Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  The American marriage, not the woman, is the patient under analysis in the ’70s women’s films, and the dialogue probes the economic and social inequities of traditional wedlock. “A woman like me works twice as hard and for what?” Barbra Streisand, the housewife Margaret in Up the Sandbox, demands of her husband, a history professor. “Stretch marks and varicose veins, that’s what. You’ve got one job; I’ve got ninety-seven. Maybe I should be on the cover of Time. Dust Mop of the Year! Queen of the Laundry Room! Expert on Tinker Toys!” Margaret’s mother offers the most succinct summation of what, in the opinion of these films, lies at the core of marital distress: “Remember, marriage is a 75—25 proposition. The woman gives 75.”

  In these films, the heroines are struggling to break out of the supporting-actress status that traditional marriage conferred on them; they are asking to be allowed, for once, to play a leading role in their own lives. “This story is going to be all about me,” announces Judy Davis’s Sybylla, in the first line of Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career, an Australian film that became a hit in the United States in the late ’70s. The youthful heroine turns down a marriage proposal not because she doesn’t care for her suitor, but because marriage would mean that her own story would never have a chance to develop. “Maybe I’m ambitious, selfish,” she says apologetically. “But I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own yet.”

  Of course, according to the conventional ’80s analysis, these ’70s film heroines were selfish, their pursuit of self-discovery just a euphemism for self-involvement. But that reading misses a critical aspect of the female quest in these movies. The heroines did not withdraw into themselves; they struggled toward active engagement in affairs beyond the domestic circle. They raised their voices not simply for personal improvement but for humanitarian and political causes—human rights in Julia, workers’ rights in Norma Rae, equal pay in 9 to 5, and nuclear safety in The China Syndrome. They wished to transform not only themselves but the world around them. They were loud, belligerently loud, because speaking up was a social, as well as a private, responsibility. “Are you still as angry as you used to be?” Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical Julia. “I like your anger. . . . Don’t you let anyone talk you out of it.”

  THE ’80S: THE CELLULOID WOMAN’S SURRENDER

  If Vanessa Redgrave’s Julia represented the kind of heroine that 1970s feminist cinema would single out for biographical study, then it fell to Redgrave’s daughter, Natasha Richardson, to portray her counterpart for the late 1980s: Patty Hearst. As conceived in Paul Schrader’s 1988 film, the bound and blindfolded heiress is all victim; her lack of identity is her leading personality trait. As Schrader explained: “[E]ssentially the performance is like a two-hour reaction shot.”

  The same might be said of the droves of passive and weary female characters filling the screen in the late 1980s. In so many of these movies, it is as if Hollywood has taken the feminist films and run the reels backward. The women now flee the office and hammer at the homestead door. Their new quest is to return to traditional marriage, not challenge its construction; they want to escape the workplace, not remake it. The female characters who do have professional lives take little pleasure from them. They find their careers taxing and tedious, “jobs” more than callings. While the liberated women of ’70s films were writers, singers, performers, investigative reporters, and political activists who challenged the system, the women of the late ’80s are management consultants, investment advisers, corporate lawyers, behind-the-scenes production and literary assistants. They are the system’s support staff.

  Most women in the real contemporary labor force are, of course, relegated to ancillary, unsatisfying or degrading work, but these films aren’t meant to be critiques of sex discrimination on the job or indictments of a demoralizing marketplace. They simply propose that women had a better deal when they stayed home. The films stack the deck against working female characters: it’s easier to rationalize a return to housekeeping when the job left behind is so lacking in rewards or meaning. It’s hard to make the case that a woman misses out if she quits the typing pool—or that society suffers when an investment banker abandons Wall Street.

  The career women of the late-’80s cinema are an unappealing lot. They rarely smile and their eyes are red-rimmed from overwork and exhaustion. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” Cher, an attorney, complains to a co-worker in Suspect; he’s single, too, but, being male, immune to burnout. She tells him:

  I don’t have a life. The last time I went to the movies was like a year ago. The only time I listen to music is in my car. I don’t date. I’d like to have a child but I don’t even have a boyfriend so how can I have a child? . . . I don’t think I can do it anymore. You know, I’m tired. I’m really tired.

