 percent of college-educated women could get married. They, too, faced a so-called infertility epidemic—this one induced by “brain-womb” conflict, as a Harvard professor’s best-selling book defined it in 1873. And Victorian women who worked were likewise said to be suffering a sort of early career burnout—“exhaustion of the feminine nervous system”—and losing their femininity to “hermaphroditism.”
Then as now, late-Victorian religious and political leaders accused women who postponed childbearing of triggering a “race suicide” that endangered (white) America’s future; they were, in the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, “criminals against the race” and “objects of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Married women who demanded rights were charged, then as now, with creating a “crisis of the family.” The media and the churches railed against feminists for fueling divorce rates, and state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws between 1889 and 1906. South Carolina banned divorce out-right. And a band of “purity” crusaders, like the contemporary New Right brigade, condemned contraception and abortion as “obscene” and sought to have them banned. By the late 1800s, they had succeeded: Congress outlawed the distribution of contraceptives and a majority of states criminalized abortion—both for the first time in the nation’s history.
In the early 1910s, women’s rights activists resurrected the struggle for suffrage and turned it into a nationwide political campaign. The word “feminism” entered the popular vocabulary—even silent film vamp Theda Bara was calling herself one—and dozens of newly formed women’s groups hastened to endorse its tenets. The National Woman’s Party organized in 1916, a campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment began and working women formed their own trade unions and struck for decent pay and better working conditions. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, founded in 1900, grew so quickly that it was the American Federation of Labor’s third largest affiliate by 1913. Margaret Sanger led a national birth control movement. And Heterodoxy, a sort of feminist intelligentsia, began conducting early versions of consciousness-raising groups.
But just as women had won the right to vote and a handful of state legislatures had granted women jury duty and passed equal-pay laws, another counterassault on feminism began. The U.S. War Department, with the aid of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, incited a red-baiting campaign against women’s rights leaders. Feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman suddenly found they couldn’t get their writings published; Jane Addams was labeled a Communist and a “serious threat” to national security; and Emma Goldman was exiled. The media maligned suffragists; magazine writers advised that feminism was “destructive of woman’s happiness;” popular novels attacked “career women;” clergymen railed against “the evils of woman’s revolt;” scholars charged feminism with fueling divorce and infertility; and doctors claimed that birth control was causing “an increase in insanity, tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, diabetes, and cancer.” Young women, magazine writers informed, no longer wanted to be bothered with “all that feminist pother.” Postfeminist sentiments first surfaced, not in the 1980s media, but in the 1920s press. Under this barrage, membership in feminist organizations soon plummeted, and the remaining women’s groups hastened to denounce the Equal Rights Amendment or simply converted themselves to social clubs. “Ex-feminists” began issuing their confessions.
In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920—the same year women won the vote. In place of equal rights, lawmakers, labor and corporate leaders, and eventually some women’s groups endorsed “protective” labor policies, measures that served largely to protect men’s jobs and deny women equal pay. The ’20s eroded a decade of growth for female professionals; by 1930 there were fewer female doctors than in 1910. When the Depression hit, a new round of federal and state laws forced thousands of women out of the work force, and new federal wage codes institutionalized lower pay rates for women.
“All about us we see attempts being made, buttressed by governmental authority, to throw women back into the morass of unlovely dependence from which they were just beginning to emerge,” feminist Doris Stevens wrote in 1933, in Equal Rights, the National Woman’s Party publication. “It looks sometimes as if pre-suffrage conditions even might be curiously reversed and the grievance held by women against men be changed into a grievance held by men against women,” Margaret Culkin Banning remarked in an essay in Harper’s in 1935. But like today, most social commentators held that the feminists’ tents were folding only because their battle was over—women’s rights had been secured. As political science scholar Ethel Klein writes of the 1920s, “The dissipation of interest in the women’s movement was taken as a sign not of failure but of completion.”
The spiral swung around again in the 1940s as a wartime economy opened millions of high-paying industrial jobs to women, and the government even began to offer minimal day care and household assistance. Federal brochures saluted the hardy working woman as a true patriot. Strong women became cultural icons; Rosie the Riveter was revered and, in 1941, Wonder Woman was introduced. Women welcomed their new economic status: 5 to 6 million poured into the work force during the war years, 2 million into heavy-industry jobs: by war’s end, they would represent a record 57 percent of all employed people. Seventy-five percent reported in government surveys that they were going to keep their jobs after the war—and, in the younger generation, 88 percent of the 33,000 girls polled in a Senior Scholastic survey said they wanted a career, too. Women’s political energies revived; working-class women flooded unions, protested for equal pay, equal seniority rights, and day care; and feminists launched a new campaign for the ERA. This time, the amendment won the endorsements of both political parties, and, in the course of the war, for the first time since the ERA had been proposed in 1923, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted it to the Senate floor three times. In a record outpouring of legislative goodwill, the ’40s-era Congress passed thirty-three bills serving to advance women’s rights.
But with the close of World War II, efforts by industry, government, and the media converged to force a female retreat. Two months after a U.S. victory had been declared abroad, women were losing their economic beachhead as 800,000 were fired from the aircraft industry; by the end of the year, 2 million female workers had been purged from heavy industry. Employers revived prohibitions against hiring married women or imposed caps on female workers’ salaries, and the federal government proposed giving unemployment assistance only to men, shut down its day care services, and defended the “right” of veterans to displace working women. An anti-ERA coalition rallied its forces, including the federal Women’s Bureau, forty-three national organizations, and the National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment. Soon, they had killed the amendment—a death sentence hailed on the New York Times editorial page. “Motherhood cannot be amended and we are glad the Senate didn’t try,” the newspaper proclaimed. When the United Nations issued a statement supporting equal rights for women in 1948, the United States government was the only one of the twenty-two American nations that wouldn’t sign it.
