Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  But oatmeal sales, which probably picked up thanks to the late-’80s mania for cholesterol-fighting oat bran, have little to do with whether women are returning to “traditional” values and lifestyles. Nonetheless, MacDougall said he had one other key source of proof of “neotraditionalism”—from the Yankelovich Monitor poll of 2,500 Americans. Some of the New Traditionalist ads even footnoted this survey, lending a pseudoscholarly touch. “When I looked at that study.” MacDougall says of the Yankelovich report, “the numbers just jumped out at me. It’s a pretty dramatic shift. It’s a trend going back five years, it’s very real and it can be backed up. So I went back to Good Housekeeping and I said, this is not a problem, it’s an opportunity.”

  But at Yankelovich, the researchers are still trying to figure out just what numbers jumped out at him. “I cheerfully disavow any connection with those Good Housekeeping ads,” Susan Hayward, senior vice president at Yankelovich, says. “Good Housekeeping is a client of ours. They looked at the Monitor study and we did a proprietary study for them, too. And they chose to misinterpret both.” Neither study shows any signs of women leaving work or even fantasizing about leaving work. The percentage of women who want to work in the Yankelovich poll is as high as ever. And the proportion of women who describe motherhood as “an experience every woman should have” stands at 53 percent; in 1974, when nontraditionalism was more in vogue, it was 54 percent.

  But doubts about neotraditionalism’s validity don’t faze MacDougall. “You can argue forever that people aren’t this way but it doesn’t work because they are,” he says. Pressed to offer something more substantial, he gets a little huffy: “I’m selling a magazine based on home values. C’mon. We’re in business here. I’m not going to give in to a few angry women.”

  THE SPINSTER BOOM: THE SORROW AND THE PITY

  “In all respects, young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago,” the New York Times noted in 1974. Single women are more “self-assured, confident, secure.” The article concluded, “The [women’s] movement, apparently, is catching on.”

  Such media views of single women were certainly catching on in the ’70s. Newsweek quickly elevated the news of the happy single woman to trend status. “Within just eight years, singlehood has emerged as an in-tensely ritualized—and newly respectable—style of American life,” the magazine ruled in a 1973 cover story. “It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” In fact, according to Newsweek, the single lifestyle for women was more than “respectable;” it was a thrill a minute. The cover photo featured a grinning blonde in a bikini, toasting her good fortune poolside. Inside, more singles beamed as they sashayed from sun decks to moonlit dances. “I may get married or I just may not,” a flight attendant, who described her single status as “pretty groovy,” told the magazine. “But if I do, it will be in my own time and on my own terms. . . . I see nothing wrong with staying single for as long as you please.” And even Newsweek’s writers, though betraying some queasiness at such declarations, ultimately gave a round of applause to these spunky new singles who weren’t “settling for just any old match.”

  The many features about giddy single women in the early ’70s left the impression that these unwed revelers rarely left their beach towels. The stereotype got so bad that one bachelor grumbled in a 1974 New York Times article, “From reading the press, you’d think that every girl is 36-24-36 . . . and every guy lounges by a poolside and waits for the beautiful blondes to admire his rippling muscles.”

  Married life, on the other hand, acquired a sour and claustrophobic reputation in the early ’70s press. “Dropout Wives—Their Number Is Growing,” a 1973 New York Times trend story advised, asserting that droves of miserable housewives were fleeing empty marriages in search of more “fulfilled” lives. The Times’s portrait of the wedded state was bleak: it featured husbands who cheat, criticize and offer “no communication,” and wives who obsessively drink and pop pills. According to Newsweek, married couples were worse than troubled—they were un-trendy: “One sociologist has gone so far as to predict that ‘eventually married people could find themselves living in a totally singles-oriented society.’”

