Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  In the spring of 1987, she reported to her plastic surgeon for the first operation, breast implants. She lay down on the operating table and held the anesthesia mask to her mouth and nose. As the room went fuzzy, Diana pushed aside her fears about the operation’s effect on her health: “Okay, what do you want more, to be beautiful or run a marathon?” she recalls murmuring to herself. “To be beautiful, of course.” When she woke up, she was in no shape to stand, much less jog. Her chest throbbed with pain and her muscles were so weak that she had to be lifted out of bed.

  When she was well enough to resume the Project, she paid a visit to some marketing executives at Oil of Olay. She had seen the company’s new “control concept” ad campaign urging women to “fight” aging; she figured they would be interested in her action-oriented story. They were—until she revealed that her self-improvement plan involved cosmetic surgery. They told her the surgery represented a “conflict of interest” with their image because it wasn’t “natural.” During her first radio show, Diana ran up against the same critique—this time from male callers. They denounced her “vanity” and accused her of manipulating her flesh “unnaturally.” First the male reporter had put her down because she was “physically inferior;” now men were criticizing her for trying to live up to male-created standards—standards that she had made her own. In pursuit of the Project, her desire to achieve and her desire to find acceptance had become indistinguishable. “They were telling me that I shouldn’t strive for what I want,” she says. “They were saying . . . don’t take charge of your looks.”

  Eventually Netter called to say he had arranged a meeting with several producers at Paramount for a possible “Movie of the Week.” When Diana walked into the studio’s plush office suite, the producers were seated around a boardroom table, already planning “her story.” They continued to talk as if she weren’t present. “They kept saying, ‘It’s great but we need an ending,’” Diana recalls. “‘Should we marry her off? Should we have her fail and go off by herself?’ They were talking about me as if I was some girl on the auction block.” She didn’t want them to make up her ending—she wanted to create her own.

  Meanwhile, prospects on the marriage front were looking bleak. She had struck up a “phone relationship” with a real estate broker. He kept wanting to meet her, and she kept refusing to see him until “the Project was completed.” He told her he was “behind her a hundred percent” and she shouldn’t worry about the way she looked. This went on for five months until she reluctantly agreed to fly out and spend the day with him.

  When he picked her up at the airport, she spotted the disappointment in his eyes. “He looked at me and I knew it was all over.” It was weeks before they talked again. “You aren’t going to be there for me, are you?” she asked him. “No,” he said. “Why?” she asked, and waited for the answer she had already anticipated. After a silence, he finally said it: “You look too old.” (He was two years older than she.) Then he rattled off “a list of all my failings,” she recalls, “starting with my hair and going down to my toes. He had about ten things on that list to explain why he was dumping me.” And every one of them was physical. Several months later, she heard he was engaged—to a woman ten years his junior.

  In August 1988, with the Project approaching its second year, Diana was struggling to lose weight in preparation for the liposuction operation. On a hot summer afternoon, she sat at the Skinny Haven restaurant and studied the calorie counts, helpfully listed on the menu. Diana’s students were graduating later that day, and she would be giving a speech at the ceremonies. She was proud of her pupils, but that wasn’t what was on her mind at the moment. Her birthday was coming up soon, she said. How old would she be? She looked up sharply; she didn’t appreciate the reminder. “I’ll be thirty-eight,” she said. “But when my project is done, then I’ll start the counting over—at one.”

  Reversing the aging process is an ancient, and famously doomed, quest. It’s not the sort of challenge a practical-minded and professional woman like Diana might be expected to take up. Yet by the late ’80s, the revival of harsh beauty standards had left even resourceful, enterprising women like her in a bind. It’s easy enough to mock the apparent self-absorption of Diana’s Five Percent plan. But perhaps she can be forgiven for choosing to hunt for the fountain of youth rather than seeking to build a life of her own against the overpowering currents of the times. Diana belonged to a culture that barely recognized these currents, much less provided women with the reinforcements to challenge them; instead, it armed women only with salves and scalpels to battle their own anatomy. If Diana chose then to take on nature itself, rather than resist comparisons with the Breck Girl and her many commercial sisters, maybe she had her reasons. Faced with a lonely and treacherous decade for women trying to buck the “trends,” she may have simply given herself better odds fighting biology than triumphing over a seemingly more overwhelming cultural undertow.

  PART THREE

  Origins of a Reaction:

  Backlash Movers,

  Shakers, and Thinkers

  9

  The Politics of Resentment:

  The New Right’s War on Women

  “The politics of despair in America has typically been the politics of backlash.”

  —SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET AND EARL RAAB

  I HAVE HOPE FOR the first time in a long time,” declares Paul Weyrich. The “Father of the New Right” gazes out the window at the squalor surrounding his Washington, D.C., office. Homeless families huddle on the sidewalk grates; a half block from Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, sirens wail and gunshots ring out.

