Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Career women in the ’80s were also not causing a female rise in heart attacks and high blood pressure. In fact, there was no such rise: heart disease deaths among women dropped 43 percent since 1963; and most of that decline has been since 1972, when women’s labor-force participation rate took off. The hypertension rate among women has likewise declined since the early 1970s. Only the lung cancer rate has increased, and that is the legacy not of feminism but the massive midcentury ad campaign to hook women on smoking. Since the ’70s, women’s smoking rate has dropped.

  The importance of paid work to women’s self-esteem is basic and long-standing. Even in the “feminine mystique” ’50s, when married women were asked what gave them a sense of purpose and self-worth, two-thirds said their jobs; only one-third said homemaking. In the ’80s, 87 percent of women said it was their work that gave them personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. In short, as one large-scale study concludes, “Women’s health is hurt by their lower [my emphasis] labor-force participation rates.”

  By helping to widen women’s access to more and better employment, the women’s rights campaign couldn’t help but be beneficial to women’s mental outlook. A U.S. National Sample Survey study, conducted between 1957 and 1976, found vast improvements in women’s mental health, narrowing the gender differences in rates of psychological distress by nearly 40 percent. The famous 1980 Midtown Manhattan Longitudinal Study found that adult women’s rate of mental health impairment had fallen 50 to 60 percent since the early ’50s. Midtown Manhattan project director Leo Srole concluded that women’s increasing autonomy and economic strength had made the difference. The changes, he wrote, “are not mere chance coincidences of the play of history, but reflect a cause-and-effect connection between the partial emancipation of women from their 19th-century status of sexist servitude, and their 20th-century advances in subjective well-being.”

  If anything threatened women’s emotional well-being in the ’80s, it was the backlash itself, which worked to undermine women’s social and economic status—the two pillars on which good mental health are built. As even one of the “burnout” manuals concedes, “There is a direct link between sexism and female stress.” How the current counterassault on women’s rights will affect women’s rate of mental illness, however, remains to be seen: because of the time lag in conducting epidemiological studies, we won’t know the actual numbers for some time.

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  WHO, THEN, was causing the baby boomers’ “Age of Melancholy”? In 1984, the National Institute of Mental Health unveiled the results of the most comprehensive U.S. mental health survey ever attempted, the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) study, which drew data from five sites around the country and in Canada. Its key finding, largely ignored in the press: “The overall rates for all disorders for both sexes are now similar.”

  Women have historically outnumbered men in their reports of depression by a three-to-one ratio. But the ECA data, collected between 1980 and 1983, indicated that the “depression gap” had shrunk to less than two-to-one. In fact, in some longitudinal reviews now, the depression gap barely even existed. In part, the narrowing depression gap reflected women’s brightening mental picture—but, even more so, it signaled a darkening outlook for men. Epidemiological researchers observed a notable increase especially in depressive disorders among men in their twenties and thirties. While women’s level of anxiety was declining, men’s was rising. While women’s suicide rate had peaked in 1960, men’s was climbing. The rates of attempted suicide for men and women were converging, too, as men’s rate increased more rapidly than women’s.

  While the effects of the women’s movement may not have depressed women, they did seem to trouble many men. In a review of three decades of research literature on sex differences in mental health, social scientists Ronald C. Kessler and James A. McRae, Jr., with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, concluded, “It is likely that men are experiencing more rapidly role-related stresses than are women.” The role changes that women have embraced “are helping to close the male-female mental-health gap largely by increasing the distress of men.” While women’s improving mental health stems from their rising employment rate, the researchers said, at the same time “the increase in distress among men can be attributed, in part, to depression and loss of self-esteem related to the increasing tendency of women to take a job outside the home.” For many men in the ’80s, this effect was exacerbated by that other well-established threat to mental health—loss of economic status—as millions of traditional “male” jobs that once yielded a living wage evaporated under a restructuring economy. Observing the dramatic shifts in the mental-health sex ratios that were occurring in manufacturing communities, Jane Murphy, chief of psychiatric epidemiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote in 1984: “Have changes in the occupational structure of this society created a situation that is, in some ways, better for the goose than for the gander . . .?” In fact, as Kessler says in an interview, researchers who focus on the female side of the mental health equation are likely missing the main event: “In the last thirty years, the sex difference [in mental illness] is getting smaller largely because men are getting worse.”

