Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  With the psychoanalysts’ data entered into evidence, the six female therapists had a chance to present their side. They argued that the masochistic diagnosis put all the blame on the patients’ shoulders, without also taking into account social conditioning and real-life circumstances. Displays of deference and martyrdom are not necessarily evidence of masochism, the female therapists told the panel; they are also the culture’s traditional badges of female honor, billed as bringing women social approval and love.

  Next, psychological researcher Lenore Walker told the panel how domestic violence often produces the very behavioral traits that the panel had included in its definition of masochism—opening the door to misdiagnosis and mistreatment of female patients and to the opportunity for battering husbands and courts to define the spouses’ violence as the wives’ problem. In her studies of battered women, Walker had found that the victims often don’t strike back—not because they want to be beaten but because they have learned that responding only inflames the batterer. These women often remain with their abuser, too, not because they enjoy torment but because they realistically fear worse violence if they walk out; the majority of murdered battered women are slain by their abusers after they leave home. Finally, Walker presented her study of hundreds of battered women, which could locate no connection between childhood-developed personality disorders and adulthood battering. The real problem, she told the panel, is simply that violence against women is so widespread. As many as 50 percent of women report being abused at some point in their lives. Clearly not all of them are masochists.

  In response, the members of the panel told the women that they had never looked at any of their studies—and they didn’t intend to. “It’s irrelevant,” Spitzer says later of all the domestic-violence research presented. He scoffs at the statistics. He says he can recall treating only two abused women in his career, and he doubts that the rate of abuse is “anywhere near” 50 percent.

  The hearing was supposed to last all day, but at noon, Spitzer announced that they had heard enough from the women; in the after noon the panel would start drafting diagnoses and the women should leave. The female therapists protested and finally they were told they could stay, but only under the condition that they “not speak.” This stipulation would be repeated at a subsequent hearing chaired by Fink. Later, Fink (now APA president) explains the reasons for the gag order: “I didn’t think it was worth a whole day’s discussion. . . . I controlled the meeting.” He didn’t care for the women’s “rude” behavior either: “Certain of the women were absolutely unwilling to listen to anything we said or understand anything we were saying. . . . I really felt under attack.”

  The feminist therapists returned in the afternoon to watch the panel in action—and grew increasingly distressed as they witnessed the proceedings. As the APA panelists discussed among themselves how to define masochism, they made no reference to research or clinical studies. They simply tossed out new “characteristics,” and a typist keyed them into a computer. “The low level of intellectual effort was shocking,” Renee Garfinkel, an APA staff member who observed the process, recalled later. “Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let’s go to a cafeteria.” At one point, recalls Lynne Rosewater, director of the Feminist Therapy Institute, “they were having a discussion for a criterion [on the masochistic personality disorder] and Bob Spitzer’s wife [Janet Williams] says, ‘I do that sometimes,’ and he says, ‘Okay, take it out.’ You watch this and you say, ‘Wait a second, we don’t have a right to criticize them because this is a ’science’? It was really frightening. Because if this is the way they do it, then I don’t trust any of the diagnoses.”

  After the hearing, a raft of critical letters, a formal protest from the American Psychological Association and petitions signed by thousands of mental health practitioners nudged the APA panel to offer this “compromise”: they would change the names of some of the offending diagnoses. “Masochistic personality disorder” became “self-defeating personality disorder;” “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” became “late luteal-phase dysphoric disorder;” and “paraphiliac rapism” became “paraphiliac coercive disorder.” The definitions, however, remained the same.

  In December 1985, an ad hoc committee of the APA’s board of trustees agreed to a final hearing on the masochism/self-defeating diagnosis. The female therapists again came and protested, and the psychiatrists again dismissed the women after a few hours. Then they sequestered themselves in “the Freud Room”—and voted in favor of the masochism diagnosis.

  That spring, the feminist opponents continued protesting and organizing. But women’s efforts only seemed to stiffen the male panelists’ resolve. As a senior APA official said later, board members who wanted to throw out the new disorders were accused of “giving in to the women.” Just before the APA’s trustees took a final vote, Dr. Teresa Bernardez appeared before them to make a last plea. “I began to speak and they would not let me continue,” she recalls. “I had to fight to be heard.” Finally she said her piece, but she suspected her words had barely registered. Her unladylike outspokenness, however, was noted—and later punished. When Bernardez’s term on the APA women’s committee came up for renewal, she was not invited back. She wasn’t the only member of the women’s committee who was penalized for speaking out against the new disorders; within a year, the APA’s women committee had been purged of all the feminists.

  In the end, the APA’s trustees approved both the masochism and the PMS diagnoses. (The rapism disorder was temporarily shelved, pending further study.) The APA officers made one concession to all the protests over these two diagnoses: they listed both of them in the DSM’s appendix—supposedly a section for provisional disorders.