  In Surrender, Sally Field’s Daisy is an “artist.” But her artistry is performed at an assembly-line factory, where she mass-produces landscape art for hotels. Her one stab at a personal statement is to brush a tiny female figure into one of the canvases; it is a picture of herself drowning. All she wants to do, understandably, is quit and devote her life to marriage and motherhood. “If I’m not married again by the time I’m forty-one,” she moans, “there’s a twenty-seven percent chance I’ll end up a lonely alcoholic.” Her “biological clock” is practically a guest star in this film. She has a dream, she tells her enviably fertile friend, who is pregnant for the fourth time. “This dream has a husband and baby in it.” The “bottom line,” says Daisy, is, “I want a baby.” Although she claims to aspire to a career as a painter, after five minutes in front of the easel she is sidetracked by her more important marital mission. She hums the wedding march as she chases her prospective husband, a prolific and successful novelist.

  The single Isabelle in Crossing Delancey is another mirthless working woman. An assistant in a bookshop, she serves the needs of successful male authors. Her off hours are not too gratifying either: in one painful scene in a Manhattan deli, she and other single women flutter like souls in limbo around the salad bar, their faces ghostly under the fluorescent lights. Clutching their Styrofoam food containers, they drift home-ward—to consume their bland suppers curled solo on their beds.

  Typical of “postfeminist” fare, Crossing Delancey mouths sympathy for feminist aspirations, then promptly eats its words. The film’s heroine takes a stand for self-determination only to undercut it. Isabelle huffily tells her grandmother she has good friends and a full life, and doesn’t “need a man to be complete”—then admits to a nightmare she’s just had about drowning. She claims she values her independence—then gathers with her girlfriends to bemoan the man shortage. She protests that she’s really “a happy person,” that she doesn’t need the matchmaker her grandmother has hired to save her from spinsterhood. But the film shows her bereft and alone on her birthday, eating a hot dog at a stand-up grill in Times Square—while a wild-eyed bag lady croons “Some Enchanted Evening” in her ear. “A dog should live alone, not a woman,” her grandmother tells her. And in the end, her words are the ones we’re meant to believe. Isabelle learns to “settle”—in this case, for the pickle vendor in the old neighborhood. He’s dull but solid, a good provider for the little woman.

  The professional women on screen who resist these nesting “trends,” who refuse to lower their expectations and their voices, pay a bitter price for their recalcitrance. In Broadcast News, Holly Hunter’s Jane, a single network producer, fails to heed the cocooning call. She’s not out there beating the bushes for a husband and she’s passionate about her work. Her male co-worker, a single reporter, has the same traits; on him they are admirable, but on her they constitute neurosis. She is “a basket case” and “an obsessive,” who dissolves into inexplicable racking sobs in the middle of the day and compulsively chatters directions. “Except for socially,” a female colleague tells her, “you’re my role model.” While the two lead male characters wind
up with brilliant careers and full private lives, Jane winds up alone. Her aggressiveness at work cancels out her chances for love. Her attempts to pull off a romantic encounter fail miserably every time. “I’ve passed some line someplace,” she says. “I’m beginning to repel people I’m trying to seduce.”

  In these backlash films, only the woman who buries her intelligence under a baby-doll exterior is granted a measure of professional success without having to forsake companionship. In Working Girl, Melanie Griffith’s Tess, an aspiring secretary with a child’s voice, rises up the business ladder and gets the man—but she achieves both goals by playing the daffy and dependent girl. She succeeds in business only by combing the tabloid gossip columns for investment tips—and relying on far more powerful businessmen to make the key moves in her “career.” She succeeds in love Sleeping Beauty—style, by passing out in a man’s arms.