Employers who had applauded women’s work during the war now accused working women of incompetence or “bad attitudes”—and laid them off at rates that were 75 percent higher than men’s. Advice experts filled bookstores with the usual warnings: education and jobs were stripping women of their femininity and denying them marriage and motherhood; women were suffering “fatigue” and mental instability from employment; women who used day care were selfish “fur-coated mothers.” Yet another Ivy League marriage study drew headlines: this Cornell University study said college-educated single women had no more than a 65 percent chance of getting married. Better watch out, the Sunday magazine This Week advised its female readers; a college education “skyrockets your chances of becoming an old maid.” Feminism was “a deep illness” that was turning modern women into a woebegone “lost sex,” the era’s leading advice book warned. Independent-minded women had gotten “out of hand” during the war, Barnard sociologist Willard Waller decreed. The rise in female autonomy and aggressiveness, scholars and government officials agreed, was causing a rise in juvenile delinquency and divorce rates—and would only lead to the collapse of the family. Child-care authorities, most notably Dr. Benjamin Spock, demanded that wives stay home, and colleges produced new curricula to train women to be good homemakers.
Advertisers reversed their wartime message—that women could work and enjoy a family life—and claimed now that women must choose, and choose only home. As a survey of women’s images in postwar magazine fiction would later find, careers for women were painted in a more unattractive light in this era than at any time since the turn of the century; these short stories represented “the strongest assault on feminine careerism” since 1905. On the comics pages, even the postwar Wonder Woman was going weak at the knees.
Again, a few defenders of women’s rights tried to point out signs of the gathering political storm. In 1948, Susan B. Anthony IV remarked that there appeared to be a move afoot to “crack up” the women’s movement. Margaret Hickey, head of the federal Women’s Advisory Committee to the War Manpower Commission, warned that a “campaign of undercover methods and trumped up excuses” was driving women from top-paying government jobs. But most women’s rights groups were disowning their own cause. Soon, Hickey herself was declaring, “The days of the old, selfish, strident feminism are over.” Meanwhile, a younger generation of women, adrift in a TV-shaped dreamscape of suburban patios and family dens, donned padded bras and denied personal ambition. Soon, the majority of young college women were claiming they were on campus only to find husbands. Their age at first marriage dropped to a record low for the century; the number of their babies climbed to a record high. The ’50s era of the “feminine mystique” is amply chronicled, most famously in Betty Friedan’s 1963 account. But in fact the much publicized homebound image of the ’50s woman little matched her actual circumstances. This is an important distinction that bears special relevance to the current backlash, the effects of which have often been discounted, characterized as benign or even meaningless because women continue to enter the work force. In the ’50s, while women may have been hastening down the aisle, they were also increasing their numbers at the office—soon at a pace that outstripped even their wartime work participation. And it was precisely women’s unrelenting influx into the job market, not a retreat to the home, that provoked and sustained the antifeminist furor. It was the reality of the nine-to-five working woman that heightened cultural fantasies of the compliant homebody and playmate. As literary scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe of the postwar era, “[J]ust as more and more women were getting paid for using their brains, more and more men represented them in novels, plays, and poems as nothing but bodies.”
These cultural images notwithstanding, the proportion of women working doubled between 1940 and 1950, and for the first time the majority of them were married—forcing the average man to face the specter of the working woman in his own home. Even at the very peak of the postwar industries’ expulsion of female workers, women were quietly returning to the workplace through a back door. While 3.25 million women were pushed or persuaded out of industrial jobs in the first year after the end of World War II, 2.75 million women were entering the work force at the same time, in lower-paid clerical and administrative positions. Two years after the war, working women had recouped their numerical setbacks in the job market, and by 1952 more women were employed than at the height of the war economy’s output. By 1955 the average wife worked until her first child was born and went back to work when her children started school.
The backlash of the feminine-mystique years did not return working women to the home (and, instructively, almost none of the wartime clerical work force was laid off after V-J Day). Rather, the culture derided them; employers discriminated against them; government promoted new employment policies that discriminated against women; and eventually women themselves internalized the message that, if they must work, they should stick to typing. The ranks of working women didn’t shrink in the ’50s, but the proportion of them who were relegated to low-paying jobs rose, their pay gap climbed, and occupational segregation increased as their numbers in the higher-paying professions declined from one-half in 1930 to about one-third by 1960. The ’50s backlash, in short, didn’t transform women into full-time “happy housewives;” it just demoted them to poorly paid secretaries.
Women’s contradictory circumstances in the ’50s—rising economic participation coupled with an embattled and diminished cultural stature—is the central paradox of women under a backlash. At the turn of the century, concerted efforts by university presidents, politicians, and business leaders to purge women from the campus and the office also failed; between 1870 and 1910 both the proportion of college women and the proportion of working women doubled. We should not, therefore, gauge a backlash by losses in women’s numbers in the job market, but by attacks on women’s rights and opportunities within that market, attacks that serve to stall and set back true economic equality. As a 1985 AFL-CIO report on workers’ rights observed of women’s dubious progress in the ’80s job market: “The number of working women has grown to about 50 million today, but there has been no similar growth in their economic status.”
To understand why a backlash works in this contrary manner, we need to go back to our tilted corkscrew model of female progress. In any time of backlash, cultural anxiety inevitably centers on two pressure points in that spiral, demographic trends that act like two arrows pushing against the spiral, causing it to lean in the direction of women’s advancement, but also becoming the foci of the backlash’s greatest wrath.
