Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  “I’m like a mother to them all,” the therapist says, surveying her brood of “adult children.” Of herself, she says, “I am definitely a Woman Who Loves Too Much.” She was a full-time housewife, she relates, until her husband ran off with her best friend after twenty-three years of marriage. Then she went back to school at forty and became a therapist. Now she’s “in recovery,” having figured out what went wrong in her marriage. “I let myself go. I don’t blame him. He’s a man just like any other man. If I had done all this work on me before, maybe he would have stuck around.”

  Each of the women in this group had good reasons for seeking help when the sessions started ten months earlier. One woman was living with a man who had barely spoken to her since she had embarked on a career. Another woman was living with a man who called her at work, screaming, when she failed to iron his favorite shirt. Another woman’s husband, who launched periodic tirades over dust in the carpet, was having an affair, which he said was “her fault.”

  Asked why they originally joined, the women offer variations on the same answer. “I wanted to be tougher,” says one. “Not be such an emotional bimbo,” says another. “I wanted to be strong,” says a third. But asked what they learned in the group, their replies are very different: “I learned how I was a little girl within,” says a middle-aged businesswoman. “I realized I’m a little child,” says a forty-year-old teacher. “And I learned how to get in touch with that child.” At her therapist’s request, she purchased a doll and it is now her constant companion; in the car, she says, she is always careful to put on its seat belt. “You’ll notice,” the therapist says, “how in the group my girls’ little voices just get smaller and smaller.”

  Presumably the point of retreating to a childhood state is to make a new start. But here, the women seem to regress and get stuck. Rather than change their lives, they seem, at best, to have learned how to adjust to intolerable situations. One woman, a housewife who had recently gone back to work as a real estate agent, originally joined Women Who Love Too Much so she could have some support while divorcing her husband. He was seeing another woman, but that was the least of it. Ever since she had returned to work, his anger had mounted; eventually, it became intolerable. “If I didn’t vacuum the house every day, he’d scream,” she says. “If I forgot to lay out his clothes one morning, I’d hear about it. If the fish wasn’t fresh or if I said we were having fish and then I served steak, he would go into a rage. He would take away all my money and credit cards and my car and push me out of the house and tell me to try living on my own.” But after ten months in Women Who Love Too Much, she decided to move back in with him. “See, the thing I learned in the group is, it wasn’t really his fault. I allowed it to happen.”

  • • •

  FOR MORE than a year, the publicity department at Pocket Books was getting virtually daily calls from women desperate to talk with Robin Norwood. “She’s the only one who can help me,” they would say. Some women even flew out to Santa Barbara, Norwood’s residence, in hopes of an on-the-spot session with her. They hoped to join the list of the man-addicts that Norwood had helped, the dozens of real women who had been featured in Women Who Love Too Much. Norwood’s own much advertised recovery also played a major role in attracting hordes of supplicants. As Judith Staples, a San Francisco addiction counselor who organized Norwood’s last public appearance, observes, “Robin is a symbol of hope for so many women in pain. Because Robin did it, you know. She pulled herself out of relationship-addiction and into recovery.”

  For a year and a half after the book was published, Norwood told the story of her recovery to thousands of women in marathon six-hour-long speeches she delivered around the country. Her lecture fee was $2,500; the admission ticket was $40. When Norwood spoke in San Francisco in 1987, her sponsors were besieged by more than a thousand women applicants within a week. The meeting eventually had to be moved to a cavernous church, and even these quarters weren’t spacious enough. Norwood’s congregants, the event’s organizer recalls, were “hanging from the choir loft.”

  Norwood’s all-day lecture concerned her life story, but it was an oral biography that omitted all events except the particulars of various dead-end relationships. She covered each failed affair in microscopic detail, starting with the story of the boy who snubbed her on the playground—in kindergarten. And she closed each anecdote with the same conclusion. “It was an inside job,” she told her audience. “For a long time I thought, ‘Why are all these bad things happening to me?’ It’s because I chose them. We choose alcoholics. We choose men who are incapable of being faithful to us.”

  Her second husband was an alcoholic, prone to binges, and his periodic desertions eventually took a toll on her job—she worked as an alcohol-addiction counselor in a hospital. “Every morning after a while I was showing up at work and starting to cry,” she recalls. “And then one day I couldn’t stop crying. . . . So they took me by the arm and said, ‘Robin, why don’t you go home and why don’t you stay there?’ And I went home and I just stayed there. For almost three months.”

  Out of work, Norwood went downhill fast. “Part of that time, I could not function. I had a very hard time talking. I couldn’t move. It was as though I was in very heavy wet cement. I lived in my bathrobe. We ate Springfield chili almost every night. It was a big deal if I could make it to the mailbox and back. That was the highlight of the day.” Finally, her husband reappeared and vowed to reform; she returned to work and the depression receded. But soon he was back to binging and she slipped back into despair. Her skin, she says, began breaking out in “great big bruises,” which she believes was a sign that her “connective tissue” was dissolving. She said, “I knew I was dying.”

