Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  As Ms.’s 1972 guide . . .: “A Guide to Consciousness-Raising,” Ms., July 1972, reprinted in Women’s Liberation in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Mary Lynn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975) pp. 111-18.

  “I’m like a mother . . .”: Personal interview and observations, 1987.

  For more than a year . . .: Personal interview with publicist in Pocket Books’ publicity department, 1987.

  As Judith Staples . . .: Personal interview with Judith Staples, 1987.

  Norwood’s congregants . . .: Ibid.

  It was an inside job . . .”: Taped lecture by Norwood in San Francisco, 1987. Just like “Pam,” . . .: Norwood, Love Too Much, pp. 149-56, 1-5, 262-71.

  I never claimed . . .”: Personal interview with Robin Norwood, 1987; Faludi, “Addicted to Love,” p. 36. In the spring of . . .: Ibid.

  Her daily life there, she reports, . . .: Ibid.

  “The heart of [consciousness. . .]”: Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1983) p. 37.

  As psychoanalyst . . .: Susan Quinn, A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988) p. 14.

  That year, Dr. Teresa Bernardez . . .: Personal interview with Dr. Teresa Bernardez, 1988.

  “Premenstrual dysphoric . . .”: Constance Holden, “Proposed New Psychiatric Diagnoses Raise Charges of Gender Bias,” Science, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 327.

  This was obvious . . .: Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, “The Future of DSM: Scientific and Professional Issues,” The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Sept. 1988, pp. 4–6.

  They included anyone who . . .: Dr. Frederic Kass, “Self-Defeating Personality Disorder: An Empirical Study,” Journal of Personality Disorders, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 168–73.

  The APA panel included these traits . . .: Ibid., p. 170; Thomas A. Widiger, “The Self-Defeating Personality Disorder,” Journal of Personality Disorders, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1987) pp. 157–59.

  The panel illustrated . . .: Widiger, “Self-Defeating,” p. 159.

  The panel was dominated by . . .: Bruce Bower, “The Diagnostic Dilemma,” Science News, 135 (Feb. 25, 1989): 120.

  The masochism disorder’s backers . . .: Nearly half of psychologists are women, compared with less than 10 percent of psychiatrists. In surveys within the profession, psychiatrists were expressing increasing displeasure and anxiety as competition from more affordable therapists and counselors caused their earnings to drop. See “Unhappy People,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 23, 1990, p. A22.

  As APA vice president . . .: Deborah Franklin, “The Politics of Masochism,” Psychology Today, Jan. 1987, p. 53.

  “The anger we . . .”: Personal interview with Dr. Teresa Bernardez, 1988.

  It wasn’t until . . .: Paula J. Caplan, The Myth of Women’s Masochism (New York: Signet, 1985) p. 257.

  And the mostly male . . .: Personal interviews with Lynne Rosewater, director of the Feminist Therapy Institute, who attended the meeting, 1988; personal interview with Dr. Robert Spitzer, 1989.

  Then he revealed . . .: F. Kass, R. A. MacKinnon, and R. L. Spitzer, “Masochistic Personality: An Empirical Study,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 143, no. 2 (1986): 216–18.

  One of the feminist . . .: Personal interview with Lynne Rosewater, 1988.

  The APA panel’s “data” . . .: Dr. Richard C. Simons, “Self-Defeating and Sadistic Personality Disorders: Needed Additions to the Diagnostic Nomenclature,” Journal of Personality Disorders, 1, no. 2 (1987): 161–67; Franklin, “Politics of Masochism,” p. 57.

  The poll, however . . .: Paula J. Caplan, “The Psychiatric Association’s Failure to Meet Its Own Standards,” Journal of Personality Disorders, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 178.

  Next, psychological researcher . . .: Lenore E. A. Walker, “Inadequacies of the Masochistic Personality Disorder Diagnosis for Women,” Journal of Personality Disorders, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 183.

  It’s irrelevant . . .”: Personal interview with Dr. Robert Spitzer, 1989.

  I didn’t think . . .”: Personal interview with Dr. Paul Fink, 1989.

  “The low level of intellectual . . .”: John Leo, “Battling Over Masochism,” Time, Dec. 2, 1985, p. 76.