A woman’s claim to her own paycheck is one of these arrows. The proportion of women in the paid labor force has been rising with little interruption since the Victorian era. In a society where income is the measure of social strength and authority, women’s growing presence in the labor force can’t help but mitigate women’s secondary standing. But it hasn’t brought full equality. Instead, with each turn of the spiral, the culture simply redoubles its resistance, if not by returning women to the kitchen, then by making the hours spent away from their stoves as inequitable and intolerable as possible: pushing women into the worst occupations, paying them the lowest wages, laying them off first and promoting them last, refusing to offer child care or family leave, and subjecting them to harassment.
The other straight arrow pressing against but never piercing the backlash corkscrew is a woman’s control over her own fertility—and it, too, sets up the same paradox between private behavior and public attitudes. As Henry Adams said of the furor over women’s increasing propensity to limit family growth in his day, “[T]he surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the other.” With the exception of the postwar baby boom, the number of childbirths per household has gradually declined in the last century. The ability to limit family size has certainly improved women’s situation, but it, too, has only inspired countervailing social campaigns to regulate pregnant women’s behavior and stigmatize the childless. In periods of backlash, birth control becomes less available, abortion is restricted, and women who avail themselves of it are painted as “selfish” or “immoral.”
The 1970s women’s movement made its most substantial progress on the twin fronts of employment and fertility—forging historic and record numbers of equal employment and anti-discrimination policies, forcing open the doors to lucrative and elite “male” professions, and ultimately helping to legalize abortion. And now, once again, as the backlash crests and breaks, it crashes hardest on these two shores—dismantling the federal apparatus for enforcing equal opportunity, gutting crucial legal rulings for working women, undermining abortion rights, halting birth control research, and promulgating “fetal protection” and “fetal rights” policies that have shut women out of lucrative jobs, caused them to undergo invasive obstetric surgeries against their will, and thrown “bad” mothers in jail.
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THE ATTACK on women’s rights that has developed in the last decade is perhaps most remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon at all. The press has largely ignored the mounting evidence of a backlash—and promoted the “evidence” that the backlash invented instead. The media have circulated make-believe data on marriage and infertility that linked women’s progress to marital and fertility setbacks, or unquestioningly passed along misleading government and private reports that concealed increasing inequities and injustice—such as the Labor Department’s claim that women’s wage gap has suddenly narrowed or the EEOC’s claim that sexual harassment on the job is declining or a Justice Department report that rape rates are static.
In place of factual reporting on the political erosion in women’s lives, the mass media have offered us fictional accounts of women “cocooning,” a so-called new social trend in which the Good Housekeeping-created “New Traditionalist” gladly retreats to her domestic shell. Cocooning is little more than a resurgence of the 1950s “back-to-the-home movement,” itself a creation of advertisers and, in turn, a recycled version of the Victorian fantasy that a new “cult of domesticity” was bringing droves of women home. Not surprisingly, the cocooning lady has been invented and exalted by the same institutions that have sustained the heaviest financial hit from women’s increasingly non-cocooning habits. Traditional women’s magazine publishers, television programmers, and the marketers of fashion, beauty, and household goods have all played central roles—all merchandisers who still believe they need “feminine passivity” and full-time homemaking to sell their wares. They have saluted and sold the New Traditionalist’s virtuous surrender time and again—in promotional tributes heralding the so-called return of the “new” Clairol Girl, the “new” Breck Girl, the new hearth angel of Victoria magazine, and the new lady of leisure in the catalogs of Victoria’s Secret.
The very choice of the word “cocooning” should suggest to us the trend’s fantastical nature. A cocoon is a husk sloughed upon maturity; butterflies don’t return to their chrysalis—nor to a larval state. The cultural myth of cocooning suggests an adult woman who has regressed in her life cycle, returned to a gestational stage. It maps the road back from the feminist journey, which was once aptly defined by a turn-of-the-century writer as “the attempt of women to grow up.” Cocooning’s infantile imagery, furthermore, bears a vindictive subtext, by promoting a retreat from female adulthood at the very time when the largest proportion of the female population is entering middle age. Feminine youth is elevated when women can least ascend its pedestal; cocooning urges women to become little girls, then mocks them mercilessly for the impossibility of that venture.
The false feminine vision that has been unfurled by contemporary popular culture in the last decade is a sort of vast velveteen curtain that hides women’s reality while claiming to be its mirror. It has not made women cocoon or become New Traditionalists. But its thick drapery has both concealed the political assault on women’s rights and become the impossible standard by which American women are asked to judge themselves. Its false front has encouraged each woman to doubt herself for not matching the image in the mass-produced mirror, instead of doubting the validity of the mirror itself and pressing to discover what its nonreflective surface hides.
As the backlash has gained power, instead of fighting and exposing its force, many women’s groups and individual women have become caught up with fitting into its fabricated backdrop. Feminist-minded institutions founded a decade earlier, from The First Women’s Bank to Options for Women, camouflaged their intent with new, neutral-sounding names; women in politics have claimed they are now only interested in “family issues,” not women’s rights; and career women with Ivy League degrees have eschewed the feminist label for public consumption. Instead of assailing injustice, many women have learned to adjust to it. Instead of getting angry, they have become depressed. Instead of uniting their prodigious numbers, they have splintered and turned their pain and frustration inward, some in starkly physical ways.
In turn, this female adjustment process to backlash pressures has yielded record profits for the many “professionals” who have rushed in to exploit and exacerbate it: advice writers and pop therapists, matchmaking consultants, plastic surgeons, and infertility specialists have both fueled and cashed in on women’s anxiety and panic under the backlash. Millions of women have sought relief from their distress, only to wind up in the all-popular counseling of the era where women learn not to raise their voices but to lower their expectations and “surrender” to their “higher power.”
