Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Examining gender differences can be an opportunity to explore a whole network of power relations—but so often it becomes just another invitation to justify them. Whenever the “specialness” of women is saluted (or any population group’s, for that matter), the recognition is bound to be double-edged. Women are willing to forgo some legal equality for “special rights” that suit their special place as mothers, Elizabeth Wolgast argues in her 1980 Equality and the Rights of Women; in fact, she says, equality actually can serve to discriminate against them because it doesn’t meet their special needs. Marking women as “special” slips easily into demarcating limits on them. “Special” may sound like superior, but it is also a euphemism for handicapped.

  Most relational scholars no doubt believed they could bring back the cult of domesticity on their own terms. These academics hoped to push for women’s “special rights” without jeopardizing fundamental civil rights and opportunities. All the same, in their tributes to the “domestic arts,” their sometimes self-righteous homages to female moral superiority, and their denigration of “simpleminded equality,” they risked clothing old Victorian conceits in modern academic dress. And in the end, legislators would not be influenced to enact “special” rights for women. Instead, in the wider backlash era in which relational feminists were writing, their words would be used and misused—by antifeminist authors and, worse, corporate lawyers battling sex discrimination suits. The women who would pay for the relational scholars’ miscalculation were, as we shall see in a later chapter, working-class women who had never heard of them.

  Under the backlash, the proponents of women’s “difference” found that they were rewarded with approving critical and media attention. “Difference” became the new magic word uttered to defuse the feminist campaign for equality. And any author who made use of it, even one who could hardly be considered antifeminist, was in danger of being dragooned into the backlash’s service.

  Carol Gilligan’s 1982 In a Different Voice, one of the most widely quoted and influential feminist works of the ’80s, became the most famous emblem of scholarship on women’s “difference.” As one commentator noted, “[T]he very name Gilligan has become a buzzword in academic and feminist circles.” The book was cited in psychology papers, legal briefs, and public policy proposals. Beyond academia, the adult-education industry turned Gilligan’s idea into a sales tool for workshops with names like “Men’s and Women’s Reality—Making the Differences Count.” Advice writers plugged it into self-help manuals. Even Vogue invoked the scholar’s work in its meditations on High Feminity wear: Gilligan, the magazine mused, “may well have anticipated this season’s fashion references.” In the media, Ms. named Gilligan “Woman of the Year” and the New York Times Magazine put Gilligan on its cover. And when Radcliffe convened its 1989 political conference, “Meeting the Challenge: Women as Leaders,” college president Matina Horner told the assembly in her opening remarks, “The question for the twenty-first century is whether or not women can bring a different voice to the table than men.” She did not ask what would seem a more pressing question—why that table still had so few women.

  Gilligan’s work grew out of her discovery as a teacher of psychological development that virtually wherever she looked in the research, the studies drew exclusively on groups of men. “It was like a first-year graduate had conducted all these studies—and left out half the sample!” Gilligan recalls. And worse, women teaching in her field “weren’t even seeing this omission of ourselves.” One day in 1975, she sat down at her dining room table and wrote a short essay on this omission, which would eventually become In a Different Voice. “It never occurred to me that anyone would be interested but a few people in my little world, in the underground [of academic psychology].”

  In her book, Gilligan aims to show how women’s moral development has been devalued and misrepresented by male psychological researchers, how ethics has been defined only in male terms. Since at least the ’50s, Gilligan observes, researchers have evaluated women’s and men’s ability to make moral judgments on the basis of one all-male study. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg had used this study to devise his widely used scale of moral judgments, a six-stage ladder in which helping and pleasing others ranks only as the third stage, while a preference for abstracted principles of justice over relationships rates as the top rung. Gilligan proposes that women are more likely to make moral choices within the context of particular situations and out of concern for specific individuals—rather than on the basis of impersonal rules of fairness and rights. This does not make women morally “immature,” she says—just different.

  At the book’s outset she also stresses that this different voice does not belong naturally to women only. “The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. . . . The contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex,” she writes. She also does not attribute the differences to genes alone. “Clearly, these differences arise in a social context,” she says, in which “factors of social status and power” play a role, too.

  Despite these initial statements, however, Gilligan may have left herself wide open to misinterpretation—and so, to the likelihood that feminism’s opponents would harness her arguments for their own ends. After disavowing generalizations about either sex, she seems to make them herself in the three main studies she provides as the foundation of her argument.

