Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  The absence of real women in a news account that is allegedly about real women is a hallmark of ’80s backlash journalism. The press delivered the backlash to the public through a series of “trend stories,” articles that claimed to divine sweeping shifts in female social behavior while providing little in the way of evidence to support their generalizations. The trend story, which may go down as late-20th-century journalism’s prime contribution to its craft, professes to offer “news” of changing mores, yet prescribes more than it observes. Claiming to mirror public sentiment, its reflections of the human landscapes are strangely depopulated. Pretending to take the public’s pulse, it monitors only its own heartbeat—and its advertisers’.

  Trend journalism attains authority not through actual reporting but through the power of repetition. Said enough times, anything can be made to seem true. A trend declared in one publication sets off a chain reaction, as the rest of the media scramble to get the story, too. The lightning speed at which these messages spread has less to do with the accuracy of the trend than with journalists’ propensity to repeat one another. And repetition became especially hard to avoid in the ’80s, as the “independent” press fell into a very few corporate hands.

  Fear was also driving the media’s need to dictate trends and determine social attitudes in the ’80s, as print and broadcast audiences, especially female audiences, turned to other news sources and advertising plunged—eventually falling to its lowest level in twenty years. Anxiety-ridden media managements became preoccupied with conducting market research studies and “managing” the fleeing reader, now renamed “the customer” by such news corporations as Knight-Ridder. And their preoccupations eventually turned up in the way the media covered the news. “News organizations are moving on to the same ground as political institutions that mold public opinion and seek to direct it,” Bill Kovach, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Nieman Foundation’s curator, observed. “Such a powerful tool for shaping public opinion in the hands of journalists accustomed to handling fact is like a scalpel in a child’s hands: it is capable of great damage.”

  Journalists first applied this scalpel to American women. While ’80s trend stories occasionally considered the changing habits of men, these articles tended to involve men’s latest hobbies and whimsies—fly fishing, beepers, and the return of the white shirt. The ’80s female trends, by contrast, were the failure to find husbands, get pregnant, or properly bond with their children. NBC, for instance, devoted an entire evening news special to the pseudotrend of “bad girls,” yet ignored the real trend of bad boys: the crime rate among boys was climbing twice as fast as for girls. (In New York City, right in the network’s backyard, rape arrests of young boys had jumped 200 percent in two years.) Female trends with a more flattering veneer surfaced in women’s magazines and newspaper “Style” pages in the decade, each bearing, beneath new-and-improved packaging, the return-to-gender trademark: “the New Abstinence,” “the New Femininity,” “the New High Monogamy,” “the New Morality,” “the New Madonnas,” “the Return of the Good Girl.” While anxiety over AIDS has surely helped fuel promotion of these “new” trends, that’s not the whole story. While in the ’80s AIDS remained largely a male affliction, these media directives were aimed almost exclusively at women. In each case, women were reminded to reembrace “traditional” sex roles—or suffer the consequences. For women, the trend story was no news report; it was a moral reproach.

  The trends for women always came in instructional pairs—the trend that women were advised to flee and the trend that they were pushed to join. For this reason, the paired trends tended to contradict each other. As one woman writer observed wryly in an Advertising Age column, “The media are having a swell time telling us, on the one hand, that marriage is ‘in’ and, on the other hand, that women’s chances of marrying are slim. So maybe marriage is ‘in’ because it’s so hard to do, like coal-walking was ‘in’ a year ago.” Three contradictory trend pairs, concerning work, marriage, and motherhood, formed the backlash media’s triptych: Superwoman “burnout” versus New Traditionalist “cocooning;” “the spinster boom” versus “the return of marriage;” and “the infertility epidemic” versus “the baby boomlet.”

