Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  National data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the percentage of women awarded alimony or maintenance payments (all told, a mere 14 percent) is not significantly different from what it was in the 1920s. Weitzman argues that, even so, one group of women—long-married traditional housewives—have been hurt by the new laws, caught in the middle when the rules changed. Yet her own data show that older housewives and long-married women are the only groups of divorced women who actually are being awarded alimony in greater numbers under the new laws than the old. The increase that she reports for housewives married more than ten years is a remarkable 21 percent.

  Her other point is that under no-fault “equal division” rules, the couple is increasingly forced to sell the house, whereas under the old laws, she says, the judge traditionally gave it to the wife. But the new divorce laws don’t require house sales and, in fact, the authors of the California law explicitly stated that judges shouldn’t use the law to force single mothers and their children from the home. If more women are being forced to sell the family home, the new laws aren’t to blame.

  The example Weitzman gives of a forced house sale is in itself harshly illuminating. A thirty-eight-year-old divorcing housewife wanted to remain in the home where the family had lived for fifteen years. Not only did she want to spare her teenage son further disruption, she couldn’t afford to move—because the child support and alimony payments the judge had granted were so low. In desperation, she offered to sacrifice her portion of her husband’s pension plan, about $85,000, if only he would let her stay in the house. He wouldn’t. She tried next to refinance the house, and pay off her husband that way, but no bank would give her a loan based on spousal support. In court, the judge was no more yielding:

  I begged the judge. . . . All I wanted was enough time for Brian [her son] to adjust to the divorce. . . . I broke down and cried on the stand . . . but the judge refused. He gave me three months to move. . . . [M]y husband’s attorney threatened me with contempt if I wasn’t out on time.

  The real source of divorced women’s woes can be found not in the fine print of divorce legislation but in the behavior of ex-husbands and judges. Between 1978 and 1985, the average amount of child support that divorced men paid fell nearly 25 percent. Divorced men are now more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations—even though, as one study in the early ’80s found, for two-thirds of them, the amount owed their children is less than their monthly auto loan bill.

  As of 1985, only half of the 8.8 million single mothers who were supposed to be receiving child support payments from their ex-husbands actually received any money at all, and only half of that half were actually getting the full amount. By 1988, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement had collected only $5 billion of the $25 billion fathers owed in back child support. And studies on child support collection strategies are finding that only one tactic seems to awaken the moral conscience of negligent fathers: mandatory jail sentences. As sociologist Arlie Hochschild has observed, economic abandonment may be the new method some divorced men have devised for exerting control over their former families: “The ‘new’ oppression outside marriage thus creates a tacit threat to women inside marriage,” she writes. “Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form.”

  At the same time, public and judicial officials weren’t setting much of an example. A 1988 federal audit found that thirty-five states weren’t complying with federal child support laws. And judges weren’t even upholding the egalitarian principles of no-fault. Instead, surveys in several states found that judges were willfully misinterpreting the statutes to mean that women should get not one-half but one-third of all assets from the marriage. Weitzman herself reached the conclusion that judicial antagonism to feminism was aggravating the rough treatment of contemporary divorced women. “The concept of ‘equality’ and the sex-neutral language of the law,” she writes, have been “used by some lawyers and judges as a mandate for ‘equal treatment’ with a vengeance, a vengeance that can only be explained as a backlash reaction to women’s demands for equality in the larger society.”

  In the end, the most effective way to correct the post-divorce inequities between the sexes is simple: correct pay inequality in the work force. If the wage gap were wiped out between the sexes, a federal advisory council concluded in 1982, one half of female-headed households would be instantly lifted out of poverty. “The dramatic increase in women working is the best kind of insurance against this vulnerability,” Duncan says, observing that women’s access to better-paying jobs saved a lot of divorced women from a far worse living standard. And that access, he points out, “is largely a product of the women’s movement.”

  • • •

  WHILE THE social scientists whose views were promoted in the ’80s harped on the “devastating consequences” of divorce on women, we heard virtually nothing about its effect on men. This wasn’t for lack of data. In 1984, demographers on divorce statistics at the Institute for Social Research reviewed three decades of national data on men’s mental health, and flatly concluded—in a report that got little notice—the following: “Men suffer more from marital disruption than women.” No matter where they looked on the mental spectrum, divorced men were worse off—from depressions to various psychological impairments to nervous breakdowns, from admissions to psychiatric facilities to suicide attempts.

  From the start, men are less anxious to untie the knot than women: in national surveys, less than a third of divorced men say they were the spouse who wanted the divorce, while women report they were the ones actively seeking divorce 55 to 66 percent of the time. Men are also more devastated than women by the breakup—and time doesn’t cure the pain or close the gap. A 1982 survey of divorced people a year after the breakup found that 60 percent of the women were happier, compared with only half the men; a majority of the women said they had more self-respect, while only a minority of the men felt that way. The nation’s largest study on the long-term effects of divorce found that five years after divorce, two-thirds of the women were happier with their lives; only 50 percent of the men were. By the ten-year mark, the men who said their quality of life was no better or worse had risen from one-half to two-thirds. While 80 percent of women ten years after divorce said it was the right decision, only 50 percent of the ex-husbands agreed. “Indeed, when such regrets [about divorcing] are heard, they come mostly from older men,” the study’s director, Judith Wallerstein, observed.

