Wake Up, Little Susie

...The doldrums did not last long, however...

...Here is Adler again: Of the 8,814 Dallas division workers who lost their jobs—all but the most senior management of the division were laid off—the average length of employment was 17 years...

...Indeed, her discussion of abortion shows just how cold-blooded the author can be...

...This is true whether the member is Randall Terry (he and his wife "lived like charity cases," Faludi sniffs), or actual working women themselves, from the "Tupperware-hawking homemaker" to the millions who are, in the author's pitying judgment, "stuck in traditional `female-only' jobs—as secretaries, administrative 'support' workers, and sales clerks...

...Today's women—all women—feel empty, out of touch, alone...

...Even the women whose cause Backlash claims to be championing are reduced in its pages to stick figures of false consciousness...

...free to blame everyone but themselves for everything from chlamydia and "pressure in the head" to problems so incoherent that they don't even have a name...

...In February, and despite stiff competition in the category of general non-fiction, a divided jury handed Backlash a coveted National Book Critics Circle award...

...On December 23, 1988, the Observer published an article by reporter Bill Adler entitled "Leveraged Lives...

...So too was the judgment of Eleanor Clift in the Washington Post that "just as Friedan first gave voice to the `problem that has no name,' Faludi has come along to rescue feminism from the trash heap of history...

...In Backlash, day care is presented not only as a good alternative to home care...

...he walked into the bathroom of his tidy home...

...Abortion, by most accounts the single most important conMary Eberstadt is a contributing editor of the National Interest magazine...

...trophy husband" did not...

...This strategy created another nearly irresistible peg: that of passing the torch from the old generation of feminists to the new...

...Just listen to them...

...This led her to the trial of many other "trend stories" of the 1980s—on infertility, "burnout," the "mommy track," and so on—and soon myth after myth was exploding on the screen...

...There were nearly 100,000 reported cases of children sexually abused by family members (mostly fathers, stepfathers, or older brothers) compared with about 1,300 in day care...

...and Bill Mayfield, Jr., a mechanic who attempted suicide after losing his...

...it will not, however, overturn Roe v. Wade...

...36 The American Spectator October 1992...

...Day care, though not yet free, has expanded dramatically...

...Instead of assailing injustice, many women have learned to adjust to it...

...For "the distress these women felt was, in large measure, the result of the signals they picked up from their culture and the way these signals conflicted with the real circumstances of their lives...

...after all, she is not one of them...

...Back at the Texas Observer, a struggling bi-weekly whose editor, Louis Dubose, regrets the rock-bottom wages 32 The American Spectator October 1992 his reporters make, these differences are scant consolation...

...beset by "malaise and enervation...

...Moreover, as the "depression literature" shows, there seem to be "only two prime causes for female depression: low social status and marriage...

...Almost no one surveying the debate these past two decades could fail to see that most other Americans remain militantly uncomfortable with the whole subject—except Faludi...

...To see why, there is no substitute for reading the two pieces side by side...

...Ergo, Contradiction Five: The backlash business allegedly made "record profits" by exploiting millions of women—but these same millions of women allegedly rejected the backlash at the cash register...

...And so on...

...The readers then erroneously "decided that the signals were coming exclusively from their own bodies, not their newspapers...

...In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, former Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi could be found declaring that every single tenet of revisionist thought about feminism was wrong...

...There are, for example, the outright enemies of the cause—women like Phyllis Schlafly, Mona Charen, the Free Congress Foundation's Connie Marshner, and many more...

...Other recantations followed hers...

...There are not many parents who will find such "actual studies" reassuring, or who will fail to wonder what other numbers lie buried beneath the author's blithe admission that "children in day care are initially prone to more illness...

...but she fails to mention how divorced men and women and widows and widowers shift the balance in midlife...

...they acted as if women had but one side and ignored the realities of husbands and children...

...Again, the Journal: The North Texas Food Bank suffered, too...

...Rave reviews helped, too...

...But it does not take a statistician to see that the book's ideology drives its numbers, rather than vice versa...

...the leadership is splintered and squabbling...

...Often, the people who serve its ends" are not even "aware of their role...

...Thus Contradiction Three...

...he Here we have what might be called Contradiction One of Backlash: It is a book conceived in marital neurosis, yet dedicated to the proposition that spinsterhood is the cure...

...Sally Quinn, writing in the Washington Post this spring, found feminism as we know it not only dead, but murdered—by its own...

...B ut marketing, however savvy, goes only part of the way to explaining the Backlash phenomenon...

...The warning issued by family sociologist Jessie Bernard in 1972 still ates and feminist activists alike, have felt the pain of this new isolation...

...Less benign were the shows that portrayed large families, alias "a full litter of kids...

...he went to an "unaccredited school...

...they have lost their "collective spirit...

...Last year, she also won a Pulitzer for a Wall Street Journal story (May 16, 1990) about the sufferings imposed on employees by the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores Inc...

...Whatever their ugly motivations, the effect of the anti-abortion activists remained the same—the most vicious assault yet in the "long, painful and unremitting campaign to thwart women's progress...

...The backlash, with its "agents," "infiltration," "secrecy," and "codes" behaves exactly like a conspiracy—except that Faludi insists that it isn't one...

...John McLaughlin called Faludi "the best thinker of the year...

...They are certainly freer, as earlier feminists would have hoped, to engage in sex while postponing or altogether avoiding motherhood...

...Rather, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic...