The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation. In Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 Broadway hit The Heidi Chronicles, her heroine, Heidi Holland, delivers a speech that would become one of the most quoted lines by women writing about the female experience in the ’80s: “I feel stranded, and I thought the point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded,” the once feminist art historian says. “I thought we were all in this together.” As women’s collective quest for equal rights smacks into the backlash’s wall of resistance, it breaks into a million pieces, each shard a separate woman’s life. The backlash has ushered in not the cozy feeling of “family togetherness,” as advertisers have described it, but the chilling realization that it is now every woman for herself. “I’m alone,” a secretary confides in an article surveying contemporary women, an article that is filled with such laments. “I know a lot of people [are] dealing with the same problems, but I guess we’re just dealing with them by ourselves.” Both young and old women, nonideological undergraduates and feminist activists alike, have felt the pain of this new isolation—and the sense of powerlessness it has bred. “I feel abandoned,” an older feminist writes in the letters column of Ms., “as if we were all members of a club that they have suddenly quit.” “We don’t feel angry, we feel helpless,” a young woman bursts out at a college panel on women’s status.
The loss of a collective spirit has proven far more debilitating to American women than what is commonly characterized as the overly taxing experience of a liberated life. Backlash-era conventional wisdom blames the women’s movement for American women’s “exhaustion.” The feminists have pushed forward too fast, backlash pundits say; they have brought too much change too soon and have worn women out. But the malaise and enervation that women are feeling today aren’t induced by the speed of liberation but by its stagnation. The feminist revolution has petered out, leaving so many women discouraged and paralyzed by the knowledge that, once again, the possibility for real progress has been foreclosed.
When one is feeling stranded, finding a safe harbor inevitably becomes a more compelling course than bucking social currents. Keeping the peace with the particular man in one’s life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture. Saying one is “not a feminist” (even while supporting quietly every item of the feminist platform) seems the most prudent, self-protective strategy. Ultimately in such conditions, the impulse to remedy social injustice can become not only secondary but silent. “In a state of feeling alone,” as feminist writer Susan Griffin has said, “the knowledge of oppression remains mute.”
To expect each woman, in such a time of isolation and crushing conformism, to brave a solitary feminist stand is asking too much. “If I were to overcome the conventions,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero.” Under the backlash, even a heroine can lose her nerve, as the social climate raises the stakes to an unbearable degree and as the backlash rhetoric drives home, time and again, the terrible penalties that will befall a pioneering woman who flouts convention. In the last decade, all the warnings and threats about the “consequences” and “costs” of feminist aspiration have had their desired effect. By 1989, almost half the women in a New York Times poll on women’s status said they now feared they had sacrificed too much for their gains. The maximum price that their culture had forced them to pay for minimal progress, they said, was just too high.
“And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity.”
BETTY FRIEDAN, The Feminine Mystique
This stirring proclamation, offered in the final page of Friedan’s classic work, is one prediction that never came to pass. Feminists have always optimistically figured that once they demonstrated the merits of their cause, male hostility to women’s rights would evaporate. They have always been disappointed. “I am sure the emancipated man is a myth sprung from our hope and eternal aspiration,” feminist Doris Stevens wrote wearily in the early 1900s. “There has been much accomplishment,” Margaret Culkin Banning wrote of women’s rights in 1935, “. . . and more than a few years have passed. But the resentment of men has not disappeared. Quietly it has grown and deepened.”
When author Anthony Astrachan completed his seven-year study of American male attitudes in the 1980s, he found that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the men he surveyed “genuinely support women’s demands for independence and equality.” In 1988, the American Male Opinion Index, a poll of three thousand men conducted for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, found that less than one fourth of men supported the women’s movement, while the majority favored traditional roles for women. Sixty percent said wives with small children should stay home. Other studies examining male attitudes toward the women’s movement—of which, regrettably, there are few—suggest that the most substantial share of the growth in men’s support for feminism may have occurred in the first half of the ’70s, in that brief period when women’s “lib” was fashionable, and slowed since. As the American Male Opinion Index observed, while men in the ’80s continued to give lip service to such abstract matters of “fair play” as the right to equal pay, “when the issues change from social justice to personal applications, the consensus crumbles.” By the ’80s, as the poll results made evident, men were interpreting small advances in women’s rights as big, and complete, ones; they believed women had made major progress toward equality—while women believed the struggle was just beginning. This his-and-hers experience of the equal-rights campaign would soon generate a gulf between the sexes.
At the same time that men were losing interest in feminist concerns, women were gaining and deepening theirs. During much of the ’70s, there had been little divergence between men and women in polling questions about changing sex roles, and men had even given slightly more support than women to such issues as the Equal Rights Amendment. But as women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman’s proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially. By the ’80s, as the polls showed, they outpaced men in their support for virtually every feminist position.
The pressures of the backlash only served to reinforce and broaden the divide. As basic rights and opportunities for women became increasingly threatened, especially for female heads of households, the ranks of women favoring not just a feminist but a social-justice agenda swelled. Whether the question was affirmative action, the military buildup, or federal aid for health care, women were becoming more radical, men more conservative. This was especially apparent among younger women and men; it was younger men who gave the most support to Reagan. (Contrary to conventional wisdom, the rise of “the conservative youth” in the early ’80s was largely a one-gender phenomenon.) Even in the most liberal baby-boom populations, male and female attitudes were polarizing dramatically. A national survey of “progressive” baby boomers (defined as the 12 million who support social-change groups) found 60 percent of the women called themselves “radical” to “very liberal,” while 60 percent of the men titled themselves “moderate” to “conservative.” The pollsters identified one prime cause for this chasm: The majority of women surveyed said they felt the ’80s had been a “bad decade” for them (while the majority of men disagreed)—and they feared the next decade would be even worse.