  Norwood at last turned to an Al-Anon meeting. It was here, she says, that she discovered the merits of surrender. “For me, recovery meant leaning on something much larger than myself.” She “turned the whole thing over to God” and “found myself praying.” She prayed especially for a “nice man.” Her prayers were answered; a divine power, she says, caused her to meet her third husband. He was “real boring,” she says, but now that she was in recovery, she realized that this was for the best. Passion was only “suffering,” a drug that “kills.”

  Readers of Women Who Love Too Much who attended Norwood’s lectures might have been struck by the remarkable resemblance between her own story and the case histories of her patients featured in her book. Just like “Pam,” Norwood’s first marriage was to a high school dropout; just like “Jill,” Norwood met her second husband at a dance club; just like “Trudi,” her final marriage was to a boring nice guy. This is no coincidence. As Norwood let slip to a few colleagues, many of her “patients” in the book are really just her. The grand finale of the book—a long and detailed final therapy session between Norwood and the grateful, “recovered” Trudi (in which the therapist rhapsodizes about her client’s “warm brown eyes shining and the beautiful cloud of softly waved reddish brown hair longer and fuller than I remember”)—is only the therapist talking to and about herself.

  Asked later why she misrepresented herself as her patients in the book, Norwood says, “I never claimed those were case studies. Some are really fictional. The point is not which parts are me and which aren’t.” But regrettably this distinction is very much the point. Norwood originally proposed to spark a “raising of consciousness” by sharing diverse intimate female experience; her book ushered readers into her therapy office to listen, and take heart from, the voices of many women. But inside this confessional, one can hear the regrets of just one woman, a stricken and solitary figure who sees only her reflection in her lonely hall of mirrors.

  Norwood’s own “recovery”—through marriage to the “right” man—proved short-lived. In the spring of 1987, Norwood abruptly quit making speeches. She could no longer market her experience as a successful case study: being married to the nice boring husband turned out to be not so nice after all, and soon she divorced him.


  Following the breakup of her marriage, Norwood chose a path that would seem more likely to promote, not mitigate, her isolation. She gave up her practice, moved to a cottage by the sea, and retreated into a shell-like existence. Her daily life there, she reports, involves “absolutely no social life.” She no longer reads or even watches TV. “I never look at the newspaper.” She, in fact, does nothing. “I just hold still.” Wouldn’t contact with other people be comforting? “I don’t want to be involved with other people’s lives,” she says. Doesn’t she at least wonder what’s going on in the world? “I don’t want to know,” she says. “It’s just a distraction from staying in touch with myself.”

  This self-help program of Norwood’s was no consciousness-raising cure; it was closer to solitary confinement. “The heart of [consciousness raising],” as historian Hester Eisenstein writes, “was the discovery that one was not alone, that other women had comparable feelings and experiences.” But Norwood was very much alone—more alone, in fact, than when she began her treatment. So, too, were some of the “code-pendent” women in treatment who took their dolls home and slammed the doors behind them. As long as these female patients continued to be convinced that unhappy domestic affairs were a woman’s problem only, they would each end up in a room talking to themselves. They would end up like Norwood, sitting in a house by the sea, ears plugged from the noises of the outer world, eyes, like Verena Tarrant’s, turned toward heaven.

  FEMININE MASOCHISM, ’80S STYLE

  The psychiatric diagnosis of masochism first formulated in the late Victorian era described people who derive sexual pleasure from pain. It soon, however, degenerated into a sort of all-purpose definition of the female psyche; so many women got abused because so many women preferred it that way—an early statement, in some respects, of Robin Norwood’s thesis.

  But masochism as a therapeutic diagnosis eventually fell into disrepute. As psychoanalyst Karen Horney first pointed out in the 1920s, so-called “natural” female masochism was more likely the unnatural product of a sexist social system of rewards and punishments that induced many women to adopt submissive behavior. Horney’s Freudian male colleagues didn’t appreciate her observations—they forced her out of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. But eventually most mental health professionals came around to her point of view, and by the ’70s, the notion of an innate feminine masochism seemed a quaint relic, more a jocular buzzword than a defensible psychoanalytic theory.

  Then in 1985, some psychoanalysts at the American Psychiatric Association decided it was time for masochism to make a comeback, as a “new” disorder in the professional Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the bible of American psychiatry. This was no arcane matter of classification. The DSM is the standard reference book that mental health professionals rely on to diagnose patients, researchers use to study mental illness, private and public insurers require to determine compensation for therapy, and courts turn to when ruling on insanity pleas and child custody decisions.

  That year, Dr. Teresa Bernardez was chairing the APA’s Committee on Women, which is supposed to be consulted on all proposed new DSM diagnoses affecting women. But the APA panel drafting the new diagnoses never bothered to inform her or anyone else on the committee. By happenstance, as the APA was nearing a vote on the diagnosis, Bernardez heard about it from a friend across the country. She investigated further—and discovered that the APA panel planned to add not one but three diagnoses affecting women, all in troubling ways. “Premenstrual dysphoric disorder” was another one, a diagnosis that revived the long-discredited notion that PMS was a mental illness rather than a simple matter of endocrinology. “Paraphiliac rapism disorder” was the third, a diagnosis that the APA panel intended to apply to any man (or, theoretically, woman) who reported repeated fantasies about rape or sexual molestation and “repeatedly acts on these urges or is markedly distressed by them.” If approved, this vague definition could prove a handy insanity plea for any rapist or child molester with an enterprising lawyer. This was obvious enough to the U.S. Attorney General’s office which, once alerted, even issued an objection.