  Nonetheless, in her much-publicized 1989 book, Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce—hailed by such New Right groups as The Family in America and promptly showcased on the cover of the New York Times Magazine—Wallerstein chooses to focus instead on her belief that children are worse off when their parents divorce. Her evidence? She doesn’t have any: like Weitzman, she had no comparative data. She had never bothered to test her theory on a control group with intact families. Her three-hundred-page book explains away this fundamental flaw in a single footnote: “Because so little was known about divorce, it was premature to plan a control group,” Wallerstein writes, adding that she figured she would “generate hypotheses” first, then maybe conduct the control-group study at a later date—a shoot-first, ask-questions-later logic that sums up the thinking of many backlash opinion makers.

  “It’s not at all clear what a control group would be,” Wallerstein explains later. One would have to control for other factors that might have led to the divorce, like “frigidity and other sexual problems,” she argues. “I think people who are asking for a control group are refusing to understand the whole complexity of what a control group is,” she says. “It would just be foolish.”

  By the end of the decade, however, Wallerstein was feeling increasingly queasy about the ways her work was being used—and distorted—by politicians and the press. At a congressional hearing, she was startled when Sen. Christopher Dodd proposed that, given her findings, maybe the government should impose a mandator
y delay on all couples seeking a divorce. And then national magazines quoted her work, wrongly, as saying that most children from divorced families become delinquents. “It seems no matter what you say,” she sighs, “it’s misused. It’s a very political field.”

  If the campaign against no-fault divorce had no real numbers to make its case, then relentless promotion against divorce in the ’80s served as an effective substitute. Americans were finally convinced. Public support for liberalizing divorce laws, which had been rising since 1968, fell 8 percent from the ’70s. And it was men who contributed most to this downturn; nearly twice as many men as women told pollsters they wanted to make it harder for couples to divorce.

  THE INFERTILITY EPIDEMIC: A TALE OF TWO PREGNANCY STUDIES

  On February 18, 1982, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that women’s chances of conceiving dropped suddenly after age thirty. Women between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-five, the researchers claimed, stood a nearly 40 percent chance of being infertile. This was unprecedented news indeed: virtually every study up until then had found fertility didn’t start truly declining until women reached at least their late thirties or even early forties. The supposedly neutral New England Journal of Medicine didn’t just publish the report. It served up a paternalistic three-page editorial, exhorting women to “reevaluate their goals” and have their babies before they started careers. The New York Times put the news on its front page that day, in a story that extolled the study as “unusually large and rigorous” and “more reliable” than previous efforts. Dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs quickly followed suit. By the following year, the statistic had found its way into alarmist books about the “biological clock.” And like the children’s game of Telephone, as the 40 percent figure got passed along, it kept getting larger. A self-help book was soon reporting that women in their thirties now faced a “shocking 68 percent” chance of infertility—and promptly faulted the feminists, who had failed to advise women of the biological drawbacks of a successful career.

  For their study, French researchers Daniel Schwartz and M. J. Mayaux had studied 2,193 Frenchwomen who were infertility patients at eleven artificial-insemination centers that were all run by a federation that sponsored the research—and stood to benefit handsomely from heightened female fears of infertility. The patients they used in the study were hardly representative of the average woman: they were all married to completely sterile men and were trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination. Frozen sperm, which was used in this case, is far less potent than the naturally delivered, “fresh” variety. In fact, in an earlier study that Schwartz himself had conducted, he found women were more than four times more likely to get pregnant having sex regularly than by being artificially inseminated.

  The French study also declared any woman infertile who had not gotten pregnant after one year of trying. (The twelve-month rule is a recent development, inspired by “infertility specialists” marketing experimental and expensive new reproductive technologies; the definition of infertility used to be set at five years.) The one-year cutoff is widely challenged by demographers who point out that it takes young newlyweds a mean time of eight months to conceive. In fact, only 16 to 21 percent of couples who are defined as infertile under the one-year definition actually prove to be, a congressional study found. Time is the greatest, and certainly the cheapest, cure for infertility. In a British longitudinal survey of more than seventeen thousand women, one of the largest fertility studies ever conducted, 91 percent of the women eventually became pregnant after thirty-nine months.

  After the French study was published, many prominent demographers disputed its results in a round of letters and articles in the professional literature. John Bongaarts, senior associate of the Population Council’s Center for Policy Studies, called the study “a poor basis for assessing the risk of female sterility” and largely invalid. Three statisticians from Princeton University’s Office of Population Research also debunked the study and warned it could lead to “needless anxiety” and “costly medical treatment.” Even the French research scientists were backing away from their own study. At a professional conference later that year, they told their colleagues that they never meant their findings to apply to all women. But neither their retreat nor their peers’ disparaging assessments attracted press attention.