The divergence in men’s and women’s attitudes passed several benchmarks in 1980. For the first time in American history, a gender voting gap emerged over women’s rights issues. For the first time, polls found men less likely than women to support equal roles for the sexes in business and government, less likely to support the Equal Rights Amendment—and more likely to say they preferred the “traditional” family where the wife stayed home. Moreover, some signs began to surface that men’s support for women’s rights issues was not only lagging but might actually be eroding. A national poll found that men who “strongly agreed” that the family should be “traditional”—with the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the housewife—suddenly jumped four percentage points between 1986 and 1988, the first rise in nearly a decade. (The same year, it fell for women.) The American Male Opinion Index found that the proportion of men who fell into the group opposing changes in sex roles and other feminist objectives had risen from 48 percent in 1988 to 60 percent in 1990—and the group willing to adapt to these changes had shrunk from 52 percent to 40 percent.
By the end of the decade, the National Opinion Research poll was finding that nearly twice the proportion of women as men thought a working mother could be just as good a parent as a mother who stayed home. In 1989, while a majority of women in the New York Times poll believed American society had not changed enough to grant women equality, only a minority of men agreed. A majority of the men were saying, however, that the women’s movement had “made things harder for men at home.” Just as in previous backlashes, American men’s discomfort with the feminist cause in the last decade has endured—and even “quietly grown and deepened.”
While pollsters can try to gauge the level of male resistance, they can’t explain it. And unfortunately our social investigators have not tackled “the man question” with one-tenth the enterprise that they have always applied to “the woman problem.” The works on masculinity would barely fill a bookshelf. We might deduce from the lack of literature that manhood is less complex and burdensome, and that it requires less maintenance than femininity. But the studies that are available on the male condition offer no such assurance. Quite the contrary, they find masculinity a fragile flower—a hothouse orchid in constant need of trellising and nourishment. “Violating sex roles has more severe consequences for males than females,” social researcher Joseph Pleck concluded. “[M]aleness in America,” as Margaret Mead wrote, “is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and reearned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.” Nothing seems to crush the masculine petals more than a bit of feminist rain—a few drops are perceived as a downpour. “Men view even small losses of deference, advantages, or opportunities as large threats,” wrote William Goode, one of many sociologists to puzzle over the peculiarly hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements in women’s rights.
“Women have become so powerful that our independence has been lost in our own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public.” So Cato wailed in 195 B.C., after a few Roman women sought to repeal a law that forbade their sex from riding in chariots and wearing multicolored dresses. In the 16th century, just the possibility that two royal women might occupy thrones in Europe at the same time provoked John Knox to issue his famous diatribe, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”
By the 19th century, the spokesmen of male fears had mostly learned to hide their anxiety over female independence behind masks of paternalism and pity. As Edward Bok, the legendary Victorian editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal and guardian of women’s morals, explained it to his many female readers, the weaker sex must not venture beyond the family sphere because their “rebellious nerves instantly and rightly cry out, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, but no farther.’” But it wasn’t female nerves that were rebelling against feminist efforts, not then and not now.
A “crisis of masculinity” has erupted in every period of backlash in the last century, a faithful quiet companion to the loudly voiced call for a “return to femininity.” In the late 1800s, a blizzard of literature decrying the “soft male” rolled off the presses. “The whole generation is womanized,” Henry James’s protagonist Basil Ransom lamented in The Bostonians. “The masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a femi-nine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age. . . . The masculine character . . . that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!” Child-rearing manuals urged parents to toughen up their sons with hard mattresses and vigorous athletic regimens. Billy Sunday led the clerical attack on “feminized” religion, promoting a “muscular Christianity” and a Jesus who was “no dough-faced, lickspittle-proposition” but “the greatest scrapper that ever lived.” Theodore Roosevelt warned of the national peril of losing the “fiber of vigorous hardiness and masculinity” and hardened his own fiber with the Rough Riders. Martial swaggering prevailed on the political platform; indeed, as sociologist Theodore Roszak writes of the “compulsive masculinity” era that culminated in World War I, “The period leading up to 1914 reads in the history books like one long drunken stag party.”
The masculinity crisis would return with each backlash. The fledgling Boy Scouts of America claimed one-fifth of all American boys by 1920; its founder’s explicit aim was to staunch the feminization of the American male by removing young men from the too powerful female orbit. Chief Scout Ernest Thompson Seton feared that boys were degenerating into “a lot of flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality.” Again, in the years following World War II, male commentators and literary figures were panicking over reduced masculine powers. At home, “momism” was siphoning virile juices. Philip Wylie’s best-selling Generation of Vipers advised, “We must face the dynasty of the dames at once, deprive them of our pocketbooks,” before the American man degenerated into “the Abdicating Male.” In what was supposed to be a special issue on “The American Woman,” Life magazine fixated on the weak-kneed American man. Because women had failed to live up to their feminine duties, the 1956 article charged, “the emerging American man tends to be passive and irresponsible.” In the business world, the Wall Street Journal warned in 1949 that “women are taking over.” Look decried the rise of “female dominance”: First, women had grabbed control of the stock market, the magazine complained, and now they were advancing on “authority-wielding executive jobs.”
