Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Friedan was not the only famous feminist yanking out the stitches in her own handiwork. A handful of authors whose best-selling books helped popularize the women’s liberation movement in the ’70s were busy issuing retractions. To the New Right, the new words of the old-line feminists were almost too good to be true. “Feminism, which once helped open windows of opportunity for women, has turned against itself,” rejoiced Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza, managing editor of the neoconservative Policy Review. After the New York Times Magazine featured an excerpt of The Second Stage on its cover, Phyllis Schlafly exulted in her newsletter that Friedan had “just put another nail in the coffin of feminism.”

  By the mid-’80s, the voices of feminist recantation became a din, as the media picked up the words of a few symbolically important feminists and rebroadcast them nationwide. Many of these new books read like extended and hastily slapped together press releases. For the most part, these “leaders’” moment under the camera lights had actually long since passed; but, like the retiring male feminist Warren Farrell, they hoped to reclaim center stage.

  While there were plenty of feminist thinkers—new and old, famous and obscure—who stood firm in their political beliefs, they were invisible to the media’s roving eye. The one new self-proclaimed “feminist” theoretician that the press did pluck from obscurity was actually an embittered antifeminist academic. Literary scholar Camille Paglia became an overnight celebrity, landing on the cover of both New York and Harper’s the same month, soon after launching a vitriolic attack on “whining” feminists in her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. The press assiduously recycled her antifemale and antifeminist zingers (“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts,” and, “[Feminist scholars] can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag”); Newsday featured her dismissal of date rape as feminist nonsense; and television producers raced to option her book. And what was Paglia’s motive—freely admitted—for assailing feminists? Simple spite. Rival literary scholars who were feminists, she complained, had grabbed all the “acclaim” and failed to be “respectful” of her prodigious talents, a situation that consigned her to the nontenure track at the unsung Philadelphia University of the Arts and allowed her book to be snubbed by seven publishers. It was then, as she told a New York writer later, that she began “preparing my revenge” against feminist academics.

  In 1984, feminist Germaine Greer followed up The Female Eunuch, her 1970 smash-hit celebration of female independence and sexuality, with the dour and deterministic Sex and Destiny. Formerly the media’s favorite as a flamboyant advocate of sexual emancipation—a “saucy feminist that even men like,” a Life cover story had declared at the time—Greer now championed arranged marriages, chastity, and the chador, and named as her new role model the old-fashioned peasant wife, happily confined to kitchen and nursery and happily concealed under her chador. Greer herself billed the book an “attack upon the ideology of sexual freedom.” Ironically, just as Concerned Women of America’s Beverly LaHaye was endorsing birth control, sex for fun, and clitoral orgasms, Greer was signaling her opposition to all three. The best form of contraception, she asserted, was abstinence. Clitoral orgasms are too “one-dimensional” and “masculine,” she wrote.

  By 1986, antifeminist spokesmen were also making much of the revisionist murmurings of feminist activist Susan Brownmiller, author of the 1975 landmark work on rape, Against Our Will, who was now saying the women’s movement may have overlooked “profound biological and psychological differences” between the sexes. The author of a meticulously documented historical analysis of sexual violence, Brown-miller now produced a footnoteless and fuzzy look at feminine behavior through the ages. Femininity pondered such pressing issues as whether a hair on Brownmiller’s face was the result of “unholy ambition”—or, perhaps, “some dormant source of testosterone within my system”—and whether she should pluck it. The answer to that last question: yes.

  As the decade progressed, these famous ’70s feminists would continue to churn out increasingly retrograde fare. In her 1990 memoir about her weak-willed father, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Greer nearly outdid Philip Wylie’s Momism in her demonization of mother—“the mad dog in the kitchen,” as she called her, a literalized bitch who was always “foaming at the mouth” and emasculating dad. Meanwhile, Brownmiller turned her literary gun sights on a victim of domestic violence; on the New York Times op-ed page and in Waverly Place, a fictionalized and hurriedly issued account of the celebrated case of Lisa Steinberg (the New York City child beaten to death by her adoptive father), Brownmiller reserved her harshest words for the failings of the battered wife. (She finished the book before the court verdict even came in.) And celebrated feminist author Erica Jong quickly joined the re-canters. (Her support for feminism had actually always been rather equivocal, despite a public reputation as a leading “libber,” bestowed upon her by the press after Fear of Flying became a hit.) Not only did her liberated characters eat their words, she disavowed the cause herself—in Ms., of course. Women of “my generation,” she wrote, “look longingly at the marriages of our parents and grandparents. . . . Alone n our single-parent families, still searching for the one great love, we begin to smell a rat.”

  But of all the declarations of apostasy, The Second Stage had the potential to be the most damaging to the feminist cause. Betty Friedan was the household name, synonymous in the minds of millions of Americans with the women’s liberation movement. She was “the mother of the modern women’s movement,” as hundreds of newspaper articles had called her ever since her 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique, first gave voice to “the problem that has no name” and helped catalyze a movement for social change. That book was Friedan’s labor of love; she spent years researching and writing in an annex of the dusty New York Public Library. Yet, here she was, two decades later, attacking the “feminist mystique” and accusing the women’s movement of “breeding a new ‘problem that has no name’”—in a thinly documented book that often reads as if it were dictated into a tape machine. What happened?

