Hype and Misogyny

Susan Faludi, a Wall Street Journal reporter, compellingly documents the argument that gains for women in the '70s provoked a misogynist backlash that forms the core of New Right efforts to resurrect "an outmoded or imagined" social order. Such "backlashes have surfaced with striking frequency and intensity," whenever women have made "mostly tiny gains" toward greater equality, freedom, and well-being.

In 15th-century Europe, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger published 30 editions of the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witches and their craft. Montague Summers, translator and editor of the 1928 and 1948 editions, called it "among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books of the world." Witches, he said, conspired to achieve "the abolition of monarchy, the abolition of private property and...inheritance, the abolition of marriage, the abolition of order, the total abolition of all religion." The Malleus decrees that "far more women are witches than men....If we inquire, we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women."

Faludi speaks only of American women, of whom ancient fears and hatred find new expression in the "clear ideological agenda" of the late 20th-century American reactionary right. The leaders of the ideological right "were among the first to articulate the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness."

Beginning with rural fundamentalist ministers and electronic preachers, the message was that "[f]eminists are a deadly force...precisely because they threatened a transfer of gender power; they 'would turn the country over to women.'" Most people, says Faludi, rejected the "fevered rhetoric and the hellfire imagery" of the small-town and broadcast clergy, "but the heart of their political message survived - to be transubstantiated into the media's trends."

Faludi exposes many of the studies upon which such trends are based - a man shortage for independent women, loss of women's economic status from no-fault divorce, an infertility epidemic among professional women, depression and burnout among career women - to be unsubstantiated hype, contradicted by far more careful, but unreported, studies.

She concludes "that the statistics the popular culture chooses to promote most heavily are the very statistics we should view with the most caution. They may well be in wide circulation not because they are true but because they support widely held media perceptions. Under the backlash, statistics became prescriptions for expected female behavior, cultural marching orders to women describing only how they should act - and how they would be punished if they failed to heed the call."

The media, echoed by the fashion and beauty industries, have promoted the notion that women are afflicted by feminist gains, rather than by policies that have impoverished and closed opportunities for women, children, and families. When the National Organization for Women met after Bush's election and unanimously voted that the convention consider forming a third party, "The press, which generally ignored NOW conventions, exploded with outrage, anger, and derision...[in] dozens of...editorial temper tantrums."

We saw the same phenomenon at the July 1992 Democratic convention. When women and their concerns were presented as social and economic issues, drawing sustained enthusiasm, TV commentators groused that pushing "special" interests instead of economic changes was a mistake for the Democrats.

The central tenet of feminism, "that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness...[that] women be free to define themselves - instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men" - is again under attack, according to Faludi. It is denounced as heresy by the "thundering oratory" of New Right preachers, and anti-feminism has been given legitimacy by a "brain trust" of "cooler talking heads...with media polish and academic credentials."

MY ONLY QUARREL WITH Faludi, whom I greatly admire, is her inclusion of such feminist thinkers as Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick in the backlash brain trust category. Faludi fears anti-feminists will "appropriate Gilligan's theory on behalf of discriminatory arguments that could cause real harm to women."

Gilligan argues that women function in a framework that values relationship and intimacy over autonomy and abstraction. Ruddick contends that mothering provides a cognitive structure that values the giving and nurturing of life over its destruction. Gilligan and Ruddick have made valuable contributions, not because their work is flawless but because it is imaginative, valuing the task of childrearing to which women historically have been restricted. Relational, caretaking, and preservative skills, though they have developed in oppressive circumstances, are needed to transform patriarchy from a system whose policies require domination to a system that is more fully democratic.

Faludi is correct: The valuable work of these women can be used against women. But the gains made in the '70s have also been used against us.

The importance of Gilligan and Ruddick is that they recognize the expertise women bring to public discourse and policy. They do not suggest that only women can do the work of relationship, nurture, and preservation, nor that such work be done without public support.

In fact, the backlash is based on a correct perception that the entry of significant numbers of women into power, so long as feminine values come with them, does threaten the male order, with its emphasis on autonomy, domination, and acquisition. So her subtitle is accurate: The backlash is a form of war to maintain an unjust status quo.

Faludi applauds women's stamina. "No matter how many times women have been told to sit down and keep quiet, they have struggled to their feet....[W]hatever new obstacles are mounted against the future march toward equality, whatever new myths invented, penalties levied, opportunities rescinded, or degradations imposed, no one can ever take from the American woman the justness of her cause." Thanks to Faludi's careful and courageous work, we are more alert to the content and methods of contemporary misogyny. Thanks to the imagination of Gilligan and Ruddick, we have a better idea what kind of order might replace it.

Liane Ellison Norman is founder of the Pittsburgh Peace Institute and author of Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight. She taught fund raising to non-profit organizations when this article appeared.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. By Susan Faludi. Crown Publishers Inc., 1991. $24, cloth.