In the ’80s, male nerves rebelled once more, as “a decline in American manhood” became the obsession of male clergy, writers, politicians, and scholars all along the political spectrum, from the right-wing Reverend Jerry Falwell to the leftist poet and lecturer Robert Bly. Antiabortion leaders such as Randall Terry rallied thousands of men with their visions of a Christ who was a muscle-bound “soldier,” not a girlish “sheep.” A new “men’s movement” drew tens of thousands of followers to all-male retreats, where they rooted out “feminized” tendencies and roused “the wild man within.” In the press, male columnists bemoaned the rise of the “sensitive man.” Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham advocated all-male clubs to tone sagging masculinity: “Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny,” he predicted. In films and television, all-male macho action shows so swamped the screen and set that the number of female roles in this era markedly declined. In fiction, violent macho action books were flying off the shelves, in a renaissance for this genre that Bantam Books’ male-action-adventure editor equated with the “blood-and-thunder pulp dime novels of the nineteenth century.” In apparel, the masculinity crisis was the one bright spot in this otherwise depressed industry: sales boomed in safari outfits, combat gear, and the other varieties of what Newsweek aptly dubbed “predatory fashion.” In national politics, the ’88 presidential campaign turned into a testosterone contest. “I’m not squishy soft,” Michael Dukakis fretted, and leapt into a tank. “I’m very tough.” George Bush, whose “wimpiness” preoccupied the press, announced, “I’m the pitbull of SDI.” He stocked his wardrobe with enough rugged togs to adorn an infantry, and turned jogging into a daily photo opportunity. Two years into his presidency, George Bush’s metaphorical martial bravado had taken a literal and bloody turn as his administration took the nation to war; it might be said that Bush began by boasting about “kicking a little ass” in his debate with Geraldine Ferraro and ended by, as he himself put it, “kicking ass” in the Persian Gulf.
Under this backlash, like its predecessors, an often ludicrous overreaction to women’s modest progress has prevailed. “The women are taking over” is again a refrain many working women hear from their male colleagues—after one or two women are promoted at their company, but while top management is still solidly male. In newsrooms, white male reporters routinely complain that only women and minorities can get jobs—often at publications where women’s and minorities’ numbers are actually shrinking. “At Columbia,” literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun has observed, “I have heard men say, with perfect sincerity, that a few women seeking equal pay are trying to overturn the university, to ruin it.” At Boston University, president John Silber fumed that his English department had turned into a “damn matriarchy”—when only six of its twenty faculty members were women. Feminists have “complete control” of the Pentagon, a brigadier general complained—when women, much less feminists, represented barely 10 percent of the armed services and were mostly relegated to the forces’ lowest levels.
• • •
BUT WHAT exactly is it about women’s equality that even its slightest shadow threatens to erase male identity? What is it about the way we frame manhood that, even today, it still depends so on “feminine” dependence for its survival? A little-noted finding by the Yankelovich Monitor survey, a large nationwide poll that has tracked social attitudes for the last two decades, takes us a good way toward a possible answer. For twenty years, the Monitor’s pollsters have asked its subjects to define masculinity. And for twenty years, the leading definition, ahead by a huge margin, has never changed. It isn’t being a leader, athlete, lothario, decision maker, or even just being “born male.” It is simply this: being a “good provider for his family.”
If establishing masculinity depends most of all on succeeding as the prime breadwinner, then it is hard to imagine a force more directly threatening to fragile American manhood than the feminist drive for economic equality. And if supporting a family epitomizes what it means to be a man, then it is little wonder that the backlash erupted when it did—against the backdrop of the ’80s economy. In this period, the “traditional” man’s real wages shrank dramatically (a 22 percent free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners), and the traditional male breadwinner himself became an endangered species (representing less than 8 percent of all households). That the ruling definition of masculinity remains so economically based helps to explain, too, why the backlash has been voiced most bitterly by two groups of men: blue-collar workers, devastated by the shift to a service economy, and younger baby boomers, denied the comparative riches their fathers and elder brothers enjoyed. The ’80s was the decade in which plant closings put blue-collar men out of work by the millions, and only 60 percent found new jobs—about half at lower pay. It was a time when, of all men losing earning power, younger baby-boom men were losing the most. The average man under thirty was earning 25 to 30 percent less than his counterpart in the early ’70s. Worst off was the average young man with only a high-school education: he was making only $18,000, half the earnings of his counterpart a decade earlier. Inevitably, these losses in earning power would breed other losses. As pollster Louis Harris observed, economic polarization spawned the most dramatic attitudinal change recorded in the last decade and a half: a spectacular doubling in the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as feeling “powerless.”
When analysts at Yankelovich reviewed the Monitor survey’s annual attitudinal data in 1986, they had to create a new category to describe a large segment of the population that had suddenly emerged, espousing a distinct set of values. This segment, now representing a remarkable one-fifth of the study’s national sample, was dominated by young men, median age thirty-three, disproportionately single, who were slipping down the income ladder—and furious about it. They were the younger, poorer brothers of the baby boom, the ones who weren’t so celebrated in ’80s media and advertising tributes to that generation. The Yankelovich report assigned the angry young men the euphemistic label of “the Contenders.”
The men who belonged to this group had one other distinguishing trait: they feared and reviled feminism. “It’s these downscale men, the ones who can’t earn as much as their fathers, who we find are the most threatened by the women’s movement,” Susan Hayward, senior vice president at Yankelovich, observes. “They represent 20 percent of the population that cannot handle the changes in women’s roles. They were not well employed, they were the first ones laid off, they had no savings and not very much in the way of prospects for the future.” Other surveys would reinforce this observation. By the late ’80s, the American Male Opinion Index found that the largest of its seven demographic groups was now the “Change Resisters,” a 24 percent segment of the population that was disproportionately underemployed, “resentful,” convinced that they were “being left behind” by a changing society, and most hostile to feminism.