  One gets few insights directly from Friedan herself. “I don’t use the term ‘feminist mystique’ in my book,” Friedan says in an interview, sounding indignant. Reminded that she, in fact, uses that term twice in the first fifty pages, she responds, “Well, there was some extremism in the ’70s. The radical feminists started a reactive feminism that was limited and wrong and distorted.” Anyone who disagrees with her is simply dismissed as one of those radical feminists who is “still locked into first-stage thinking themselves” and “threatened by my attempt to reconceptualize the movement.”

  The “radical feminists” of the ’70s have executed many serious strategic missteps, according to Friedan’s book. Feminists, she says, were so caught up seeking access to the men’s world that they failed to “affirm the differences between men and women” and celebrate the “female sensitivities to life.” They shouldn’t have devoted their energies to protesting rape (a problem that 88 percent of women cited in a 1989 Yankelovich poll as the “most important issue for women today”); in her view, marching against sexual violence is a “kind of wallowing in that victim-state” that “dissipates our own well-springs of generative power.” (Her words recall George Gilder’s in Men and Marriage; he, too, complained of feminists “palavering endlessly” about rape.) They lost the ERA by being “co-opted by ‘masculine’ political power.” They focused too much on issues like abortion rights, which are “surely,” she sniffs, “not the main problems in America today.” In fact, the movement’s continued emphasis on women’s rights itself is misguided. “I do not think,” Friedan writes, “women’s rights are the most urgent business for American women.”

  Why was Friedan stomping on a movement that she did so much to create and lead? Perhaps under the backlash the tendency to turn and bite one’s tail is inevitable. As feminist scholar Judith Stacey writes: “Aging, in the right-wing
and ‘postfeminist’ climate of the 1980s, has been a traumatic experience for many Second Wave feminists, and we lack convenient scapegoats for our distress. . . . Perhaps this accounts for the strident and unmodulated quality of recantation in the new pro-family feminism.” But in Friedan’s case, another possibility presents itself as well. A closer reading of The Second Stage suggests that the prime mistake the “radical feminists” made was not following her orders. Friedan may say she “easily related” to the “Beta style” of leaderless, cooperative, and “relational” organization that her book expounds. Yet her book is punctuated with the tantrums of a fallen leader who is clearly distressed and angry that she wasn’t allowed to be the Alpha wolf as long as she would have liked.

  Much of the book is insistently self-referential, devoted to rehashing power struggles she lost at long-forgotten feminist conferences, reprints of her old speeches, and complaints that other feminists kept ignoring her proposals. Friedan’s penchant for imperial decrees and self-dramatization is long-standing. In 1970, she retired as president of NOW with the words, “I have led you into history. I leave you now—to make new history.”

  Her departure was an embattled one—Friedan versus the “radical feminists” was how she cast it at the time—and ever since, her accounts of political infighting have featured the same subtext: she was unfairly locked out of the feminist power structure. While the general public may have been under the impression that she was the movement’s leading “mother,” she felt that she had been too quickly relegated to the media sidelines, shoved aside in favor of younger and more photogenic leaders. She may have been dubbed feminism’s “mother,” but the media had designated Gloria Steinem, literally, the movement’s “glamour girl”—and Friedan well knew which was the more prized honorific in America.

  Rather than understanding the media bias as the press’s typical preference for youthful blondes, she came to suspect that feminist women themselves were plotting to depose her. While philosophical differences certainly existed, sometimes sharply, within the women’s liberation movement (as they do within every political movement), Friedan seemed to believe all the internal debates added up to, in her words, a “scheme,” a cabal that excluded her. She lashed back in the press in 1972, accusing Steinem of “ripping off the movement for private profit” and announcing “No one should mistake [Steinem] for a leader.” Years later, in Marcia Cohen’s The Sisterhood, the 1988 chronicle of the women’s movement, Friedan was still fixated on this theme. “Gloria [Steinem] wanted me to disappear,” she told the author. “She just wanted to disappear me.”

  The “new history” Friedan’s book scripts for feminism is a “second-stage solution,” a call for a murkily defined new order that is heavy on old Victorian rhetorical flourishes. In this new stage she envisions, women will rediscover the family circle “as the base of their identity and human control.” Like the 19th-century proponents of separate spheres, Friedan proposes that women can exert influence from the home front: “The power of ‘women’s sphere’ in shaping political as well as personal consciousness has clearly been underestimated by feminists today,” she asserts—a strange statement from a woman who eagerly broke out of that sphere and has since chosen to live almost exclusively, and with great relish, in the public realm. This solution puts the burden on women; the need for men to change barely figures in Friedan’s new plan. In fact, she blithely dismisses feminists’ observations that men have been loathe to shoulder their share of household and child care responsibilities. If men haven’t changed, she writes, then “why, in 1981, do three out of every four gourmet dinners suddenly seem to be cooked, soup to mousse, by men?” Where does this “statistic” come from? She invented it—based on some off-the-cuff remarks from “a number of my women colleagues.”