  A dozen years later, these same publications were sending out the opposite signals. Newsweek was now busy scolding single women for refusing to “settle” for lesser mates, and the New York Times was reporting that single women are “too rigid to connect” and suffer from “a sickness almost.” Single women were no longer the press’s party girls; with a touch of the media’s wand, they were turned back into the scowling scullery maids who couldn’t go to the ball. Too LATE FOR PRINCE CHARMING? the Newsweek headline inquired sneeringly, over a drawing of a single woman sprawled on a lonely mattress, a teddy bear her only companion. The magazine now offered only mocking and insincere pity for women shut out of the marital bedroom, which ’80s press accounts enveloped in a heavenly, and tastefully erotic, glow. On the front page of the New York Times, the unwed woman stalked the empty streets like Typhoid Mary; though “bright and accomplished,” she “dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.” It’s clear enough why she fears the dark: according to the ’80s press, nightmares are a single girl’s only bedmate. New York magazine’s 1984 cover story on single women began with this testimony from “Mary Rodgers,” which the magazine noted in small print was not her real name: “Last night, I had a terrible dream. The weight of the world was on my shoulders, and it was pressing me into the ground. I screamed for help, but nobody came. When I woke up, I wanted somebody to hold me. But it was just like the dream. There was no husband. No children. Only me.”

  “Mary” was an executive in a garment firm. Like most of the ailing single women that the ’80s media chose to pillory, she was one of the success stories from the women’s movement now awakening to the error of her independent ways. She was single because, as the story’s own headline put it, she was one of those women who “expect too much.”

  The campaign for women’s rights was, once more, identified as the culprit; liberation had depressed single women. “Loveless, Manless: The High Cost of Independence,” read one women’s magazine headline. “Feminism became a new form of defensiveness” that drove men away, explained a 1987 Harper’s Bazaar article, entitled “Are You Turning Men Off?: Desperate and Demanding.” New York’s story on grim-faced single women summoned an expert, psychotherapist Ava Siegler, who said the women’s movement should be blamed for “failing to help women order their priorities.” Siegler charged, “It [the women’s movement] didn’t outline the consequences. We were never told, ‘While you’re climbing up the corporate ladder, don’t forget to pick up a husband and child.’”

  ABC’s 1986 special, “After the Sexual Revolution,” also told single women to hold feminism responsible for their marital status. Women’s success has come “at the cost of relationships,” co-host Richard Threlkeld said. Even married women are in danger, he advised: “The more women achieve in their careers, the higher their chances for divorce.” Co-host Betsy Aaron concurred: Feminists never “calculated that as a price of the revolution, freedom and independence turning to loneliness and depression.” It wasn’t a trade-off Aaron could have deduced from her own life: she had a successful career and a husband—co-host Threlkeld.

  The media’s preoccupation with single women’s miseries reared up suddenly in the mid-1980s. Between 1980 and 1982, as one study has noted, national magazines ran only five feature articles about single women; between 1983 and 1986, they ran fifty-three—and almost all were critical or pitying. (Only seven articles about single men ran in this same period.) The headlines spoke bleakly of THE SAD PLIGHT OF SINGLE WOMEN, THE TERMINALLY SINGLE WOMAN, and SINGLE SHOCK. To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.

  The press contributed to single women’s woes as much as it reported on them, by redefining single women’s low social status as a personal defect. The med
ia spoke ominously of single women’s “growing isolation”—but it was an isolation that trend journalism helped create and enforce. In the ’70s, the media’s accounts featured photos and stories of real single women, generally in groups. In the ’80s, the press offered drawings of fictional single women and tales of “composite” or “anonymous” single women—almost always depicted alone, hugging a tear-stained pillow, or gazing forlornly from a garret window. McCall’s described the prototype this way: “She’s the workaholic, who may enjoy an occasional dinner with friends but more likely spends most of her time alone in her apartment, where she nightly retreats as her own best friend.”