  Finally, in female trend stories fact and forecast traded places. These articles weren’t chronicling a retreat among women that was already taking place; they were compelling one to happen. The “marriage panic,” as we have seen, didn’t show up in the polls until after the press’s promotion of the Harvard-Yale study. In the mid-’80s, the press deluged readers with stories about how mothers were afraid to leave their children in “dangerous” day care centers. In 1988, this “trend” surfaced in the national polls: suddenly, almost 40 percent of mothers reported feeling fearful about leaving their children in day care; their confidence in day care fell to 64 percent, from 76 percent just a year earlier—the first time the figure had fallen below 70 percent since the survey began asking that question four years earlier. Again, in 1986 the press declared a “new celibacy” trend—and by 1987 the polls showed that the proportion of single women who believed that premarital sex was acceptable had suddenly dropped six percentage points in a year; for the first time in four years, fewer than half of all women said they felt premarital sex was okay.

  Finally, throughout the ’80s the media insisted that women were fleeing the work force to devote themselves to “better” motherhood. But it wasn’t until 1990 that this alleged development made a dent—a very small one—in the labor charts, as the percentage of women in the work force between twenty and forty-four dropped a tiny 0.5 percent, the first dip since the early ’60s. Mostly, the media’s advocacy of such a female exodus created more guilt than flight: in 1990, a poll of working women by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman found almost 30 percent of them believed that “wanting to put more energy into being a good homemaker and mother” was cause to consider quitting work altogether—an 11 percent increase from just a year earlier and the highest proportion in two decades.

  The trend story is not always labeled as such, but certain characteristics give it away: an absence of factual evidence or hard numbers; a tendency to cite only three or four women, typically anonymously, to establish the trend; the use of vague qualifiers like “there is a sense that” or “more and more;” a reliance on the predictive future tense (“Increasingly, mothers will stay home to spend more time with their families”); and the invocation of “authorities” such as consumer researchers and psychologists, who often support their assertions by citing other media trend stories.

  Just as the decade’s trend stories on women pretended to be about facts while offering none, they served a political agenda while telling women that what was happening to them had nothing to do with political events or social pressures. In the ’80s trend analysis, women’s conflict was no longer with her society and culture but only with herself. Single women were simply struggling with personal problems; they were “consistently self-destructive” or “overly selective.”

  The only external combat the press recognized was woman on woman. THE UNDECLARED WAR, a banner headline announced on the front page of the San Francisco Examiners Style section: “To Work or Not Divides Mothers in the Suburbs.” Child magazine offered THE MOMMY WARS and Savvy’s WOMEN AT ODDS informed readers that “the world is soon to be divided into two enemy camps and one day they may not be civil toward each other.” Media accounts encouraged married and single women to view each other as opponents—and even confront each other in the ring on “Geraldo” and “Oprah.” IS HE SEPARABLE? was the title of a 1988 Newsday article that warned married women to beware the husband-poaching trend; the man shortage had driven single women into “brazen” overtures and wives were advised to take steps to keep “the hussy” at bay.

  Trend journalists in the ’80s were not required to present facts for the same reason that ministers aren’t expected to support sermons with data. The reporters were scripting morality plays, not ne
ws stories, in which the middle-class woman played the Christian innocent, led astray by a feminist serpent. In the final scene, the woman had to pay—repenting of her ambitions and “selfish” pursuit of equality—before she could reclaim her honor and her happiness. The trend stories were strewn with judgmental language about the wages of feminist sin. The ABC report on the ill effects of women’s liberation, for example, referred to the “costs” and “price” of equality thirteen times. Like any cautionary tale, the trend story offered a “choice” that implied only one correct answer: Take the rocky road to selfish and lonely independence or the well-paved path to home and flickering hearth. No middle route was visible on the trend story’s map of the moral feminine universe.

  COCOONERS, NEW TRADITIONALISTS, AND MOMMY TRACKERS

  “Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family Over Career,” the front page of the New York Times announced in 1980. Actually, the “many” women were a few dozen Ivy League undergraduates who, despite their protestations, were heading to medical school and fellowships at Oxford. The Times story managed to set off a brief round of similar back-to-the-home stories in the press. But with no authority to bless the trend, return-to-nesting’s future looked doubtful. Then, midway through the decade, a media expert surfaced spectacularly in the press. Her name, which soon became a household word, was Faith Popcorn.