To single out these men alone for blame, however, would be unfair. The backlash’s public agenda has been framed and promoted by men of far more affluence and influence than the Contenders, men at the helm in the media, business, and politics. Poorer or less-educated men have not so much been the creators of the antifeminist thesis as its receptors. Most vulnerable to its message, they have picked up and played back the backlash at distortingly high volume. The Contenders have dominated the ranks of the militant wing of the ’80s antiabortion movement, the list of plaintiffs filing reverse-discrimination and “men’s rights” lawsuits, the steadily mounting police rolls of rapists and sexual assailants. They are men like the notorious Charles Stuart, the struggling fur salesman in Boston who murdered his pregnant wife, a lawyer, because he feared that she—better educated, more successful—was gaining the “upper hand.” They are young men with little to no prospects like Yusef Salaam, one of six charged with raping and crushing the skull of a professional woman jogging in Central Park; as he later told the court, he felt “like a midget, a mouse, something less than a man.” And, just across the border, they are men like Marc Lepine, the unemployed twenty-five-year-old engineer who gunned down fourteen women in a University of Montreal engineering classroom because they were “all a bunch of fucking feminists.”
The economic victims of the era are men who know someone has made off with their future—and they suspect the thief is a woman. At no time did this seem more true than in the early ’80s, when, for the first time, women outranked men among new entrants to the work force and, for a brief time, men’s unemployment outdistanced women’s. The start of the ’80s provided not only a political but an economic hair trigger to the backlash. It was a moment of symbolic crossover points for men and women: the first time white men became less than 50 percent of the work force, the first time no new manufacturing jobs were created, the first time more women than men enrolled in college, the first time more than 50 percent of women worked, the first time more than 50 percent of married women worked, the first time more women with children than without children worked. Significantly, 1980 was the year the U.S. Census officially stopped defining the head of household as the husband.
To some of the men falling back, it certainly has looked as if women have done the pushing. If there has been a “price to pay” for women’s equality, then it seems to these men that they are paying it. The man in the White House during much of the ’80s did little to discourage this view. “Part of the unemployment is not as much recession,” Ronald Reagan said in a 1982 address on the economy, “as it is the great in crease of the people going into the job market, and—ladies, I’m not picking on anyone but—because of the increase in women who are working today.”
In reality, the past decade’s economic pains most often took a disproportionate toll on women, not men. And working women’s so-called gains under Reagan had precious little to do with men’s losses. If women appeared to be snapping up more jobs in the Reagan era of 1.56 percent annual job growth—the smallest rate under any administration since Eisenhower—that’s only because women had few male competitors for these new employment “opportunities.” About a third of the new jobs were at or below the poverty level, up from a fourth a decade earlier, and lowly “female” service jobs in retail and service industries accounted for 77 percent of the total net job growth in the ’80s. The so-called job growth occurred in such areas as $2-an-hour sweatshop labor, home-based work with subminimum wages, the sales-clerk and fast-food career track of no security and no benefits. These were not positions men were losing to women; these were the bottom-of-the-barrel tasks men turned down and women took out of desperation—to support families where the man was absent, out of work, or underemployed.
The ’80s economy thinned the ranks of middle-income earners and polarized the classes to the greatest extreme since the government began keeping such records in 1946. In this climate, the only way a middle-class family maintained its shaky grip on the income ladder was with two paychecks. Household income would have shrunk three times as much in the decade if women hadn’t worked in mass numbers. And this fact dealt the final blow to masculine pride and identity: not only could the middle-class man no longer provide for his family, the person who bailed him out was the wife he believed he was meant to support.
To the men who were suffering, the true origins of economic polarization seemed remote or intangible: leveraged buyouts that larded up debt and spat out jobs; a speculative boom that collapsed in the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash; a shift to offshore manufacturing and office automation; a loss of union power; the massive Reagan spending cuts for the poor and tax breaks for the rich; a minimum wage that placed a family of four at the poverty level; the impossible cost of housing that consumed almost half an average worker’s income. These are also conditions, it’s worth noting, that to a large degree reprise economic circumstances confronting American workers in previous backlash eras: mass financial speculation led to the panic of 1893 and the 1929 crash; under the late-19th-century and Depression-era backlashes, wage earners also reeled under waves of corporate mergers, unions lost their clout, and wealth was consolidated in the hands of the very few.
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one. All that free-floating anxiety over declining wages, insecure employment, and overpriced housing needs a place to light, and in the ’80s, much of it fixed itself on women. “There had to be a deeper cause [for the decade’s materialism] than the Reagan era and Wall Street,” a former newspaper editor wrote in the New York Times Magazine—then concluded, “The women’s movement had to have played a key role.” Seeking effigies to hang for the ’80s excesses of Wall Street, the American press and public hoisted highest a few female MBAs in this largely white male profession. “FATS” (“Female Arbitrageurs Traders and Short Sellers”) was what a particularly vindictive 1987 column in Barron’s labeled them. When the New York Times Magazine got around to decrying the avidity of contemporary brokers and investment bankers, the publication reserved its fiercest attack for a minor female player: Karen Valenstein, an E. F. Hutton vice president who was one of Wall Street’s “preeminent” women. (In fact, she wasn’t even high enough to run a division.) The magazine article, which was most critical of her supposed failings in the wife-and-motherhood department, unleashed a torrent of rage against her on Wall Street and in other newspapers (the New York Daily News even ran an un-popularity poll on her), and she was ultimately fired, blacklisted on Wall Street, and had to leave town. She eventually opened a more lady-like sweater store in Wyoming. Still later, when it came time to vent public wrath on the haves of the decade, Leona Helmsley was the figure most viciously tarred and feathered. She was dubbed “the Wicked Witch of the West” and a “whore” by politicians and screaming mobs, scalded in a Newsweek cover story (entitled “Rhymes with Rich”), and declared “a disgrace to humanity” (by, of all people, real-estate king Donald Trump). On the other hand, Michael Milken, whose multibillion-dollar manipulations dwarf Helmsley’s comparatively petty tax evasions, enjoyed fawning full-page ads from many admirers, kid-gloves treatment in national magazines such as Vanity Fair, and even plaudits from civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats—charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd. Beset by corruption and awash in weaponry boondoggles, military brass blamed the Defense Department’s troubles on feminists who were trying “to reduce combat effectiveness” and on “the feminization of the American military;” commanding officers advised the Pentagon that pregnancy among female officers—a condition affecting less than I percent of the total enlisted force at any one time—was the armed services’ “single biggest readiness problem.” Mayor Marion Barry blamed a “bitch” for his cocaine-laced fall from grace—and one of his more vocal defenders, writer Ishmael Reed, went further, recasting the whole episode later in a play as a feminist conspiracy. Joel Steinberg’s attorney claimed that the notorious batterer and child beater had been destroyed by “hysterical feminists.” And even errant Colonel Oliver North blamed his legal troubles in the Iran-Contra affair on “an arrogant army of ultramilitant feminists.”