  Three years later, in February 1985, the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics unveiled the latest results of its nationwide fertility survey of eight thousand women. It found that American women between thirty and thirty-four faced only a 13.6 percent, not 40 percent, chance of being infertile. Women in this age group had a mere 3 percent higher risk of infertility than women in their early twenties. In fact, since 1965, infertility had declined slightly among women in their early-to mid-thirties—and even among women in their forties. Overall, the percentage of women unable to have babies had actually fallen—from 11.2 percent in 1965 to 8.5 percent in 1982.

  As usual, this news made no media splashes. And in spite of the federal study’s findings, Yale medical professor Dr. Alan DeCherney, the lead author of the New England Journal’s sermonizing editorial, says he stands by his comments. Asked whether he has any second thoughts about the editorial’s message, he chuckles: “No, none at all. The editorial was meant to be provocative. I got a great response. I was on the ‘Today’ show.”

  • • •

  IN SEEKING the source of the “infertility epidemic,” the media and medical establishment considered only professional women, convinced that the answer was to be found in the rising wealth and independence of a middle-class female population. A New York Times columnist blamed feminism and the careerism it supposedly spawned for creating “the sisterhood of the infertile” among middle-class women. Writer Molly McKaughan admonished fellow career women, herself included, in Working Woman (and, later, in her book The Biological Clock) for the “menacing cloud” of infertility. Thanks largely to the women’s movement, she charged, we made this mistake: “We put our personal fulfillment first.”

  At the same time, gynecologists began calling endometriosis, a uterine ailment that can cause infertility, the “career woman’s disease.” It afflicts women who are “intelligent, living with stress [and] determined to succeed at a role other than ‘mother’ early in life,” Niels Lauersen, a New York Medical College obstetrics professor at the time, asserted in the press. (In fact, epidemiologists find endometriosis no more prevalent among professional women than any other group.) Others warned of high miscarriage rates among career women. (In fact, professional women typically experience the lowest miscarriage rate.) Still others reminded women that if they waited, they would more likely have stillbirths or premature, sick, retarded, or abnormal babies. (In fact, a 1990 study of four thousand women found women over thirty-five no more likely than younger women to have stillbirths or premature or sick newborns; a 1986 study of more than six thousand women reached a similar conclusion. Women under thirty-five now give birth to children with Down syndrome at a higher rate than women over thirty-five.)

  Exercising the newly gained right to a legal abortion became another favorite “cause” of infertility. Gynecologists warned their middle-class female patients that if they had “too many” abortions, they risked developing infertility problems later, or even becoming sterile. Several state and local governments even enacted laws requiring physicians to advise women that abortions could lead to later miscarriages, premature births, and infertility. Researchers expended an extraordinary amount of energy and federal funds in quest of supporting data. More than 150 epidemiological research efforts in the last twenty years searched for links between abortion and infertility. But, as a research team who conducted a worldwide review and analysis of the research literature concluded in 1983, only ten of these studies used reliable methods, and of those ten, only one found any relation between abortion and later pregnancy problems—and that study looked at a sample of Greek women who had undergone dange
rous, illegal abortions. Legal abortion methods, the researchers wrote, “have no adverse effect on a woman’s subsequent ability to conceive.”

  In reality, women’s quest for economic and educational equality has only improved reproductive health and fertility. Better education and bigger paychecks breed better nutrition, fitness, and health care, all important contributors to higher fecundity. Federal statistics bear out that college-educated and higher-income women have a lower infertility rate than their high school—educated and low-income counterparts.

  The “infertility epidemic” among middle-class career women over thirty was a political program—and, for infertility specialists, a marketing tool—not a medical problem. The same White House that promoted the infertility threat allocated no funds toward preventing infertility—and, in fact, rebuffed all requests for aid. That the backlash’s spokesmen showed so little interest in the decade’s real infertility epidemics should have been a tipoff. The infertility rates of young black women tripled between 1965 and 1982. The infertility rates of young women of all races in their early twenties more than doubled. In fact, by the ’80s, women between twenty and twenty-four were suffering from 2 percent more infertility than women nearing thirty. Yet we heard little of this crisis and its causes—which had nothing to do with feminism or yuppie careerists.

  This epidemic, in fact, could be traced in large part to the negligence of doctors and government officials, who were shockingly slow to combat the sexually transmitted disease of chlamydia; infection rates rose in the early ’80s and were highest among young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. This illness, in turn, triggered the breakneck spread of pelvic inflammatory disease, which was responsible for a vast proportion of the infertility in the decade and afflicted an additional 1 million women each year. Chlamydia became the number-one sexually transmitted disease in the U.S., afflicting more than 4 million women and men in 1985, causing at least half of the pelvic inflammatory infections, and helping to quadruple life-threatening ectopic pregnancies between 1970 and 1983. By the mid-to late-’80s, as many as one in six young sexually active women were infected; infection rates ran as high as 35 percent in some inner-city clinics.