  Numerous mental health reports published in the last decade support this assertion. A 1980 study finds husbands of working women reporting higher levels of depression than husbands of housewives. A 1982 study of 2,440 adults at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center finds depression and low self-esteem among married men closely associated with their wives’ employment. A 1986 analysis of the federal Quality of Employment Survey concludes that “dual earning may be experienced as a downward mobility for men and upward mobility for women.” Husbands of working women, the researchers found, had greater psychological distress, lower self-esteem, and greater depression than men wed to homemakers. “There lies behind the facade of egalitarian lifestyle pioneering an anxiety among men that cannot be cured by time alone,” they concluded. The fact is, they wrote, “that conventional standards of manhood remain more important in terms of personal evaluation than contemporary rhetoric of gender equality.”

  A 1987 study of role-related stresses, conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and Cornell University, makes the same connection and observes that men’s psychological well-being appears to be significantly threatened when their wives work. “Given that previous research on changing gender roles has concentrated on women to the neglect of men,” they wrote, “this result suggests that such an emphasis has been misleading and that serious effort is needed to understand the ways changing female roles affect the lives and attitudes of men.” This warning, however, went virtually unheeded in the press. When Newsweek produced its cover story on depression, it put a grim-faced woman on the cover—and, inside, all but two of the nine victims it displayed were female.

  THE DAY CARE DEMONS: MAKE YOUR OWN STATISTICS

  The anti-day care headlines practically shrieked in the ’80s: “MOMMY, DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!” THE DAY CARE PARENTS DON’T SEE. DAY CARE CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR CHILD’S HEALTH. WHEN CHILD CARE BECOMES CHILD MOLESTING: IT HAPPENS MORE OFTEN THAN PARENTS LIKE TO THINK. CREEPING CHILD CARE . . . CREEPY.

  The spokesmen of the New Right, of course, were most denunciatory, labeling day care “the Thalidomide of the ’80s.” Reagan’s men didn’t mince words either, like the top military official who proclaimed, “American mothers who work and send their children to faceless centers rather than stay home to take care of them are weakening the moral fiber of the Nation.” But the press, more subtly but just as persistently, painted devil’s horns both on mothers who use day care and day care workers themselves.

  In 1984, a Newsweek feature warned of an “epidemic” of child abuse in child care facilities, based on allegations against directors at a few day care centers—the most celebrated of which were later found innocent in the courts. Just in case the threat had slippe
d women’s minds, two weeks later Newsweek was busy once more, demanding “What Price Day Care?” in a cover story. The cover picture featured a frightened, saucer-eyed child sucking his thumb. By way of edifying contrast, the eight-page treatment inside showcased a Good Mother—under the title “At Home by Choice.” The former bond seller had dropped her career to be home with her baby and offer wifely assistance to her husband’s career. “I had to admit I couldn’t do [everything],” the mother said, a view that clearly earned an approving nod from Newsweek. Still later, in a special issue devoted to the family, Newsweek ran another article on “the dark side of day care.” That story repeatedly alluded to “more and more evidence that child care may be hazardous to a youngster’s health,” but never got around to providing it. This campaign was one the press managed to conduct all by itself. Researchers were having a tough time linking day care with deviance. So the press circulated some antiquated “research” and ignored the rest.

  At a press conference in the spring of 1988, the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Laboratory released the largest and most comprehensive study ever on sexual abuse in day care centers—a three-year study examining the reported cases of sexual abuse at day care facilities across the country. One would have assumed from the swarm of front-page stories on this apparent threat that the researchers’ findings would rate as an important news event. But the New York Times’s response was typical: it noted the study’s release in a modest article on the same page as the classifieds. (Ironically, it ran on the same page as an even smaller story about a Wisconsin father beating his four-year-old son so brutally that the child had to be institutionalized for the rest of his life for brain injuries.) Why such little interest? The study concluded that there was no epidemic of child abuse at day care centers. In fact, if there was an abuse crisis anywhere, the study pointed out, it was at home—where the risk to children of molestation is almost twice as high as in day care. In 1985, there were nearly 101,000 reported cases of children sexually abused by family members (mostly fathers, stepfathers, or older brothers), compared with about 1,300 cases in day care. Children are far more likely to be beaten, too, at the family hearth, the researchers found; and the physical abuse at home tends to be of a longer duration, more severe and more traumatic than any violence children faced in day care centers. In 1986, 1,500 children died from abuse at home. “Day care is not an inherently high-risk locale for children, despite frightening stories in the media,” the Family Research Laboratory study’s authors concluded. “The risk of abuse is not sufficient reason to avoid day care in general or to justify parents’ withdrawing from the labor force.”

  Research over the last two decades has consistently found that if day care has any long-term effect on children, it seems to make children slightly more gregarious and independent. Day care children also appear to be more broad-minded about sex roles; girls interviewed in day care centers are more likely to believe that housework and child rearing should be shared by both parents. A National Academy of Sciences panel in 1982 concluded that children suffer no ill effects in academic, social, or emotional development when mothers work.