  Just as the press had ignored the social inequalities that cause career women to “burn out,” it depoliticized the situation of single women. While ’70s press reports had chipped away at the social stigma that hurt single women, the ’80s media maintained, with the aid of pop psychologists, that single women’s troubles were all self-generated. As a therapist maintained in the New York Times story on single women, “Women are in this situation because of neurotic conflicts.” This therapist was even saying it about herself; she told the Times she had entered “intensive analysis” to cure herself of this singular distaff disorder.

  The media’s presentation of single women as mental patients is a well-worn backlash tradition. In the late Victorian press, single women were declared victims of “andromania” and “marriage dread.” After briefly rehabilitating single women as sprightly “bachelor girls” in the early 1900s, the press condemned them to the mental ward once more for the duration of the Depression. In the ’30s, Good Housekeeping conducted a poll of single career women that looked for signs of psychic distress. When the single women all said they were quite satisfied with their lives, the magazine inquired hopefully, “May not some of them have hidden a longing that hurt like a wound . . . as they bent above some crib and listened to the heavy sleeping breath that rhythmed from rosy lips?” And yet again in the ’50s, a parade of psychoanalysts led by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, authors of the 1947 leading manual Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, marched through the women’s magazines, declaring single women “defeminized” and “deeply ill.”

  When the backlash press wasn’t labeling single women mental misfits, it was busy counting the bodies. Not only were single women sick, the media pundits warned, they were outnumbered—a message that only helped to elevate anxiety levels. The late Victorian press was obsessed with calculating the exact number of “excess” or “redundant” single women; national periodicals printed graphs and tables listing the overabundance of unaccounted-for women. “Why Is Single Life Becoming More General?” The Nation pondered in 1868, noting that the issue “is fast getting into the category of topics of universal discussion.” The ratio was so bad, Harper’s Bazaar exclaimed in 1874, that men could get “wives at discount,” and “eight melancholy maids” clung to the same bachelor’s arm at parties. “The universal cry is ‘No husbands! No husbands!’” (Feminist ideas, the magazine was quick to add, were to blame for this “dreadful” situation: “Many ‘advanced women’ forgot that there can be no true progress for them save in the company of, not in opposition to, men.”)

  By the mid-1980s, the media was busy once more counting heads in the single-woman pool and issuing charts that supposedly proved a surplus of unattached women, which the press now called “the spinster boom” and “hypermaidenism.” The most legendary tally sheet appeared in Newsweek. “If You’re a Single Woman, Here Are Your Chances of Getting Married,” the headline on Newsweek’s June 2, 1986, cover helpfully announced. The accompanying graph plunged like the north face of the Matterhorn, its color scheme changing from hot red to frigid blue as it slid past thirty—and into Old Maid free-fall. “The traumatic news came buried in an arid demographic study,” Newsweek’s story began, “titled innocently enough, ‘Marriage Patterns in the United States.’ But the dire statistics confirmed what everybody suspected all along: that many women who seem to have it all—good looks and good jobs, advanced degrees and high salaries—will never have mates.”

  Newsweek took the flawed and unpublished Harvard-Yale marriage study and promoted it to cover-story celebrity status. A few months later, the magazine received the more comprehensive U.S. Census Bureau marriage study and shrank it to a two-paragraph item buried in the “Update” column. Why? Eloise Salholz, Newsweek’s lead writer on the marriage study story, later explains the showcasing of the Harvard-Yale study in this way: “We all knew this was happening before that study came out. The study summarized impressions we already had.”

  The New York Times assigned a staff writer to the Harvard-Yale study and produced a lengthy story. But when it came time to cover the Census Bureau study, the Times didn’t even waste a staff writer’s time; it just used a brief wire story and buried it. And almost a year after demographers had discredited the Harvard-Yale study, the New York Times ran a front-page story on how women were suffering from this putative man shortage, citing the Harvard-Yale study as proof. Asked to explain this later, the story’s author, Jane Gross, says, “It was untimely, I agree.” But the story was assigned to her, so she made the best of it. The article dealt with the fact that the study had been invalidated by dismissing the entire critique as “rabid reaction from feminists.”

