Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

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  The Backlash Brain Trust:

  From Neocons to Neofems

  THE NEW RIGHT’S LEADERS could never have marketed the backlash alone. They may have enjoyed unlimited airtime on Falwell’s “Old-Time Gospel Hour,” but their thundering oratory would never go over on “Good Morning America.” Their antifeminist tracts may have made the evangelical best-seller lists, but the big publishing houses weren’t exactly clamoring for paperback rights. Entree to the national forum awaited cooler talking heads, intermediaries with the proper media polish and academic credentials to translate fiery tirades against women’s independence into tempered soundbites and acclaimed hardcovers.

  The backlash’s emissaries reported from all scholarly outposts; they were philosophers invoking the classics, social scientists brandishing math scores, and anthropologists claiming aboriginal evidence of women’s proper place. But they weren’t just academic authorities. They were also popular writers and speakers; they were mentors in the men’s and even women’s movements. These middlemen and women did not ally themselves with any single ideological camp, either; indeed, their endorsements helped spread antifeminist sentiments across the political spectrum. While at the start of the decade, the most celebrated of them were neoconservative commentators, by the decade’s end, theoreticians who identified with liberal and leftist causes crowded onto the backlash dais, too. By the early ’90s, Reaganite author George Gilder ceded the platform to leftist intellectual Christopher Lasch, who was castigating pro-choice women and calling for a constitutional ban on divorce for couples with children.

  While a few of these thinkers openly denounced women’s demand for equality, most professed neutrality. They were engaged in a philosophical, not a personal, discourse over female independence. When they said feminism had wounded women, they were speaking only as informed and concerned bystanders, surveying the feminist-crime scene from an objective distance. The public could trust their judgments. Unlike the New Right, they had no brief against the feminist movement. They just wanted what was best for women.

  In fact, some of the backlash experts were even women who claimed to be feminists. Some classified themselves as second-generation “neo-feminists,” speaking up for “mothers’ rights.” Others brandished membership cards from the early days of the women’s movement; they were feminist writers of the ’70s now issuing revisionist texts. And then there were the unwitting and unwilling messengers—feminist scholars, who watched in dismay as their studies of gender difference were distorted by the backlash’s burgeoning staff of zealous interpreters.

  The experts who delivered the backlash to the public were a diverse and unrelated clan who defied political or social generalization—but they all carried personal baggage when they stepped up to the mike. Their interest in examining women’s status may have been genuine, their intellectual curiosity keen enough. But they were also moved by private yearnings and animosities and vanities that they barely recognized or understood themselves. Like the men and women of the New Right and Reagan camps, they, too, struggled in their domestic and professional lives with the wrenching social transformations that the last two decades had brought. And, as seems inevitable in such stressful periods between the sexes, personal anxiety and intellectual inquiry would eventually fuse to make women a “problem” demanding feverish and microscopic study, a blight on the national landscape worthy of endless beard-pulling and pontification. In their own lives, women may or may not have been the source of trouble, but in their writings and speeches, “Woman” became the all-purpose screen on which so many private apprehensions and apparitions might be projected.

  The donnish robes of many of these backlash thinkers cloaked impulses that were less than scholarly. Some of them were academics who believed that feminists had cost them in advancement, tenure, and honors; they found the creation of women’s studies not just professionally but personally disturbing and invasive, a trespasser trampling across their campus lawns. Some of them were writers who believed feminist authors and editors had overshadowed their literary careers or monopolized the publishing industry. Others were theorists trying to come to terms with very untheoretical changes in their own domiciles and marriages. Still others were political tacticians fighting unresolved, decade-old personal battles with women’s rights organizations or brooding over real and imagined slights from feminist leaders. And many others were simply publicity seekers, looking to restore former fame that they had originally won by taking a stand in favor of women’s rights.

  It would be neither feasible nor advisable here to attempt to psychoanalyze these individual men and women. Nor would it be fair; they took on the women’s movement for a tangled set of reasons—of which private circumstance is but one. The point is not to reduce the backlash theorists to psychological case studies but to widen the consideration of their ideas to include some less recognized factors—from professional grievances to domestic role strains—that played important contributory roles in shaping these thinkers’ attitudes toward feminism.