  But even this qualification was a ruse. Ordinarily, disorders in the appendix don’t have the code numbers that medical insurance companies require for reimbursement. The APA leaves them uncoded purposely—to discourage mental health professionals from applying such controversial diagnoses in their practice. In this case, however, following Dr. Spitzer’s recommendation, the APA trustees made an exception. They assigned code numbers to both masochism and PMS. The new female ailments were on the books.

  13

  The Wages of the Backlash:

  The Toll on Working Women

  THE BACKLASH AGAINST women’s rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reaganomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women’s momentum in the job market.

  But the backlash did more than impede women’s opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women—it did it on the sly. The Reagan administration downplayed or simply shelved reports that revealed the extent of working women’s declining status. Corporations claimed women’s numbers and promotions were at record highs. And the press didn’t seem to mind. As the situation of working women fell into increasing peril in the ’80s, the backlash media issued ever more upbeat reports—assuring that women’s only problem at work was that they would rather be home.

  Many myths about working women’s “improving” circumstances made the rounds in the ’80s—while some discouraging and real trends that working women faced didn’t get much press. Here are just a few examples.

  • • •

  THE TREND story we all read about women’s wages:

  PAY GAP BETWEEN THE SEXES CLOSING!

  The difference between the average man’s and woman’s paycheck, we learned in 1986, had suddenly narrowed. Women who work full-time were now said to make an unprecedented 70 cents to a man’s dollar. Newspaper editorials applauded and advised feminists to retire their “obsolete” buttons protesting female pay of 59 cents to a man’s dollar
.

  The trend story we should have seen:

  IT’S BACK! THE ’50S PAY GAP

  The pay gap did not suddenly improve to 70 cents in 1986. Women working full-time made only 64 cents to a man’s dollar that year, actually slightly worse than the year before—and exactly the same gap that working women had faced in 1955.

  The press got the 70-cent figure from a onetime Census Bureau report that was actually based on data from another year and that departed from the bureau’s standard method for computing the gap. This report artificially inflated women’s earnings by using weekly instead of the standard yearly wages—thus grossly exaggerating the salary of part-time workers, a predominantly female group, who don’t work a full year. Later, the Census Bureau calculated the pay gap for 1986 using its standard formula and came up with 64 cents. This report, however, managed to elude media notice.

  By that year, in fact, the pay gap had only “improved” for women by less than five percentage points since 1979. And as much as half of that improvement was due to men’s falling wages, not women’s improving earnings. Take out men’s declining pay as a factor and the gap had closed only three percentage points.

  By 1988, women with a college diploma could still wear the famous 59-cent buttons. They were still making 59 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar. In fact, the pay gap for them was now a bit worse than five years earlier. Black women, who had made almost no progress in the decade, could wear the 59-cent buttons, too. Older and Hispanic women couldn’t—but only because their pay gap was even worse now than 59 cents. Older working women had actually fared better in 1968, when they had made hourly wages of 61 cents to a man’s dollar; by 1986, they were down to 58 cents. And Hispanic women, by 1988, found their wages backsliding; they were now making an abysmal 54 cents to a white man’s dollar.

  The pay gap was also getting worse in many occupations, from social work to screenwriting to real estate management, as U.S. Labor Department data detail. By 1989, the pay gap for women in all full-time managerial jobs was growing worse again; that year, while the average male manager enjoyed a four-percent income boost, his average female counterpart received none. And the gap was widening most in the very fields where female employment was growing most, a list that includes food-preparation and service supervisory jobs, waiting tables, and cleaning services. In public relations, where women doubled their ranks in the decade, the pay gap grew so massively that communications professor Elizabeth Lance Toth, who tracks women’s status in this profession, reported, “In a forty-year career, a woman will lose $1 million on gender alone.”

  • • •

  THE TREND story we all read about integrating the workplace:

  WOMEN INVADE MAN’S WORLD!

  Women, we learned, charged into traditional “male” occupations. A sea of women in their dress-for-success suits and stride-to-work sneakers abandoned the “pink-collar” ghettos and descended on Wall Street, law firms, and corporate suites. Still other women laced up army boots, slapped on hard hats, and barged into the all-male military and blue-collar factories.

  The trend story we should have seen:

  MORE AND MORE, WOMEN STUCK IN SECRETARIAL POOL.

  While the level of occupational segregation between the sexes eased by 9 percent in the 1970s—the first time it had improved in the century—that progress stalled in the ’80s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics soon began projecting a more sex-segregated work force. This was a bitter financial pill for women: as much as 45 percent of the pay gap is caused by sex segregation in the work force. (By one estimate, for every 10 percent rise in the number of women in an occupation, the annual wage for women drops by roughly $700.) A resegregating work force was one reason why women’s wages fell in the ’80s; by 1986, more working women would be taking home poverty-level wages than in 1973.