  At one point, recalls . . .: Personal interview with Lynne Rosewater, 1988. Indeed, questions have been raised more generally about the “scientific” nature of all the DSM’s diagnoses. See Kutchins and Kirk, “The Future of DSM,” pp. 4–5. The female therapists again . . .: Caplan, Women’s Masochism, pp. 259–61. As a senior APA . . .: Ibid., p. 270.

  “I began to speak . . .”: Personal interview with Dr. Teresa Bernardez, 1988.

  When Bernardez’s term on the . . .: Personal interviews with Dr. Paul Fink, 1989, Dr. Teresa Bernardez, 1988. Asked about the purge of the feminists from the committee on women, APA president Dr. Paul Fink says: “I think that human nature says if you’re having a lot of trouble with some groups then you might think twice, more carefully, about who[m] you appoint.” Asked about Bernardez specifically, he says: “There’s one of them I can think of [whose tenure he did not want to see continued]. I won’t say her name. I think her time was up.” Then he adds: “Nothing you’ve heard has any validity in terms of our going out of our way to disenfranchise people. People whose time was up just couldn’t be reappointed.”

  In this case, however . . .: Caplan, Women’s Masochism, pp. 270-71; Robert Spitzer and Janet Williams, A Guide to DSM-III-R (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987) p. 15.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN. THE WAGES OF THE BACKLASH

  Newspaper editorials applauded . . .: See, for example, “70 Percent of a Man,” editorial, San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 7, 1988, p. P8.

  Women working full-time . . .: U.S. Bureau of Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, no. 157, 1987.

  The press got the 70-cent figure . . .: “Male-Female Differences in Work Experience, Occupations, and Earnings: 1984,” U.S. Bureau of Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-70, no. 10, Aug. 1987; personal interviews with statisticians at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1988. See also “Briefing Paper on the Wage Gap,” National Committee on Pay Equity, Sept. 18, 1987. That same year, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management was also promoting its own “good news” on the wage gap for federal employees—through similar data fudging. This agency “adjusted” the figures to reflect a spurious claim that full-time working women work many fewer hours than men, and they claimed the rest of the gap could be explained away by such factors as geography and “personal choices.” Through these sleights of hand, federally employed women were now suddenly said to be earning 75 cents to a man’s dollar. The actual figure was 69 cents, a paltry 3 cent improvement from 1976. See “Comparable Worth for Federal Jobs: A Wrong Turn Off the Road Toward Pay Equity and Women’s Career Advancement,” U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Washington, D.C., Sept. 1987.

  By that year, . . .: U.S. Bureau of Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, no. 157, 1987.

  And as much as . . .: Mishel and Frankel, The State of Working America, pp. 83-85, 105; “Briefing Paper 1: The Wage Gap,” National Committee on Pay Equity.

  By 1988, women with a college . . .: “Average Earnings of Year-Round Full-Time Workers by Sex and Educational Attainment, 1987,” U.S. Bureau of Census, Table 35, Feb. 1989; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, no. 166, 1988. For data on older women, see James P. Smith and Michael Ward, “Women in the Labor Market and in the Family,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 10.

  The pay gap was also . . .: A Reagan-era, Labor Department policy decision has made it extraordinarily difficult to make comprehensive occupational comparisons over time: in 1983, the Labor Department relabeled most of its job classifications. For the comparisons noted here, see “Money Income and Poverty Status in the United States, 1989,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, S
eries P-60, no. 168; “Male-Female Differences,” pp. 5, 23–24, Table G, Table 11 (for social workers, the gap worsened by a hefty 10 points between 1979 and 1986); William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, “The 1987 Hollywood Writers’ Report: A Survey of Ethnic, Gender and Age Employment Practices,” The Writers Guild of America West, Hollywood, Calif., 1987. This study found that just between 1982 and 1985 the pay gap for female writers in feature films had expanded by 23 percentage points. In no sector of the entertainment industry did female writers’ earnings improve, the report noted, and at some studios it plummeted spectacularly. At MTM, for example, female writers were making an incredible 20 cents to a white man’s dollar in 1984 and 1985. A subsequent 1989 survey found that the gap for female writers in television and film overall had worsened by 10 percentage points between 1982 and 1987. See William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, “The 1989 Hollywood Writers’ Report: Unequal Access, Unequal Pay,” The Writers Guild of America West, Hollywood, Calif., 1989.