  The good cheer of the New Right leader would seem as inappropriate to the times as it is to his location. Isn’t the winter of 1988, after all, a little late for the founder of the Heritage Foundation to be feeling good about America? Wasn’t the New Right movement’s time of hope at the start of the decade, when its leaders drove liberal senators from office, rewrote the Republican party’s platform, and marched triumphantly into Washington? Hasn’t it all been downhill since then?

  Weyrich, who has just returned from a college lecture tour, reads the signs differently. “I see great hope because there’s a new receptivity out there for the first time. Ten years ago, when I talked on campuses about the lie of women’s liberation, about withholding sexual gratification, I got an absolutely hostile reaction. People hissed and booed. Now I get great interest. Now at Kent State—Kent State!—I get a nineteen-year-old girl coming up to me afterward with grateful tears in her eyes, and she says, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’”

  Not only are some college girls listening, the “liberal media” seem to be coming around to Weyrich’s point of view on women. This encourages him the most: “At last the lie of feminism is being understood. Women are discovering they can’t have it all. They are discovering that if they have careers, their children will suffer, their family life will be destroyed. It used to be we were the only ones who were saying it. Now, I read about it everywhere. Even Ms. magazine. Ms.!”

  While the New Right movement failed to enact many of the specific legislative measures on its list, it made great strides in the wider—and, in the Reagan and Bush years, increasingly more important—realm of public relations. By the end of the ’80s, men like Weyrich no longer appeared to loom large on the Washington political landscape, but then that’s not where they had intended to wind up. As a New Right minister put it to his fellows at an early strategy session at the Heritage Foundation: “We’re not here to get into politics. We’re here to turn the clock back to 1954 in this country. And once we’ve done it, we’re gonna clear out of this stinking town.” In the final years of the decade, when men like Weyrich picked up their newspapers, it seemed to them that, as their sentiments began to seep into mainstream culture, the hands of time were indeed starting to inch counterclockwise.

  If the contemporary backlash had a birthplace, it was here within the ranks of the New Righ
t, where it first took shape as a movement with a clear ideological agenda. The New Right leaders were among the first to articulate the central argument of the backlash—that women’s equality is responsible for women’s unhappiness. They were also the first to lambaste the women’s movement for what would become its two most popularly cited, and contradictory, sins: promoting materialism over moral values (i.e., turning women into greedy yuppies) and dismantling the traditional familial support system (i.e., turning women into welfare mothers). The mainstream would reject their fevered rhetoric and hell-fire imagery, but the heart of their political message survived—to be transubstantiated into the media’s “trends.”

  The leaders of the New Right were rural fundamentalist ministers whose congregations were shrinking and electronic preachers whose audience was declining. In the countryside, the steady migration of evangelicals to the suburbs and cities and the indifference of a younger generation were emptying their pews. On the airwaves between 1977 and 1980, at the very time of the “rise” of the New Right, the TV preachers’ audience fell by 1 million viewers. By November 1980, nine of the ten most popular TV preachers had fewer viewers than in February of that same year; Oral Roberts had lost 22 percent of his TV audience, and the PTL Club had lost 11 percent. Even at the peak of Moral Majority’s national prominence in the media, less than 7 percent of Americans surveyed said the organization represented their views. A Harris poll found that no more than 14 percent of the electorate followed the TV evangelists—and half of the followers told pollsters they were considering withdrawing their support.

  “Backlash politics,” political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab observed in their study of this periodic phenomenon in modern American public life, “may be defined as the reaction by groups which are declining in a felt sense of importance, influence, and power.” Unlike classic conservatives, these “pseudoconservatives”—as Theodore Adorno dubbed the constituents of such modern right-wing movements—perceive themselves as social outcasts rather than guardians of the status quo. They are not so much defending a prevailing order as resurrecting an outmoded or imagined one. “America has largely been taken away from them and their kind,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” As Weyrich himself observed of his liberal opponents: “They have already succeeded. We are not in power. They are.”

  The New Right movement has its counterparts in the last several backlash eras: the American Protective Association of the late 19th century, the Ku Klux Klan revival and Father Coughlin’s right-wing movement in the ’20s and ’30s, the John Birch Society’s anticommunist campaign in the postwar years. The constituents of these crusades were failing farmers who could no longer live off the land, lower-middle-class workers who could not support their families or rural fundamentalists in a secular urban nation. They found their most basic human aspirations thwarted—the yearning to be recognized and valued by their society, the desire to find a firm footing on an unstable economic ladder. If they couldn’t satisfy these fundamental needs, they could at least seek the bitter solace of retribution. As Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips declared, “We must prove our ability to get revenge on people who go against us.” The New Right’s prime fundraiser Richard Viguerie vowed to “do an awful lot of punishing.” If they weren’t going to be rewarded in this life, they could at least penalize the people who they suspected had robbed them of good fortune. Every backlash movement has had its preferred scapegoat: for the American Protective Association, Catholics filled the bill. For Father Coughlin’s “social justice” movement, Jews. For the Ku Klux Klan, of course, blacks. And for the New Right, a prime enemy would be feminist women.