  Some of the press’s computations on the marriage crunch were at remedial levels. The Newsweek story declared that single women “are more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than marry. Maybe Newsweek was only trying to be metaphorical, but the terrorist line got repeated with somber literalness in many women’s magazines, talk shows, and advice books. “Do you know that . . . forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband?” gasped the press release that came with Tracy Cabot’s How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You. A former Newsweek bureau intern who was involved in the story’s preparation later explains how the terrorist analogy wound up in the magazine: “What happened is, one of the bureau reporters was going around saying it as a joke—like, ‘Yeah, a woman’s more likely to get bumped off by a terrorist’—and next thing we knew, one of the writers in New York took it seriously and it ended up in print.”

  Newsweek’s “marriage crunch” story, like its story on a “mother’s choice,” was a parable masquerading as a numbers report. It presented the “man shortage” as a moral comeuppance for independent-minded women who expected too much. Newsweek’s preachers found single women guilty of at least three deadly sins: Greed—they put their high-paying careers before the quest for a husband. Pride—they acted “as though it were not worth giving up space in their closets for anything less than Mr. Perfect.” And sloth—they weren’t really out there beating the bushes; “even though they say they want to marry, they may not want it enough.”

  Now came judgment day. “For many economically independent women, the consequences of their actions have begun to set in,” Newsweek intoned. “For years bright young women singlemindedly pursued their careers, assuming that when it was time for a husband they could pencil one in. They were wrong.” Newsweek urged young women to learn from the mistakes of their feminist elders: “Chastened by the news that delaying equals forgoing, they just may want to give thought to the question [of marriage] sooner than later.”

  For the further edification of the young, Newsweek lined up errant aging spinsters like sinners before the confessional grate and piously recorded their regrets: “Susan Cohen wishes she had been able to see her way clear to the altar. ‘Not being of sound mind,’ she refused several marriage proposals when she was younger.” Pediatrician Catherine Casey told the magazine’s inquisitors, “I never doubted I would marry, but I wasn’t ready at twenty-two. I was more interested in going to school. . . . Now my time clock is striking midnight.”

  Parading the penitent unwed became a regular media tearjerker, and it was on the network news programs that the melodrama enjoyed its longest run. “CBS Morning News” devoted a five-day special in 1987
to the regrets of single women. Just like the timing of the Newsweek story, the show was graciously aired in the wedding month of June. “We thought we were going to be dating for twenty-five years,” one woman moaned. “We’ll be sitting here in our forties and our biological clocks will have stopped,” wailed another. The relentless CBS newscaster behaved as if she were directing an on-air group therapy session. “Have you always been this way?” she pressed her patients. “What are you scared of?” “Do you all have strong relationships with your dads?” “Did you learn to talk as kids?”

  ABC took television psychiatry one step further in its three-hour special in 1986. Not only did the network hire a psychiatrist to serve as a behind-the-scenes consultant, the newscaster managed to badger one of the program’s subjects into an on-camera breakdown. Laura Slutsky, thirty-seven and single, the president of her own company, tried to explain that while living alone could be a “difficult challenge,” she was determined to “make my life work.” “I’ll do it,” she said, “I’ll be classy about it, at times.” But the interviewer would have none of it and kept at her. Finally:

  INTERVIEWER: Face that fear a minute for me.

  SLUTSKY: Wait a second, this is not easy stuff. [starts to cry] The fear of being alone is not—I don’t like it. I’ll do it though. Why am I crying? I don’t know why I’m crying. . . . These are hard questions. . . . But I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it. Apparently still not sated, ABC aired another special the following year, this one the four-day “Single in America.” Co-anchor Kathleen Sullivan set the tone in the opening segment: “Well, when I first heard that we were going to do this,” she announced on the air, “I said, so what? I mean, who cares about singles? They don’t have responsibilities of family. They’re only career-motivated.” But, she added generously, she’s learned to pity them: “I at first wasn’t compassionate, but now I am.