  In public relations . . .: Speech by Elizabeth Toth at “Women, Men and Media” conference, Feb. 29, 1988. By 1988, the annual pay gap in public relations was $20,000. Data from Public Relations Journal survey. See also “Women Practitioners: How Far How Fast?” Public Relations Journal, May 1989.

  While the level of . . .: Cynthia Taeuber and Victor Valdisera, “Women in the American Economy,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Special Studies, Series P-23, no. 146, pp. 21–23; American Woman 1990–91, p. 358; O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave, p. 148; Women’s Work, Men’s Work: Sex Segregation on the Job, ed. by Barbara F. Reskin and Heidi I. Hartmann (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986) pp. 32–33. Between 1900 and 1960, occupational segregation remained the same. A 1986 study of 61,000 workers found that only 10 percent had job assignments that were held by both men and women. See William T. Bielby and James N. Baron, “Sex Segregation Within Occupations,” American Economic Review, May 1986, pp. 43–47.

  (By one estimate, for every. . .): American Woman 1988–89, p. 258; “Is Sex Discrimination the Root of Wage Differences?” Women at Work, April 1989, p. 9, excerpted from Committee on Women’s Employment and Related Social Issues, Pay Equity: Empirical Inquiries (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989).

  A resegregating work force . . .: Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn (New York: Basic Books, 1988), Table A.2, p. 199. Bizarrely, their findings were reported in one press article under this inappropriate headline: “Women Are Beginning to Make Big Gains In the Workplace.” See Carol Kleiman, San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 15, 1989, p. 27.

  The already huge proportion . . .: Nancy Barrett, “Women and the Economy,” American Woman 1987–88, p. 119. The 40 percent figure is from 1982. The following year the Labor Department changed this job classification, so it’s not possible to compare this group of workers after 1983.

  By the late ’80s . . .: American Woman 1990–91, p. 385.

  A long list of . . .: The secretarial pool, for example, went from 98.9 percent female in 1979 to 99.2 in 1986. See “Male-Female Differences,” p. 5.

  The proportion of bookkeepers . . .: Ibid.

  Black women, especially . . .: Personal interview with Natalie J. Sokoloff, sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 1991; Natalie J. Sokoloff, “Are Professions Becoming Disintegrated? An Analysis of Detailed Professional Occupations by Race and Gender,” unpublished paper, Aug. 1989; Natalie J. Sokoloff, “The Gender/Race Interaction: Toward a More Complex View of Black Women in the Professions,” unpublished paper, Aug. 1990; Natalie J. Sokoloff’s study is forthcoming in Black and White Women in the Professions, 1960–1980: An Analysis of Changes in Job Segregation by Race and Gender (Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman).

  Between 1976 and 1986 . . .: “Comparable Worth for Federal Jobs;” unpublished data from U.S. Office of Personnel Management; Susanna Downie, “Decade of Achievement: 1977-1987,” The National Women’s Conference Center, May 1988, p. 37. The lowest rungs are grades 1-8.

  As a job-integration study . . .: Barbara Reskin, “Occupational Resegregation,” in American Woman 1988–89, pp. 258, 263; personal interview with Barbara Reskin, sociology professor at University of Illinois, 1988. I am grateful to Barbara Reskin for sharing her research and several chapters of Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Movement into Male Dominated Occupations, by Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos, forthcoming, Temple University Press.

  Other studies . . .: Chloe E. Bird, “High Finance, Small Change: Women in Back Management,” unpublished paper, Jan. 1989; Myra H. Strober and Carolyn L. Arnold, “The Dynamics of Occupational Segregation Among Bank Tellers,” Gender in the Workplace, ed. by Clair Brown and Joseph A. Pechman (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987) pp. 107-157.

  And still another . . .: Smith, “Impact of the Reagan Years,” pp. 4, 12-13.

  Professional athletes, . . .: “Employment and Earnings: 1983 Annual Averages,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jan. 1984; “Employment and Earnings: 1988 Annual Averages,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jan. 1989; Bielby and Bielby, “1987 Hollywood Writer’s Report;” “The Female in Focus: In Whose Image?: A Statistical Survey of the Status of Women in Film, Television and Commercials,” Screen Actors Guild, Inc., Hollywood, Calif., Aug. 1, 1990; EEO-1 Employment Analysis Report Program, “Producers, Orchestras and Entertainment,” Nationwide Summaries, 1987, 1984, 1981. (It should be pointed out that the EEO-1 reports likely understate women’s declining status. These figures are based on the corporations’ own equal-opportunity reports to the federal government, and, as subsequent audits have found, these corporate self-reports have frequently exaggerated the numbers of women and minorities hired. During the Reagan years, this tendency toward embellishment got far worse—as the administration scaled back monitoring and enforcement of affirmative action and turned a blind eye to companies that inflated hiring data.)