  Tess is allowed to move up in the ranks of American business only by tearing another woman down; in the ’80s cinema, as in America’s real boardrooms, there’s only room for one woman at a time. Female solidarity in this film is just a straw man to knock down. “She takes me seriously,” the naive Tess confides to her boyfriend about her new boss, Katharine. “It’s because she’s a woman. She wants to be my mentor.” The rest of the narrative is devoted to disabusing Tess of that notion. Katharine, a cutthroat Harvard MBA with a Filofax where her heart should be (the film’s ads called her “the boss from hell”), betrays Tess at the first opportunity. The film ends with a verbal cat fight between the Dark and Light Woman, a sort of comic version of Fatal Attraction’s final scene, in which Tess orders Katharine to get her “bony ass” out of the office. Not only does Katharine not get the man; she doesn’t even get to keep her job.

  The incompatibility of career and personal happiness is preached in another prototypical woman’s film of the ’80s, Baby Boom. Like Fatal Attraction, it was a movie that the media repeatedly invoked, as “evidence” that babies and business don’t mix. “Remember the troubles that beset the high-powered Manhattan businesswoman played by Diane Keaton in the movie Baby Boom . . .?” Child magazine prodded its readers. “[T]he talents needed to nurture a child are at odds with those demanded for a fast-paced career.”

  As was the case in Working Girl, the male boss’s hands in Baby Boom are clean. A benign patriarch, he reminds J. C. Wiatt, an aspiring management consultant with a messianic complex to match her initials, that she must choose between the corner office and the cradle. He’s not being nasty, just realistic. “Do you understand the sacrifices?” he asks as he offers her a chance to become one of the firm’s partners. “A man can be a success. My wife is there for me whenever I need her. I’m lucky. I can have it all.” Baby Boom was cowritten by Nancy Meyers, creator of Private Benjamin, so one might expect that the film would set out to challenge this unjust arrangement—and argue that the corporation must learn to accommodate women, not the other way around. But this is a very different Nancy Meyers from the one who championed Private Benjamin’s liberation seven years ago.

  In keeping with the decade’s prevailing views, Meyers now envisions women as divided into two hostile camps. “There are certain women who are very aggressive and great at business but who know nothing about babies and are intimidated by the thought of having kids,” she told the press now. “They want them but don’t know how to go about settling down and having one out of fear of what it’ll do to their careers. I feel bad for those women.”

  “I don’t see women having it all and achieving great things,” Meyers says later in an interview. She’s sitting in her Studio City house with a baby in her arms. “I don’t see them in the corporate world.” Rather than protest the lack of progress, Meyers has made adjustments. She says she has chosen to take a back seat to her creative partner and common-law husband, director Charles Shyer, so she can look after their two young children. Although Meyers was deeply involved in the creation of Baby Boom, Shyer got the directing credit. “People ask me why I don’t direct,” Meyers says. “I’ve had directing offers and I’ve turned them down. It wouldn’t be right for my family. It wouldn’t be right for my children. The movie says ‘Directed by Charles Shyer’ and people look at that and I guess they think, well . . .” Her voice trails off. “But that’s just the way it is. I’m not saying it’s fair; I’m not saying women should compromise, but they do have to compromise. I guess if more men would give up something . . .” Meyers’s voice trails off again. If this last remark is meant for Shyer, who is sitting across the table from her, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

  In scaling back her female characters’ expectations, Meyers got plenty of encouragement from the Hollywood studios. When she and Shyer wrote Protocol, they ran into heavy interference from the presiding studio, Warner Brothers. The story was supposed to be about a naive waitress, again played by Goldie Hawn, who has her consciousness raised and becomes a politically wise diplomat. The studio insisted the producers rewrite the female character’s development, Shyer recalls, removing Hawn’s political evolution from the script. In the final version, she winds up a scatterbrained national sweetheart, cheerleading for the American way. “They were very nervous about the content of the movie, that it not have a political point of view,” Charles Shyer recalls. “It was the beginning of the Reagan administration and they didn’t want anything that might be seen as an anti-Reagan movie.” A woman who thinks for herself, apparently, could now be mistaken for a subversive.