  The brief cameos that follow are not meant, either, to represent a comprehensive catalog of the many scholars, writers, and speakers who stirred the backlash stew. There were simply too many cooks—from brand names to mere media blips—who helped make the backlash palatable for public consumption. The succeeding pages offer instead a sampler of anointed spokespersons—thumbnail sketches of some lofty experts who could also be frightened or confused people, bluffing or blowharding or bullying their way through a trying and bewildering time of change.

  GEORGE GILDER: “AMERICA’S NUMBER-ONE ANTIFEMINIST”

  When the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, a twenty-nine-year-old George Gilder, then a spokesman for the liberal Republican Senator Charles McC. Mathias, found himself “besieged” by antiwar protesters who demanded to know how the congressman could claim both to oppose the invasion and support the president. They derided Gilder, too. “In their view, I might be against the war,” he recalled, “but I was part of the ‘system.’” One evening, having squeezed his way through a sea of shouting demonstrators, Gilder sat at home and brooded. His feelings of “uneasiness” that night, as he would write later, “reached beyond the dilemmas of my job. I also had qualms about my virility.”

  Not only was I avoiding enemy fire in Southeast Asia, I was also shunning full commitment in Washington. Thousands of young men and women would be marching the next day full of moral fervor, while I would be worrying about violence, about affronting powerful senators who might vote for peace.

  In a way, I knew my commitment was deeper, more practical, professional. But it didn’t allow a fusion of physical and emotional engagement: a delivery of myself to the group and the cause.

  After much soul-searching, he settled on a solution—jogging. “A good run could give me a sense of manliness and moral sufficiency often lasting several hours.” As Gilder was puffing up the hill to the Washington Monument, an object fell from the sky and suddenly he was “bowled to the ground in the darkness, as if by a bullet in the gut or a noose at the neck.” The police had mistaken him for a protester and lobbed a tear gas canister in his direction. It hadn’t actually hit him, but it was “baptism by fire” nonetheless. “As I stood there on the hill . . . I was not exactly pensive or philosophical,” he writes. “I was surprised by a surge of elation. It might not be history but it had made me part of the flow of events. I saw that I must have been one of the very first demonstration casualties. Perhaps the first.”

  The baptism did not convert Gilder to the antiwar movement, but it did give him an “immediate connection” and, in its communal afterglow, he ran up to four demonstrators parked outside his apartment to tell them “my story.” The protesters—three men and a woman—told him their story: they needed a place to crash. “In the spirit of the moment,” Gilder writes, “I invited them to stay the night.”

  The male houseguests wouldn’t leave in the morning—or the next day. Day after day, Gilder came hom
e to find the guys sprawled on the couch, his living room littered with marijuana butts, his refrigerator picked clean. When Gilder delicately broached the subject of a possible departure date, their leader taunted him with a switchblade. Finally, Gilder packed his bags and fled, taking temporary refuge at a “girl’s” house. “I guess in a way they kicked me out,” he writes.

  When he finally ventured back a week later, he was relieved to discover that the squatters had cleared out—though they had taken his turntable, records, and food with them. But they had left behind a lone fifteen-year-old girl, asleep in his bed. Against this solitary female interloper, Gilder found he could stand tall. He booted Goldilocks out of his bedroom and “sent her packing.”

  The following year, Gilder moved back to Harvard Square with hopes of launching a career as a “famous writer,” a family tradition—among the women anyway. An exceptional number of his female relatives, as he notes, had been successful and even distinguished authors and playwrights. (Gilder was also raised by the Rockefellers after his father, David Rockefeller’s college roommate, was killed in World War II—an environment that no doubt contributed to greater expectations.) As he recalls later, he had hoped to become the social commentator of the era’s turbulent national scene—a literary figure on the order of Joan Didion, his designated role model. In the meantime, however, he was editing the Ripon Forum, the newspaper of the liberal Republican Ripon Society.