  Women were pouring into many low-paid female work ghettos. The already huge proportion of working women holding down menial clerical jobs climbed to nearly 40 percent by the early ’80s, higher than it had been in 1970. By the late ’80s, the proportion of women consigned to the traditionally female service industries had grown, too. A long list of traditionally “female” jobs became more female-dominated, including salesclerking, cleaning services, food preparation, and secretarial, administrative, and reception work. The proportion of bookkeepers who were women, for example, rose from 88 to 93 percent between 1979 and 1986. Black women, especially, were resegregated into such traditional female jobs as nursing, teaching, and secretarial and social work. And the story was the same at the office of the nation’s largest employer, the federal government. Between 1976 and 1986, the lowest job rungs in the civil service ladder went from 67 to 71 percent female. (At the same time at the top of the ladder, the proportion of women in senior executive services had not improved since 1979—it was still a paltry 8 percent. And the rate of women appointed to top posts had declined to the point that, by the early ’80s, less than 1 percent of the G.S. 13 and 14 grade office holders were women.)

  In the few cases where working women did make substantial inroads into male enclaves, they were only admitted by default. As a job-integration study by sociologist Barbara Reskin found, in the dozen occupations where women had made the most progress entering “male” jobs—a list that ranged from typesetting to insurance adjustment to pharmaceuticals—women succeeded only because the pay and status of these jobs had fallen dramatically and men were bailing out. Computerization, for example, had demoted male typesetters to typists; the retail chaining of drugstores had turned independent pharmacists into poorly paid clerks. Other studies of women’s “progress” in bank management found that women were largely just inheriting branch-manager jobs that men didn’t want anymore because their pay, power, and status had declined dramatically. And still another analysis of occupational shifts concluded that one-third of the growth of female employment in transportation and half of the growth in financial services could be attributed simply to a loss of status in the jobs that women were getting in these two professions.

  In many of the higher-paying white-collar occupations, where women’s successes have been most heavily publicized, the rate of progress slowed to a trickle or stopped altogether by the end of the decade. The proportion of women in some of the more elite or glamorous fields actually shrank slightly in the last half of the ’80s. Professional athletes, screenwriters, commercial voice-overs, producers and orchestra musicians, economists, geologists, biological and life scientists were all a little less likely to be female by the late ’80s than earlier in the decade.

  The breathless reports about droves of female “careerists” crashing the legal, medical, and other elite professions were inflated. Between 1972 and 1988, women increased their share of such professional jobs by only 5 percent. In fact, only 2 percent more of all working women were in professional specialties in 1988 than fifteen years earlier—and that increase had been largely achieved by the early ’80s and barely budged since.

  Hardly any progress occurred in the upper echelons of corporations. In fact, according to scattered studies, in the top executive suites in many industries, from advertising to retailing, women’s already tiny numbers were beginning to fall once more by the end of the decade. The rate of growth in numbers of women appointed to Fortune 1010 boards slacked off by the late ’80s, after women’s share of the director chairs had reached only 6.8 percent. Even the many reports of the rise of female “entrepreneurs” founding their own companies masked the nickel-and-dime reality: the majority of white female-owned businesses had sales of less than $5,000 a year.

  Under Reagan, women’s progress in the military soon came under fire. In the mid-’70s, after quota ceilings on female recruits had been lifted and combat classifications rewritten to open more jobs to women, women’s ranks in the armed services had soared—by 800 percent by 1980. But shortly after Reagan’s election, the new army chief of staff declared, “I have called a pause to further increases in the number of army women”—a
nd by 1982, the army had revised combat classifications to bar women from an additional twenty-three career occupations. All the services reined in their recruitment efforts, subsequently slowing female employment growth in the military throughout the ’80s.

  The blue-collar working world offered no better news. After 1983, as a Labor Department study quietly reported to no fanfare, women made no progress breaking into the blue-collar work force with its better salaries. By 1988, the tiny proportions of women who had squeezed into the trades were shrinking in a long list of job categories from electricians and plumbers to automotive mechanics and machine operators. The already tiny ranks of female carpenters, for example, fell by half, to 0.5 percent, between 1979 and 1986. Higher up the ladder, women’s share of construction inspector jobs fell from 7 to 5.4 percent between 1983 and 1988.

  Where women did improve their toeholds in blue-collar jobs, the increments were pretty insubstantial. The proportion of women in construction, for example, rose from 1.1 to 1.4 percent between 1978 and 1988. Women made the most progress in the blue-collar professions as motor vehicle operators—more than doubling their numbers between 1972 and 1985—but that was only because women were being hired to drive school buses, typically a part-time job with the worst pay and benefits of any transportation position.

  • • •

  The trend story we all read about equal opportunity:

  DISCRIMINATION ON THE JOB: FADING FAST!

  Corporations, we read, were now welcoming women. “Virtually all large employers are now on [women’s] side,” Working Woman assured female readers in 1986. Discrimination was dropping, mistreatment of female workers was on the wane—and any reports to the contrary were just “propaganda from self-interested parties,” as Forbes asserted in 1989—in its story on the “decline” of sexual harassment on the job.