  By the time production rolled around for Baby Boom in the mid-’80s, Meyers and Shyer had internalized the studio’s commands; no unseemly political outbursts sully Diane Keaton’s performance. At the start of Baby Boom, J. C. Wiatt, the Tiger Lady of the boardroom, has “chosen” career over marriage and maternity and in the process scoured away any trace of womanhood—or humanity. Diane Keaton’s Wiatt is an efficient machine; even her sexual encounters are confined to passionless four-minute couplings. When a baby is forced into her unwilling arms by the death of a distant relative, she tries to explain about the zero-sum game of “choice”: “I can’t have a baby,” she says, “because I have a twelve-thirty lunch meeting.” Because she has cast her lot in a man’s world, she is also seemingly incapable of the simplest acts of child care. Diapering the baby becomes an impossible ordeal for this Ivy Leaguer. Eventually, in the female game of trade-offs, as her baby skills ascend, her career plummets. Devotion to the baby destroys her chances of a promotion; the partnership offer is retracted and she is demoted to the dog-food account.

  It never occurs to the highly educated Tiger Lady that her treatment might constitute sex discrimination. Instead of proceeding to the courtroom, she quits and moves to the country. Ensconced in a bucolic estate, she soon softens up, learning to bake and redirecting her business skills to a more womanly vocation, making and marketing gourmet baby food. Ultimately, her truly feminine side is awakened by the local veterinarian “Cooper.” Like Tess, she finds love the old-fashioned way—by fainting. The doctor revives her on his examining table, and she falls in love.

  Baby Boom’s values are muddled; the film takes a feeble swipe at the corporate system before backing off completely. It pretends to reject the ’80s money ethic without ever leaving its orbit. The Tiger Lady retreats to the country, but to an obscenely expensive farmhouse that she can afford only because of her prior Wall Street paychecks. She turns up her nose at yuppie materialism, but supports herself by selling boutique applesauce baby food to yuppie mothers. When one of her old corporate accounts at the firm offers to buy her baby-food company for $3 million in cash, she marches into the boardroom to reject the deal. “Country Baby is not for sale,” she says piously. Her speech might have been an opportunity to take the firm to task for expelling its most valuable employee simply because she had a child. She could have spoken up for the rights of working mothers. But instead, the former Tiger Lady’s talk dribbles off into a dewy-eyed reverie about the joys of rural living. “And anyway, I really think I’d miss my six
ty-two-acre estate,” she explains. “Elizabeth [her baby] is so happy there and well, you see, there’s this veterinarian I’m seeing . . .” The last shot shows her back at home in a rocking chair, baby in her arms, surrounded by curtain lace and floral upholstery.

  Like Fatal Attraction’s creators, Meyers and Shyer defend the “you-can’t-have-it-all” message of the film by explaining that they based it on “research.” To their credit, they did go to the trouble of interviewing an actual career woman. They modeled the Tiger Lady on a management consultant with a Harvard MBA. “She was so torn by the whole thing,” Meyers says. “It was so hard for her. She didn’t know what to do.” What their model, Nadine Bron, didn’t do, however, was give up work. She managed to find love and marry, too, despite the career. She’s not even particularly “torn,” she says.

  “Well, I know it’s Hollywood and all,” Bron says diplomatically when asked later for her view of Baby Boom, “but what bothered me is that the movie assumed that is the only way—to give it all up and move to the country.” Bron’s life does not fit the you-can’t-have-it-all thesis: she has worked for a large consulting firm and now runs her own money-management business—without abandoning a personal life. Her marriage, she says, is stronger because both she and her husband have “full lives.” She has no desire to become a country housewife.

  “My mother stayed home while my father ran the business,” she recalls. “She was very frustrated.” Growing up, Bron was a pained witness to her mother’s weight swings and bouts of depression. It is not a pattern she cares to repeat. “For some women,” Bron says, “staying home is preferable, but I could never do it. For me, it’s very important to work.” The problem, as she sees it, is not women wanting to go home but the male business world refusing to admit the women on equal terms. “Society has not been willing to adapt to these new patterns of women,” she says. “Society punishes you.”