  In the first “rights and responsibilities” study, she focuses almost exclusively on two eleven-year-olds, whom she calls Jake and Amy. The two come to serve as near archetypes of gender behavior—based largely on their responses to a hypothetical question. The moral dilemma they are asked to resolve: A man must decide whether to steal a drug he can’t afford so he can save his wife’s life. Jake says to steal it because “a human life is worth more than money.” Amy waffles and wonders if the man could “borrow the money or make a loan or something” because otherwise he might have to go to jail later and then what if his wife got sick again? Judging by these answers, it would seem that the ailing wife had better survival odds under Jake’s care than Amy’s, but this is not the issue that interests Gilligan. Jake, Gilligan writes, is “constructing the dilemma, as Kohlberg did, as a conflict between the values of property and life.” Amy’s reasoning, on the other hand, is founded on a vision of “a world comprised of relationships rather than people standing alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather than systems of rules.” Gilligan goes on to expand this case study into two distinct moral systems, with Jake representing “an ideal of perfection” and Amy signifying an “ideal of care.” The difference between these stereotypical male and female voices is repeatedly underscored without reference to those “factors of social status and power” that she had originally suggested should be taken into account. Is Jake preoccupied with perfection partly because that’s how boys are raised? Is Amy more concerned with relationships partly because girls are taught that achievement in this arena will bring them the greatest applause? These questions are never explored.

  Gilligan’s “studies” aren’t exactly drawn from ideal demographic samples. The “college student study” bases its findings on twenty-five Harvard undergraduates who chose to take a class on moral and political choices—hardly a representative slice of American society. And the evidence that Gilligan offers in the “rights and responsibilities” study—based on a sample of eight boys and eight girls from different age groups—boils down to anonymous quotes from two eight-year-olds and two eleven-year-olds. Most frustrating is In a Different Voice’s final study, which examines how twenty-nine young women decide whether or not to have abortions. “No effort was made to select a representative sample of the clinic or counseling service population,” Gilligan writes, but the problem with this case study is even more basic than its data base. The choice of issue for the study s
eems self-defeating in a book that supposedly examines the different ways men and women approach moral dilemmas. Obviously, for abortion there was no male control group. (Gilligan argues that a control group in this case is not necessary; rather, the abortion study illustrates how women’s perceptions of moral choices sometimes vary from men’s simply because women’s situations are different.)

  To be fair, Gilligan doesn’t hold out her studies as scientific research efforts. “I would never want to say this is an exhaustive group of people,” she says. “It was a very small piece of work with three little pilot studies.” In a written defense of her work later, she supports her approach by saying that her argument was “not statistical” but “interpretive,” and by observing that “data alone do not tell us anything.” But even so, Gilligan doesn’t give readers the basic data they do need to evaluate her case studies: she says almost nothing about the backgrounds, education, or income of the children she interviewed. Nor does she make allowances for the difference between what people say about their own moral behavior and how they really act. While the young women in her interviews may have talked more than the young men about compassion and caring, in the many observational studies in which the two sexes are actually called on to help someone in need, women consistently are no more altruistic than men.

  Gilligan’s whole effort to break out of Kohlberg’s moral categories may be moot. In a critique of In a Different Voice, Tufts University psychological researcher Zella Luria points out that, in tackling Kohlberg’s male-biased moral scale, Gilligan may be knocking down a “straw man.” In 1984, researcher Lawrence Walker reviewed nineteen studies that used Kohlberg’s moral reasoning measurements—and he discovered that, overall, their data revealed no statistically significant differences in moral reasoning between the sexes. Ironically, one of the studies he examined was coauthored by Gilligan. Asked about this point, Gilligan concedes that some of her own research finds no difference. But she maintains that such criticisms are beside the point, because “what I was interested in was not could women score on Kohlberg’s scale, but why was it that when women spoke in a different way, it was ignored or considered problematic.”

  The differences in moral reasoning that social-science researchers have been able to find in these studies are most often linked not with sex but with class and education—that is, those very social and economic forces that relational feminists, Gilligan included, have given such a wide berth. “If there is one statement to be clearly and loudly stated to the public by students of sex differences,” Zella Luria writes, “it is that overlap of scores by males and females is always far greater than the differences in those scores, particularly on psychological measures. We are not two species; we are two sexes.”

  Zella Luria’s voice, however, would not be heard over the roar of acclaim for In a Different Voice, which had sold 360,000 copies by 1989. The New York Times Magazine’s cover story on Gilligan swept aside dissenters in a single paragraph, claiming that they suffered from “murky academic psychologese.”

  In large part, the popularity of Gilligan’s book was due to its elegant prose and its many literary allusions to Chekhov, Tolstoy, and George Eliot. Maybe her statistics were dubious, but the lyrical writing, a rarity in psychological texts, seemed more than compensatory. As Stanford psychological researchers Catherine Greeno and Eleanor Maccoby observe in their analysis of the book, “It seems almost philistine to challenge the nature of her evidence.”