Once a society projects its fears onto a female form, it can try to cordon off those fears by controlling women—pushing them to conform to comfortingly nostalgic norms and shrinking them in the cultural imagination to a manageable size. The demand that women “return to femininity” is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful. The “feminine” woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
In times of backlash, images of the restrained woman line the walls of the popular culture’s gallery. We see her silenced, infantilized, immobilized, or, the ultimate restraining order, killed. She is a frozen home-bound figure, a bedridden patient, an anonymous still body. She is “the Quiet Woman,” the name on an ’80s-vintage wine label that depicted a decapitated woman. She is the comatose woman on display in perfume ads for Opium and many other ’80s scents. She is Laura Palmer, the dead girl of “Twin Peaks,” whom Esquire picked for the cover of its “Women We Love” issue. While there have been a few cases—Murphy Brown on TV, or, to some degree, Madonna in music—where a female figure who is loud and self-determined has successfully challenged the popular consensus, they are the exceptions. More commonly, outspoken women on screen and stage have been hushed or, in a case like Roseanne Barr’s, publicly shamed—and applause reserved for their more compliant and whispery sisters. In this past decade, the media, the movies, the fashion and beauty industries, have all honored most the demure and retiring child-woman—a neo-Victorian “lady” with a pallid visage, a birdlike creature who stays indoors, speaks in a chirpy small voice, and clips her wings in restrictive clothing. Her circumstances are, at least in mainstream culture, almost always portrayed as her “choice;” it is important not only that she wear rib-crushing garments but that she lace them up herself.
The restrained woman of the current backlash distinguishes herself from her predecessors in earlier American backlashes by appearing to choose her condition twice—first as a woman and second as a feminist. Victorian culture peddled “femininity” as what “a true woman” wants; in the marketing strategy of contemporary culture, it’s what a “liberated” woman craves, too. Just as Reagan appropriated populism to sell a political program that favored the rich, politicians, and the mass media, and advertising adopted feminist rhetoric to market policies that hurt women or to peddle the same old sexist products or to conceal antifeminist views. Bush promised “empowerment” for poor women—as a substitute for the many social-service programs he was slashing. Even Playboy claimed to ally itself with female progress. Women have made such strides, the magazine’s spokeswoman assured the press, “there’s no longer a stigma attached to posing.”
The ’80s culture stifled women’s political speech and then redirected self-expression to the shopping mall. The passive consumer was reissued as an ersatz feminist, exercising her “right” to buy products, making her own “choices” at the checkout counter. “You can have it all,” a Michelob ad promised a nubile woman in a bodysuit—but by “all,” the brewing company meant only a less-filling beer. Criticized for targeting young women in its ads, an indignant Philip Morris vice president claimed that such criticism was “sexist,” because it suggested that “adult women are not capable of making their own decisions about whether or not to smoke.” The feminist entreaty to follow one’s own instincts became a merchandising appeal to obey the call of the market—an appeal that diluted and degraded women’s quest for true self-determination. By returning women to a view of themselves as devoted shoppers, the consumption-obsessed decade succeeded in undercutting one of the guiding principles of feminism: that women must think for themselves. As Christopher Lasch (who would himself soon be lobbing his own verbal grenades at feminists) observed in The Culture of Narcissism, consumerism undermines women’s progress most perniciously when it “seems to side with women against male oppression.”
The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, “You’ve come a long way, baby” and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. . . . It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.
The contemporary counterassault on women’s rights contributes still another unique tactic to the old backlash strategy books: the pose of a “sophisticated” ironic distance from its own destructive ends. To the backlash’s list of faked emotions—pity for single women, worry over the fatigue level of career women, concern for the family—the current onslaught adds a sneering “hip” cynicism toward those who dare point out discrimination or anti-female messages. In the era’s entertainment and advertising, aimed at and designed by baby boomers, the self-conscious cast of characters constantly let us know that they know their presentation of women is retrograde and demeaning, but what of it? “Guess we’re reliving ‘Father Knows Best,’” television figures ironically chuckle to each other, as if women’s secondary status has become no more than a long-running inside joke. To make a fuss about sexual injustice is more than unfeminine; it is now uncool. Feminist anger, or any form of social outrage, is dismissed breezily—not because it lacks substance but because it lacks “style.”
It is hard enough to expose antifeminist sentiments when they are dressed up in feminist clothes. But it is far tougher to confront a foe that professes not to care. Even the unmitigated furor of an antiabortion “soldier” may be preferable to the jaundiced eye of the sitcom spokesmen. Feminism is “so ’70s,” the pop culture’s ironists say, stifling a yawn. We’re “postfeminist” now, they assert, meaning not that women have arrived at equal justice and moved beyond it, but simply that they themselves are beyond even pretending to care. It is an affectlessness that may, finally, deal the most devastating blow to American women’s rights.