  Between 1972 and 1988 . . .: Bergmann, Economic Emergence, p. 70, Table 4-3.

  In fact, only . . .: Ibid.; data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: American Woman 1990–91, Figure 8, p. 383. Much was also made of women’s invasion of the managerial ranks in corporate America. But while their numbers grew, by 1989 less than 11 percent of all working women held managerial jobs. See American Woman 1990–91, p. 357.

  Hardly any progress . . .: “CEOs on Barriers to Women’s Advancement,” Catalyst Perspective, Feb. 1990, p. 2. A 1985 study found fewer women at high corporate levels than in 1982. See “After the Sexual Revolution,” ABC News, transcript, July 30, 1986, p. 5. A 1989 Adweek Women’s Survey found that advancement had slowed for women in advertising. See “The Seventh Annual Women’s Survey,” Adweek, June 5, 1989, p. W4.

  The rate of growth in . . .: Alison Leigh Cowan, “The New Wave Director,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1990, p. 58.

  Even the many reports of . . .: American Woman 1990–91, p. 227.

  Under Reagan, women’s progress . . .: Marc Leepson, “Women in the Military,” The Women’s Movement: Agenda for the ’80s, Editorial Research Reports (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1981) pp. 83–101; Robert Landers, “Should Women Be Allowed in Combat?” Editorial Research Reports, Congressional Quarterly, 2, no. 14 (Oct. 13, 1989): 570–82.

  After 1983 . . .: “Employment of Women in Nontraditional Jobs, 1983–88,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report 756, Second Quarter 1988.

  By 1988, the tiny proportions . . .: “Employment and Earnings: 1983”; Employment and Earnings: 1988;” “Male-Female Differences,” Table G, p. 5; American Woman, 1990–91, Table 19, p. 358.

  The proportion of women in construction . . .: American Woman, 1990–91, p. 385.

  Women made the most . . .: “Women in the American Economy,” p. 18; “Women as a Percent Of All Workers in Selected Occupations,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jan. 1989, Table 22.

/>   Virtually all large . . .”: Peggy Simpson, “Why the Backlash Is a Big Bust,” Working Woman, Nov. 1986, p. 164.

  Discrimination was dropping . . .: Gretchen Morgenson, “Watch That Leer, Stifle That Joke,” Forbes, May 15, 1989, p. 69.

  Women’s sex discrimination . . .: Statistics from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A 1988 survey by the Merit Systems Protection Board found 42 percent of federally employed women said they had been sexually harassed. A 1988 U.S. Navy survey the same year found more than half of women in the Navy were victims of sexual harassment.

  Press accounts to the . . .: “White Collar Displacement: Job Erosion in the Service Sector,” 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women, p. 4; Bergmann, Economic Emergence, p. 155.

  And even among . . .: Personal interview with statisticians with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, 1989.

  In the federal . . .: Reskin and Hartmann, Women’s Work/Men’s Work, p. 14.

  Far more working . . .: “Work and Family Responsibility: Achieving a Balance,” Ford Foundation, March 1989, p. 25; “Working Women: Statistics, Jobs, Salaries,” Salaried and Professional Women’s Committee, July 28, 1989. In desperation, a record 3.1 million women patched together two or more jobs by 1990, a 500 percent increase since 1970. (The proportion of male moonlighters in the same period didn’t change.) And when women fell out of the work force, they found the social net beneath them far more shredded. In the first few years of the 1980s alone, nearly a half-million poor mothers were dropped from the welfare rolls and another 260,000 lost most of their federal assistance. Power, “Women, the State and the Family,” p. 148.

  At the same time that . . .: “Equal Employment Opportunity: EEOC and State Agencies Did Not Fully Investigate Discrimination Charges,” U.S. General Accounting Office, Oct. 1988; Report on the EEOC by the House Education and Labor Committee, 1986; Reskin and Hartmann, Women’s Work/Men’s Work, p. 86.