  But In a Different Voice had another sort of appeal in the ’80s, too. Under the backlash, it became easy to appropriate Gilligan’s theories on behalf of discriminatory arguments that could cause real harm to women. Very much against her will, Gilligan became the expert that backlash mass media loved to cite. Newsweek used Gilligan’s book to support its contention that career women pay “a psychic price” for professional success. Retrograde pop psychology books, including both Smart Women/Foolish Choices and Being a Woman, invoked Gilligan’s work to bolster their arguments that independence was an unnatural and unhealthy state for women. Antifeminist scholars such as Michael Levin abused Gilligan’s scholarship even further, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of traditional Freudian analysis of the female psyche—and gleefully insisting that Gilligan had circled back to what they had been saying all along. As antifeminist writer Nicholas Davidson wrote of Gilligan in his 1988 work, The Failure of Feminism: “Was it really necessary to pass through all the storm and stress of the Feminist Era in order to arrive at ideas that were generally available forty years ago . . .?”

  Gilligan could and did object to such representations of her work. “I am well aware that reports of sex differences can be used to rationalize oppression, and I deplore any use of my work for this purpose,” she wrote in the scholarly feminist journal Signs. And she now says privately that if she had it to do again, she would cast some of her ideas differently; in particular, she would refine her argument “so that Jake and Amy wouldn’t be presented so starkly ‘male’ and ‘female.’” But her regrets don’t really matter. The general public does not subscribe to Signs. And the damage has already been done.

  PART FOUR

  Backlashings:

  The Effects on Women’s Minds,

  Jobs, and Bodies

  12

  It’s All in Your Mind: Popular Psychology

  Joins the Backlash

  INSIDE THE CENTER for Relationship Studies, a small medical suite near Hollywood, celebrated self-help authors Melvyn Kinder and Connell Cowan are working their way through the morning’s business. First on the agenda: contract negotiations with ABC for a “Movie of the Week” version of Smart Women/Foolish Choices. Next, deliberations on whether to appear on “Oprah” or “Donahue.” (“You can’t do both,” Kinder sighs.) Now, time for another media interview, another opportunity to air their analysis of the contemporary female malady.

  KINDER:“The women’s movement pulled women away from caring about relationships.”

  COWAN:“The women’s movement tended to suppress women’s interest in relationships and refocused women on careers.”

  KINDER:“The smarter the women were, the more likely they were to have these illusory notions. They thought they could hold out. I know loads of women in their thirties and forties who could have had scores of husbands, by virtue of how many men they rejected.”

  The two advice experts hardly needed to explain their diagnosis to the press; by the late ’80s, their advice manuals, Smart Women/Foolish Choices and Women Men Love/Women Men Leave, had become media classics and record-breaking best-sellers. (Smart Women became the second longest running book on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, after Lee Iacocca’s autobiography.) Both of these books drove the same point home: women’s independence had made women think they were too “smart” for just any man—and so, made women act too “foolish,” postponing marriage for personal, educational, or professional pursuits. Feminism gave women swollen, and consequently sick, heads.

  But, strangely enough, toward the end of the decade, Kinder and Cowan were marketing a contradictory diagnosis. Women’s psychological problem, they now said, wasn’t the result of women caring too little about relationships—but of caring too much.

  COWAN:“A lot of women are obsessed now with getting married.”

  KINDER:“It’s all they talk about! When you put off your needs, you create personality disorders—and all these women in their late thirties, they are getting very anxious, very upset. . . . I mean, the best-selling book now is How to Marry the Man of Your Choice!” [Margarent Kent’s book that came with a money-back guarantee for unsuccessful spinsters].

  Indeed, this most recent female neurosis has become such a “trend,” Kinder says, that he and his partner are considering writing a third book to address it.

  Could this new marital “disorder” be, perchance, related to the protracted scolding of single women that preceded it—a chastisement to which popular psychologists such as themselves amply contributed
? Certainly not, the self-help authors retort. “We’re not goading them on,” Kinder says. “We’re providing information.” Who, then, induced this latest psychic disturbance? “If anyone’s to blame for women’s obsessive behavior,” Kinder volunteers, “it’s the women’s movement.”

  • • •

  BUT IN the ’80s, advice writers like Cowan and Kinder did play a role in the development of such “obsessive behavior”—a highly instrumental and, for the writers at least, profitable one. Via popular psychology, the backlash insinuated itself into the most intimate front lines, impressing its discouraging and moralistic message most effectively, and destructively, on the millions of women seeking help from therapy books and counseling—women who were already feeling insecure and vulnerable, already bunkered in isolated private trenches.

  To the vast female readership of self-help manuals, the advice experts delivered a one-two punch. First they knocked down the liberated woman, commanding that she surrender her “excessive” independence, a mentally unhealthy state that had turned her into a voracious narcissist, a sterile cuckoo. Then, having brought the “victim” of feminism to her more feminine knees, the advice writers reaped the benefits—by nursing the backlash victim. In the first half of the ’80s, the advice experts told women they suffered from bloated egos and a “fear of intimacy;” in the second half, they informed women that atrophied egos and “codependency” were now their problems. In the decade’s war on women, these popular psychologists helped fire the opening shots—then rushed to the battlefield to bandage the many wounds.