  A former advertising executive, Popcorn had reinvented herself as a “leading consumer authority” and launched her own market research firm, Brain Reserve, which had this specialty: “trend identification.” Popcorn even maintained a “Trend Bank,” whose deposits she offered to clients at a charge of $75,000 to $600,000. Claiming a 95 percent accuracy rate, Popcorn promised to identify not only “major trend directions in the nation today” but also “upcoming TIPs (trends-in-progress).”

  Much of the information in Popcorn’s Trend Bank was hardly proprietary. While she did have a group of consumers that she polled, her predictions often came from popular TV shows, bestsellers, and “lifestyle” magazines. “People is my bible,” Popcorn said. She also checked out movies and fashion from the last backlash, on the theory that styles repeat every thirty years. In spite of this rather elementary method of data collection, she managed to attract hundreds of corporate clients, including some of the biggest names in the packaged food and household goods industries—from Campbell Soup Company to Quaker Oats. Popcorn’s clients, fretting over sluggish consumerism and the failure of more than 80 percent of new products introduced in the contemporary marketplace, were especially interested in her promise of “brand renewal.” Rather than coming up with new products that appealed to shoppers, they could rely on Popcorn’s promotion of retrotrends to get their has-been goods flying off the shelves again. As Popcorn promised, “Even if people don’t move to the country, they will buy L. L. Bean’s stuff.”

  In 1986, Faith Popcorn managed to please the media trend writers and her corporate clients at the same time with the coining of a single word, “cocooning.” The word “just popped into my head” in the middle of an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Popcorn recalls. “It was a prediction . . . It hadn’t happened.” But that wasn’t quite how she marketed it to the media at the time.

  Cocooning was the national trend for the ’80s, she told the press. “We’re becoming a nation of nesters . . . We like to stay home and cocoon. Mom foods, like meat loaf and chicken potpie, are very big right now.” Her foodmaker clients were more than happy to back her up on that. As one enthusiastic spokesman for Pillsbury told Newsweek, “I believe in cocooning.”

  The press evidently did, too. In the next year alone Popcorn and her cocoon theories were featured in, to mention just a few publications, Newsweek (five times), the Wall Street Journal (four times), USA Today (twice), the Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, Boardroom Reports, Success!, and, of course, People. “Is Faith Popcorn the ur of our era,” a bemused writer wondered in The New Yorker. “Is she the oversoul incarnate?” Faith Popcorn is “one of the most interviewed women on the planet,” grumbled Newsweek in 1987, which, despite its irritation, allotted her another two pages.

  “Cocooning” may have been envisioned by Popcorn as a gender-neutral concept. But the press made it a female trend, defining cocooning not as people coming home but as women abandoning the office. Other Popcorn predictions helped to goad on that media misimpression: “Fewer women will work. They will spend their time at home concentrating on their families.” The press feminized this trend even further, envisioning not only cocooning but the cocoon itself as female. “Little in-home wombs,” was how the Los Angeles Times described these shells to which women were supposed to be retreating.

  Female cocooning might have shown up on Popcorn’s trend meter but it had yet to make a blip on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics charts. Women steadily increased their representation in the work force in the ’80s—from 51 to 57 percent for all women, and to more than 70 percent for women between twenty-five and forty-four. And the increase in working mothers was the steepest. Opinion polls didn’t support the theory either: they showed adult women increasingly more determined to have a career with a family (63 percent versus 52 percent a decade earlier) and less interested in having a family with no career (26 percent versus 38 percent a decade earlier). And 42 percent of the women who weren’t working said they would if there were more day care centers in the vicinity.