  Yet the day care “statistics” that received the most press in the ’80s were the ones based more on folklore than research. Illness, for example, was supposedly more pervasive in day care centers than in the home, according to media accounts. Yet, the actual studies on child care and illness indicate that while children in day care are initially prone to more illnesses, they soon build up immunities and actually get sick less often than kids at home. Day care’s threat to bonding between mother and child was another popular myth. But the research offers scant evidence of diminished bonds between mother and child—and suggests that children profit from exposure to a wider range of grown-ups, anyway. (No one ever worries, it seems, about day care’s threat to paternal bonding.)

  With no compelling demographic evidence to support an attack on day care for toddlers, critics of day care turned their attention to infants. Three-year-old toddlers may survive day care, they argued, but newborns would surely suffer permanent damage. Their evidence, however, came from studies conducted on European children in wartime orphanages and war refugee camps—environments that were hardly the equivalent of contemporary day care centers, even the worst variety. One of the most commonly quoted studies in the press wasn’t even conducted on human beings. Psychologist Harry Harlow found that “infants” in day care suffer severe emotional distress. His subjects, however, were baby monkeys. And his “day care workers” weren’t even surrogate adult monkeys: the researchers used wire-mesh dummies.

  Finally in 1986, it looked as if day care critics had some hard data they could use. Pennsylvania State University psychologist and social researcher Jay Belsky, a prominent supporter of day care, expressed some reservations about day care for infants. Up until this point, Belsky had said that his reviews of the child development literature yielded few if any significant differences between children raised at home and in day care. Then, in the September 1986 issue of the child care newsletter Zero to Three, Belsky proposed that placing children in day care for more than twenty hours a week in their first year of life may pose a “risk factor” that could lead to an “insecure” attachment to their mothers. The press and conservative politicians hurried to the scene. Soon Belsky found himself making the network rounds—“Today,” “CBS Morning News,” and “Donahue”—and fielding dozens of press calls a month. And, much to the liberal Belsky’s discomfort, “conservatives embraced me.” Right-wing scholars cited his findings. Conservative politicians sought out his Congressional testimony at child care hearings—and got furious when he failed to spout “what they wanted me to say.”

  Belsky peppered his report on infant day care with qualifications, strongly cautioned against overreaction, and advised that he had only a “trickle,” “not a flood,” of evidence. He wrote that only a “relatively persuasive circumstantial [all italics are his] case can be made that early infant care may be associated with increased avoidance of mother, possibly to the point of greater insecurity in the attachment relationship.” And he added, “I cannot state strongly enough that there is sufficient evidence to lead a judicious scientist to doubt this line of reasoning.” Finally, in every press interview, as he recalls later, he stressed the many caveats and emphasized that his findings underscored the need for better funding and standards for child care centers, not grounds for eliminating day care. “I was not saying we shouldn’t have day care,” he says. “I was saying that we need good day care. Quality matters.” But his words “fell on deaf ears.” And once the misrepresentations of his work passed into the media, it seemed impossible to root them out. “What amazed me was the journalists just plagiarized each other’s newspaper stories. Very few of them actually read my article.”

  What also got less attention in the press was the actual evidence Belsky used to support his tentative reassessment. He focused on four studies—any of which, as he himself conceded, “could be dismissed for a variety of scientific reasons.” The first study was based on one center that mostly served poor welfare mothers with unplanned pregnancies—and so it was impossible to say whether the children were having trouble because they went to day care or because they had such grim and impecunious home lives. Belsky said he had evidence from more middle-class populations, too, but the authors of the two key studies he used later maintained that he had misread their data. University of North Carolina psychologist Ron Haskins, author of one of the studies on the effects of day care on aggression, flatly stated in a subsequent issue of Zero to Three that “my results will not support these conclusions.” Belsky alluded to a final study to support his position that infants in day care might be “less compliant” when they get older. But he failed to mention the study’s follow-up review, in which the authors rather drastically revised their assessment. Later behavioral problems, the researchers wrote, “were not predicted by whether the toddler had been in day care or at home” aft
er all. In response, Belsky says that it all depends on how one chooses to read the data in that study. Like so many of the “findings” in this politically charged field of research, he says, “It is all a question of, is the glass half full or half empty?”

  Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the American family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mom stays home and minds the children. But that person is dad—a finding of limited use to backlash publicists. Anyway, by the end of the decade the press was no longer even demanding hard data to make its case. By then the public was so steeped in the lore of the backlash that its spokesmen rarely bothered to round up the usual statistics. Who needed proof? Everybody already believed that the myths about ’80s women were true.

  3

  Backlashes Then and Now

  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.”