Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  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 m
asculine 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.