  Popcorn herself is no model of the trend she has so avidly promoted. Past forty, she is happily unmarried and childless—and puts her career first. “I’m hooked on my work,” she confesses, laughing, in an interview. Though she has had many men in her life, she says, marriage has never appealed to her: “I didn’t want somebody to own me.” The women in her family, she proudly reports, have valued professionalism and financial independence for at least three generations. Her grandmother owned and managed New York City real estate—and pronounced marriage “dumb” and “boring.” Popcorn’s mother, a negligence lawyer in the ’20s who started her own firm when no one would hire her, took a similarly low view of traditional femininity. “She was really a cowgirl, rough and tough,” Popcorn recalls with admiration. “She was teeny, five feet, but you’d never know it.”

  Despite her assertions that, as a trend, feminism is out—“it’s seen as a step back”—Popcorn describes herself as “still a seventies feminist.” She explains, “I think we still have a long way to go. I think we have a lot of prejudice and a lot of discrimination. I think we need to organize.” She, in fact, says she started Brain Reserve because prejudice was stalling her progress at a male-run advertising agency. “I didn’t like how I was being treated. . . . And I wanted to be noticed, I wanted the top title, I wanted the recognition, just like any guy.”

  What made Popcorn think that “cocooning” was a trend? In the press, she cited the following evidence: the improving sales of “mom foods,” the popularity of “big comfortable chairs,” the ratings of the “Cosby” show, and one statistic—“a third of all the female MBAs of 197[6] have already returned home.” But the sales spurt in “mom foods” was the consequence, not the cause, of her relentless “cocooning” promotions; if it had been the other way around, Campbell Soup wouldn’t have needed her services. And while people might well be sinking into Barcaloungers or tuning in the Huxtables on “Cosby,” that hardly meant real women were flocking home. Only the last statistic had anything remotely to do with gauging women’s actual behavior—and that statistic, as it happened, was highly dubious.

  • • •

  POPCORN BORROWED the MBA figure from what was, at the time, a celebrated trend article—a 1986 Fortune cover story entitled “Why Women Are Bailing Out.” The article, about businesswomen trained at elite schools fleeing the corporate suite, inspired similar “bailing out” articles in Forbes, USA Today, and U.S. News & World Report, among others.

  The Fortune story left an especially deep and troubling impression on young women aspiring to business and managemen
t careers; after all, it seemed to have hard data. A year later at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, women were still talking about the article and the effect it had had on them. Phyllis Strong, a Stanford MBA candidate, said she now planned to look for a less demanding career, after reading how “you give up too much” and “you lose that sense of bonding and family ties” when you take on a challenging business job. Marcia Walley, another MBA candidate, said that she now understood “how impossible it is to have a successful career and a good family life. You can’t have it all and you have to choose.” A group of women at the business school even wrote a musical number on this theme for the senior play. Set to the tune of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” the bitter little anthem provoked tears from young women in the audience:

  When I was at B-school, they said . . .

  Girl, you can have it all. But I

  Didn’t think I’d lose so much.

  Didn’t want such long hours.

  Who’d think my only boyfriend

  Would be a blow-up doll? . . . Where are my old boyfriends now?

  Nesting, nesting,

  Getting on with their lives,

  Living with women who get off at five.

  The year after Fortune launched the “bailing out” trend, the proportion of women applying to business schools suddenly began to shrink—for the first time in a decade.

  Fortune’s 1986 cover photo featured Janie Witham, former IBM systems engineer, seated in her kitchen with her two-year-old daughter on her lap. Witham is “happier at home,” Fortune’s cover announced. She has time now to “bake bread.” She is one of “many women, including some of the best educated and most highly motivated,” wrote the article’s author, Fortune senior writer Alex Taylor III, who are making “a similar choice” to quit work. “These women were supposed to lead the charge into the corridors of corporate power,” he wrote. “If the MBAs cannot find gratification there [in the work force], can any [his italics] women?”