  At the offices of this Republican newsletter, he would face another, more directly political, threat of eviction from his own turf. After he wrote an article praising President Nixon’s veto of a day care bill, the “feminists” at the Ripon Forum ganged up on him, he says; they lobbied for his ouster. Even worse, they got media notice by bad-mouthing him. “Several of them got on the ‘Today’ show with Barbara Walters,” he recalls. “I mean, here was this obscure magazine that had virtually no subscribers and yet these female officers could get on TV, on the ‘Today’ show no less, to protest my views.”

  Then he discovered that the TV hosts were even more interested in his counterattack. “I was on ‘Firing Line’ with all these congressmen and leading professors and feminists, just because of this article I wrote.” And he got the attention of a long-sought-after audience: “After the program, virtually all the women rushed forward to argue with me. All these years I’d been looking for a way to arouse the passionate interest of women, and it was clear I had reached pay dirt.” It was then that the notion struck him: he could make a national name for himself another way—as “America’s number-one antifeminist.”

  Until then, Gilder had, in fact, described himself as a feminist. He maintains now that he had no choice; back then, “women’s libbers” forced men to mouth the words. “In Cambridge, the feminists just dominated the scene,” he says. “Really, everybody was a feminist. It was like a rhetorical requirement.” But by becoming “the nation’s number-one male chauvinist,” yet another title he, half-jokingly, conferred upon himself, he saw a way to escape that dominance and build a literary career at the same time. Immediately after the showdown with the Ripon feminists, Gilder quit his editing job, moved to New Orleans and began writing Sexual Suicide. It was to be the first of four Gilder books on the ravages of feminism; Naked Nomads, Visible Man, and Men and Marriage followed. (The last, published in 1986, was really just a revised version of Sexual Suicide, reissued in hopes of capitalizing on feminism’s “serious setbacks,” as Gilder put it, in the backlash ’80s.) In each of them, he would write of women who are “displacing more and more men at work,” and of men—even “many conservative men”—who are “lacking the guts to rebuff the upper-class feminist ladies.” Feminists are turning to “coercion” to have their way, his books warned: in business, they “menace not only the sex roles on which the family is founded but also the freedoms at the very heart of free enterprise;” in Washington, they are trying to “emasculate the political order itself.”

  • • •

  “LET US dream a dream of liberation, a dream of young women,” begins Gilder’s fable, “The Princess’ Problem.” Like a media trend story, Gilder’s tale for single career girls is a cautionary one. The princess is the unhappily liberated Susan, an associate editor at “Rancour House.” Her “problem”: She’s single and pushing thirty. She’s having an affair with Simon, Rancour’s married editor-in-chief.

  “Why are there no single men?” Susan sighs to herself in her office, as she “lets her eyes rest on her small but privileged view of the East River.” She considers, simultaneously, the Statue of Liberty and the downside of women’s liberation.

  What does Liberty ask in 1986? Bring me your associate editors yearning to breathe free, your girl executives weary of the office air, your young lady lawyers with brisk efficient smiles and medicated wombs, your tired and hungry heiresses with advanced degrees—all your single women moving upward behind the glowing unopenable glass windows, who gaze at the brown river and ponder the passage of time, the promise of freedom.

  Susan could solve her “problem,” Gilder writes, if she would only lower her standards and marry Arnold, an unsuccessful writer and bachelor. Arnold is a persistent, if somewhat pathetic, suitor, but Susan considers Arnold barely worthy of her Rolodex. His latest manuscript gathers dust on her desk.

  Susan will pay for spurning Arnold, Gilder writes. Simon won’t leave his wife and Susan will end up “well into her thirties, without a husband.” She “will have to marry whoever happens to be available as her thirties pass by. . . . If she waits too long, she may well find that even Arnold is no longer interested, particularly if he has at last managed to succeed in his career. He may reject her with regret. But reject her he will, in favor of a woman in her twenties.” Nebbishy Arnold will have the last laugh. And she will become a spinster who “all too often . . . gives herself to drugs and the bottle.”