  In 1980, Weyrich was among the first of many New Right leaders to identify the culprit. In the Conservative Digest, he warned followers of the feminist threat:

  [T]here are people who want a different political order, who are not necessarily Marxists. Symbolized by the women’s liberation movement, they believe that the future for their political power lies in the restructuring of the traditional family, and particularly in the downgrading of the male or father role in the traditional family.

  That same year, Moral Majority’s Reverend Jerry Falwell issued the same advisory. “The Equal Rights Amendment strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure,” he concluded in Listen, America!, a treatise that devotes page after page to the devastation wreaked by the women’s movement. The feminists had launched a “satanic attack on the home,” Falwell said. And his top priority was crushing these women, starting with the execution of the ERA. “With all my heart,” he vowed, “I want to bury the Equal Rights Amendment once and for all in a deep, dark grave.”

  One New Right group after another lined up behind this agenda. The Conservative Caucus deemed the ERA one of “the most destructive pieces of legislation to ever pass Congress,” and to determine which candidates deserved funding, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress made each politician’s stance on the ERA the deciding factor. The depiction of feminists as malevolent spirits capable of great evil and national destruction was also a refrain. The opening of the American Christian Cause’s fund-raising newsletter warned, “Satan has taken the reins of the ‘women’s liberation’ movement and will stop at nothing.” The Christian Voice held that “America’s rapid decline as a world power is a direct result” of the feminist campaign for equal rights and reproductive freedom. Feminists, the Voice’s literature advised, are “moral perverts” and “enemies of every decent society.” Feminists are a deadly force, as the commentators on the evangelical 700 Club explained it, precisely because they threatened a transfer of gender power; they “would turn the country over to women.” That the New Right fastened on feminism, not communism or race, was in itself a testament to the strength and standing of the women’s movement in the last decade. As scholar Rosalind Pollack Petchesky observed, “The women’s liberation movement in the 1970s had become the most dynamic force for social change in the country, the one most directly threatening not only to conservative values and interest, but also to significant groups whose ‘way of life’ is challenged by ideas of sexual liberation.” Significantly, the critical New Right groups all got underway within two years after the two biggest victories for women’s rights—Congress’s approval of the ERA in 1972 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973.

  For the New Right preachers, the force of feminist ideas was also threatening their professional status. Like the late Victorian ministers who led their era’s vanguard against the 19th-century women’s movement, the New Right clergy depended on a mostly female flock of worshipers for their livelihood—and that flock was not only diminishing but becoming increasingly disobedient. In a 1989 survey of about eighteen thousand Christian-identified women in the United States, only 3 percent said they turned to their minister for moral guidance. Frustrated, the pastors tried to at least keep these women quiet. When a researcher tried to conduct a survey of evangelical women, one preacher after another refused to give her access to their female congregations. In their sermons, the New Right ministers invoked one particular Biblical passage with such frequency that it even merited press attention: Ephesians 5:22—24—“The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church”—became an almost weekly mantra in many pulpits. In their domestic life, too, as much as the fundamentalist men tried to seal shut the doors, feminist ideas persisted in slipping through the cracks. “Wife beating is on the rise because men are no longer leaders in their homes,” an evangelical minister told a sociologist. “I tell the women they must go back home and be more submissive.”

  To the New Right ministers, feminism and the sweeping political forces they associated with it seemed too powerful to rein in, but individual women closer to home made for more convenient and vulnerable whipping girls. Disappointed and embittered with the Carter administration for igno
ring their demands for government-legislated school prayer, federally funded religious education, and a host of other objectives that they had hoped a Baptist president would back, fundamentalist leaders went after his sister Ruth Carter Stapleton with the most wrath. In a smear campaign that produced anti-Stapleton tapes, radio sermons, even a book, these men denounced the woman they dubbed “Queen of the Witches.” (Sorcery and sex equality were never far removed in New Right rhetoric.) “They really came after me,” Stapleton would recall later. “They were against women evangelists. Really, they were against women altogether. They said every woman had to be in total submission to the male.”

  When the New Right men entered national politics, they brought their feminist witch-hunts with them. Howard Phillips charged that feminists had overrun the capital and were behind “the conscious policy of government to liberate the wife from the leadership of the husband.” Jerry Falwell seemed to see strident feminists everywhere he looked in Washington: even a federal Health and Education advisory committee on women’s needs was “made up of twelve very aggressive, self-proclaimed feminists,” he observed ominously. “Need I say that it is time that moral Americans became informed and involved in helping to preserve family values in our nation? . . . [W]e cannot wait. The twilight of our nation could well be at hand.” Not just the domestic cabinet was in jeopardy, Falwell advised. Feminists were undermining the military and now advancing on international affairs. In Listen, America!, Falwell outlined a global feminist conspiracy—a sinister female web of front organizations spreading its tentacles across the free world. Even the 1979 International Year of the Child had “a darker side,” he maintained: the event was a back door through which scheming socialist-minded women’s-rights activists had “gained access to a worldwide network of governments.”