  In some ways, the “masochistic personality disorder” may have been the most regressive, and peculiar, of the three proposed diagnoses. The APA panel had come up with nine characteristics to define masochism—and they were strangely broad indeed. They included anyone who “rejects help, gifts, or favors so as not to be a burden on others” or “worries excessively” about troubling others or “responds to success or positive events by feeling undeserving.” Included in this list was even the undergraduate who puts aside her homework to help fellow students write their papers. None of the nine characteristics of this new “masochism” mentioned taking pleasure in pain. Instead, they described only the self-sacrificing and self-denigrating sort of behavior that is supposed to typify ideal femininity. The APA panel had neatly summed up female socialization—and stamped it a private, psychiatric malfunction. In fact, the APA panel went even further, dubbing this problem not only a pathological imbalance but a “personality disorder,” a category of mental illness that psychiatry defines as least related to social conditions and most rooted in the underlying structure of an individual’s personality from early childhood—and, so, most difficult to change.

  Worst of all, the diagnosis threatened to invite a return to treating battered women as masochists who court domestic violence. The APA panel included these traits in its definition of the new masochists: “choosing” people who “disappoint” or “mistreat” them and remaining “in relationships in which others exploit, abuse, or take advantage.” The panel illustrated these traits with an example of a masochist who sounded more like the male perspective on the backlash than a description of mental illness: a spouse who criticizes a mate, thus “provoking an angry counterattack.”

  Once again under the backlash, attention was deflected from the causes of that “counterattack”: male anger over women’s increasing demands and male fear over women’s growing autonomy. Once again, each female target of the backlash’s fury was redefined as her own, and only, assailant. And while the pop psychology books that told women to blame themselves would come and go in bookstores during the ’80s, the DSM was a permanent fixture. If the APA inscribed this definition of masochism on its pages, it would institutionalize the psychological message of the backlash for years to come.

  • • •

  ALARMED BY the news of the proposed masochism diagnosis, Dr. Teresa Bernardez sent a letter detailing her concerns to Dr. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist at Columbia University and chairman of the APA panel in charge of revising the DSM. The panel was dominated by psychoanalysts, the subspecialty most partial to traditional Freudian psychiatry and a group of professionals who were still brooding over the last round of DSM revisions five years earlier, when vestiges of more outdated Freudian terminology were finally removed. The masochism disorder’s backers at the APA also seemed to resent the rise of the “female-dominated” psychology profession, which had been cutting into the psychiatry business since the ’70s with its lower-cost and shorter-term treatments. As APA vice president Dr. Paul Fink groused in 1987, some psychologists “won’t be happy until there is no more psychoanalysis.”

  In the course of the battle over the APA’s masochism diagnosis, many of these simmering animosities would surface—and eventually boil over—as female therapists refused to back down and accept the ruling of the psychoanalysts. “The anger we saw was unbelievable to me,” recalls Bernardez, an Argentinian émigré who had previously seen her share as a citizen under the repressive Peron regime. “It was really just lying there and when women pressed and didn’t give up, it just all came up.”

  Initially, Bernardez got nowhere lodging protests on her own, nor did the APA panel respond to repeated appeals from other women’s committees in the profession. It wasn’t until the Feminist Therapy Institute threatened legal action that Spitzer and his fellow panelists even agreed to grant the wom
en a hearing. And the mostly male panel—the only woman on it was Spitzer’s wife, a social worker—advised the female critics in advance that only six of them would be allowed to speak.

  At the hearing in November 1985, Spitzer opened by explaining the purpose of revising the DSM: to make diagnoses more “scientific.” Then he revealed the scientific data: a study, which he had directed, of eight patients who were all clients of psychiatrists in his department at Columbia. Only two of the patients were men. The study was supposed to demonstrate that masochism existed because the psychiatrists had “independently” diagnosed these eight patients as masochists. This was an “excellent” sample, Spitzer said, because the patients had been observed in analysis over a long period of time. One of the feminist therapists in the audience asked him how many of these eight “masochistic” patients were battered women or victims of violence. Spitzer couldn’t answer: none of the psychiatrists had bothered to find that out—de-spite having counseled these “masochists” for a year and a half.

  The APA panel’s “data” rolled on, with a historical overview, written by Dr. Richard Simons, president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, who argued that masochism must be a legitimate diagnosis because a 1950s European psychiatrist had described a depressive personality disorder “that had almost identical features.” Simons seemed to believe that psychiatry, like law, was a field where one could rely on precedent alone. Spitzer also had the results of a questionnaire about masochism he had sent to APA members interested in personality disorders. The poll, however, had a rather imposing bias built into it. The first question asked its readers, Do you support including the masochistic disorder in the DSM? If the answer was no, they were instructed not to fill out the rest of the questionnaire. This method, Spitzer conceded, managed to eliminate half of the people polled.