  Why must Susan marry Arnold? Women “have to bet on the Arnolds of the world,” Gilder writes, because “by choosing them and loving them and bearing their children, the young women greatly enhance the likelihood that struggling young single men will in fact become successful men like Simon.” In other words, Susan must marry Arnold for Arnold’s sake. The princess’s “problem,” it turns out, is the prince’s.

  In the ’70s, the struggling author and frustrated bachelor was having his own Arnold-like difficulties. He was past thirty, unwed and, by his own account, extremely unhappy about it. Gilder’s “single man’s predicament,” as he calls it, is a constant complaint in his works from this decade. Of his five boyhood friends, he writes worriedly, every one of them is married except for “P.J.,” a marine who recently shot himself in the head. Eager to avoid a similar fate, Gilder “was very aggressively pursuing women”—but none would marry him.

  In Naked Nomads, single George describes his encounter with one such resistant prospect, a voluptuous twenty-five-year-old he spies on an island beach; he’s holed up writing in the Caribbean, alone. He approaches her, but she turns out to be an adamantly independent woman sailing across the ocean alone, a feminist type with her “head held ideologically high.” She tells him, “I would never get married. Never, never. It is stupid today.” Then, walking by himself along the island’s cliffs (to a spot where he hoped to get a tan because, as he explains, “after all, I am a single man”), Gilder falls and breaks his nose. He suspects at once that his bachelor status is to blame for the mishap. “[S]ingle men are six times more likely than married ones to die from ‘accidental falls,’” he reports. Then he starts worrying that his flattened nose will make him unlovable. Finally he comforts himself with the notion that women fall for the prizefighter look. “Perhaps, I would not have to be single for the rest of my life.”

  Gilder’s books lament the oversupply and shaky emotional status of contemporary single men. “The single man is caught on a reef and the tide is running out,” he writes. “He is being biologically stranded and he has a hopeless dream.” Unlike some other backlash writers, he is at leas
t honest about the advantages marriage offers his sex and about the real ratio of single men to single women. (Even so, when he issued Men and Marriage in the ’80s, he couldn’t resist citing the Harvard-Yale marriage study in the introduction as evidence of feminism’s damaging effect on women.) Wherever one looks, single women today are far better off than single men, Gilder asserts, pointing dispiritedly to a study that finds single women even have more than twice as much sex as single men. “As in the case of poverty, crime, mental illness, depression, and mortality,” he writes, “it is single men who are the casualties of the Sexual Revolution.” And he points out that single men need to get married a lot more than women: “Although they may make claims to the contrary, women, in fact, can often do without marriage; single women at least can live to a stable and productive old age. . . . Men without women frequently become the ‘single menace,’” and they are “often destined to a Hobbsean life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  A man also must marry so he can support a family—the acid test of manhood. “[V]irile masculinity,” he writes, “. . . is reserved chiefly for the married.” And how can a single man prove himself as a “provider,” Gilder asks, “in a society where he cannot earn more money than the females eligible to him”? Like the Yankelovich researchers, Gilder has stumbled across America’s still largely unchallenged social prerequisite to masculinity: a real man pays the family bills—all of them. Gilder parts company with these social scientists, however, by claiming that this economic definition of manhood is basic to human biology.

  Gilder’s version of young underemployed single men is far gloomier than the Yankelovich’s “Contenders.” To Gilder, single men in general are an inordinately unsavory breed, “a baboon troop” of “naked nomads” who are far more likely than married men to become drug addicts, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, criminals, and murderers. “[T]he older a man gets without marrying,” he writes, “the more likely he is to kill himself.” Only a wedding ring, Gilder warns, can “tame the barbarians.” But if the typical single man is this unappealing, what woman would consider a date with him, much less a marriage? Gilder’s answer to women: You have no choice—wed or prepare to die. “[T]he peripheral men are not powerless,” he advises ominously. “They can buy knives and guns, drugs and alcohol, and thus achieve a brief and predatory dominance.” They will “rape and pillage, debauch and despoil.” Better to march down the aisle with them—than to meet them in a dark alley.