  The book also borrows some points of style and substance from the Reagan program. In the “second stage,” she proposes, feminists should stop pressing corporations, legislatures, and the “tired welfare state” to expand women’s rights—and get involved in volunteer and neighborhood work instead. “Individual” responsibility and “voluntary pooling of community resources,” she writes, will be the second-stage’s watchwords. To liberate themselves, she proposes, women should become Girl Scout leaders or join the Junior League. Friedan is convinced that the women’s movement has made a big error in overlooking the potential of such institutions, which “may be as important” as political-action groups in advancing women’s rights. In one of the book’s more bewildering passages—the writing is often jumbled—Friedan assails NOW for encouraging women “to volunteer only for social change and feminist groups, and not in community service where their labor was exploited. . . . I myself never liked that stand on volunteerism—though we should indeed have opposed the exploitation of women in volunteer work as in office and home . . .”

  The rhetoric of the New Right in refurbished form is strewn throughout the book. Connie Marshner’s phrase for overambitious career women: “macho feminists.” Betty Friedan’s: “female machismo.” Friedan sketches a grim scenario indeed of what could happen to the young liberated woman who succumbs to “the insatiable demands of female machismo”:

  What if, in reaction, she strips her life clean of all these unmeasured, unvalued feminine tasks and frills—stops baking cookies altogether, cuts her hair like a monk, decides not to have children, installs a computer console in her bedroom? She suffers finally a new “crisis of confidence.” She does not feel grounded in life. She shivers inside. She is depleted by female machismo.

  By accepting the New Right language, Friedan has walked right into the New Right’s “pro-family” semantics trap. She is reacting to the backlash rather than setting her own agenda, even referring to the women’s movement now as “the feminist reaction.”

  In the end, the language and logic of The Second Stage is so muddled that it’s ultimately impossible to say what Friedan really believes in today. At times in the book she seems to be retreating into a domestic haze, but at other points she seems simply to be restating fundamental feminist principles—as when she writes that the “second stage” is all about “the restructuring of our institutions on a basis of real equality for women and men.” Maybe Friedan actually meant to recant many of the tenets of The Feminine Mystique. Or maybe she just got tangled in her own words.

  CAROL GILLIGAN: DIFFERENT VOICES OR VICTORIAN ECHOES?

  Friedan’s elevation of the “relational” Beta mode and other distinctively “feminine” traits didn’t occur in a vacuum. In the ’80s, popular works praising “women’s ways” and “women’s special nature” began to crowd out other fare in the women’s sections of American bookstores, works that ranged from Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking to Sally Helgesen’s The Female Advantage. The authors wrote, sometimes in starry-eyed terms, of women’s inordinate capacity for kindness, service to others, and cooperation. Soon, “feminine caring” became the all-purpose tag to sum up the female psyche. And by the decade’s end, some of the authors of this genre (who were largely women) seemed at times to be even actively joining the backlash. Suzanne Gordon, in her 1990 Prisoners of Men’s Dreams: Striking Out for a New Feminine Future, blamed much of the unkind ’80s on “equal opportunity feminists,” who encouraged women “to devalue caring work” and “exacerbated a widespread societal crisis in caring.”

  While these works passed along such ideas to the general public, the theories on which they were based had germinated in the world of feminist scholarship. In the late ’70s, a new school of “relational” feminist thought arose, focusing on a separate “women’s culture” and women’s special “difference.” By the ’80s, feminist scholarship conferences would be awash in papers on women’s special virtues: their “nurturing qualities,” their “caring ethic,” their “contextual thinking.” In this decade, just as a fascination with gender differences had flowered in late Victorian academia, a preoccupation with women’s distinctive nature spread quickly to nearly every discipline. By 198
7, the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference was offering twenty-five sessions on sex differences.

  Most of the feminist scholars set out originally to investigate the origins of men’s and women’s differences, not to glorify them. They wanted to challenge the long-standing convention of defining male behavior as the norm, female behavior as deviant. And they hoped to find in women’s “difference” a more humane model for public life—one that both men and women might adopt. Psychiatrist Dr. Jean Baker Miller’s classic 1976 work, Toward a New Psychology of Women, is an early and successful example of that effort. “The task,” as she wrote later in the 1986 foreword to the second edition, “was to begin a description of women’s strengths and to account for the reasons that they went unrecognized. . . . Out of this can follow a new framework for understanding women—and men.”

  But by the ’80s, the task of building a new framework had been largely abandoned; while many relational scholars sought to give long overdue recognition to women’s accomplishments in the home, in the process they often lost sight of the larger context—and offered dewy-eyed visions of female domestic confinement instead. As feminist scholar Ellen DuBois warned her peers in an essay in a women’s studies journal, “[T]he dominant tendency in the study of women’s culture has not been to relate it to feminism, but to look at it in isolation and to romanticize what it meant for women.” Sometimes the academics seemed to forget the force of socialization altogether and presented women’s and men’s roles as biologically predetermined and intractable. The eminent feminist scholar Alice Rossi even proposed that men might refuse to cook dinner or take care of the children at home simply for anatomical reasons: they just don’t have the same finger dexterity as those fine-boned women, she wrote.