...By 1992, when the National Organization for Women chose as its president Patricia Ireland—a married woman who coyly acknowledged her lesbian adultery—it seemed anything but controversial to say, as Sally Quinn did, that "many women have come to see the feminist movement as anti-male, anti-child, antifamily, anti-feminine...

...they have better health and are more likely to enjoy regular sex...

...On Betty Friedan: "Her book is punctuated with the tantrums of a fallen leader who is clearly distressed and angry that she wasn't allowed to be the Alpha wolf as long as she would have liked...

...They, too, appear "duped" by the "signals" of their "culture...

...When the Dallas Division shut down," said the Journal piece, "the state unemployment office had to open on the weekend—for the first time ever—just to accommodate the Safeway crowds...

...Hollywood, offering such regressive fare as Crossing Delancey, Working Girl, Baby Boom, and, of course, Fatal Attraction, whose "message" was that "the best single woman is a dead one...

...The faint noise came from the bathroom...

...Trophy wife" entered the vernacular...

...or for any woman who aborted and came to regret it (another media invention, we're told...

...Our failure," she wrote then, "was our blind spot about the family...

...Women at large are "On the day Faludi won the award," Dubose says wryly over the phone, "I called Bill up early in the morning to congratulate him for winning the Pulitzer...

...Many more found the book "witty," "forceful," "brilliant," and "trenchant...

...In July, moreover, the Democratic party platform and convention finally exorcised pro-life dissent and committed Clinton-Gore to...

...Such trend stories, the author argues, were manufactured by reporters who "claimed to divine sweeping shifts of female social behavior while providing little in the way of evidence, to support their generalizations...

...A few months later, feminist grande dame Gloria Steinem published her own autobiography, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem...

...For most of the The American Spectator October 1992 31 past year, Backlash—now in its tenth printing—has been a fixture on the bestseller list...

...The day after Safeway closed its stores in Dallas, wrote Adler, "it would be the first time the local office of the Texas Employment Commission opened on a Saturday...

...Similarly, the "marriage panic"—another topic of late 1980s journalism—"didn't show up in the polls until after the press's promotion of the Harvard-Yale study...

...As for other acts of choice, there is no honorable mention in Backlash of any woman who has chosen to stay home, with or without children to raise...

...This was an account of the "flesh and blood consequences" and "human damage" suffered by Safeway employees in Texas as a result of the company's buyout by some of Safeway's management and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co...

...These feelings of anxiety and pain, the text continues, have been implanted in women without their knowledge by a malevolent outside force...

...These speculations threw then-27-year-old, Susan Faludi into a slump...

...True enough, Lovenheim wrote...

...Thus the views of Backlash on wives, mothers, would-be mothers, and mothers-to-be...

...most, it is implied, are just playing for personal advantage...

...Researchers for a 1986 federal government study, Faludi writes, found that "one-third of these unwed women were living with a man...

...Chief among these was Betty Friedan, whose 1981 book, The Second Stage, charged feminists with denigrating motherhood and leading women into "female machismo...

...So did opportunity, gutting crucial legal rulings for working women, undermining abortion rights, halting birth control research, and promulgating 'fetal protection' and fetal rights' policies...

...T he National Book Critics Circle award was not the first such prize to come Faludi's way...

...B ut perhaps it is unfair to tax the author with her militant indifference to children...

...The fact that Steinem's book was often castigated for its feminist backsliding redounded further to the credit of the no-holds-barred Backlash, at least among feminist readers...

...But Dealy has not changed his mind...

...The effect of day care on childhood development is not neutral, but positive: "It seems to make children slightly more gregarious and independent," and "day care children also appear to be more broad-minded about sex roles...

...As he did so, he told his wife, as he often did, that he loved her...

...George Gilder's wife, an architectural historian who appears guilty only of having married him, is smeared—for no reason—with this baffling insult: "Maybe this aging prince had considered his marital odds—and decided he'd better settle for what he could get...

...Finally, while Adler's piece is almost exclusively a human-interest story, the Journal's suggests broad conclusions about leveraged buyouts in general...

...These men (with the exception of Cindy Terry, wife of Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry, Faludi writes only of the men) were chiefly concerned with stopping women from "climbing into the sexual driver's seat...

...and no wonder, for her "attack on the women's movement earned her a showcase in every press outlet from the New York Times to People to 'Donahue...

...Nor did the threat of a-conservative majority on the Supreme Court materialize as many feared...

...As it showed this spring in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the present Court will uphold selected inconveniences to the practice of abortion on demand...

...What of other real women—for example, those who yearn for motherhood...

...More women, including more mothers of young children, are working outside the home than ever before...

...Exactly how dangerous is marriage...

...The troops have been defecting...

...And so we come to the real whopper, Contradiction Eight: Here is a best-selling, prize-winning, thunderously applauded author whose very premise (if that is the word) is that women like her, born free, are everywhere chained by the backlash...

...Indeed, "there are at least one million more unwed women than unwed men between the ages of 35 and 54...

...Even as pieces like Quinn's seemed to ratify the popular mood, the most vehement and unapologetic call to arms to issue from the feminist camp in many years was enjoying sensational success...

...None, to judge by Backlash, actually believe the preposterous things they say...

...These stories, Faludi writes, made many readers feel "desperate, unworthy, and shameful for failing to reproduce on the media's The American Spectator October 1992 33 schedule...

...Well, some people are never satisfied...

...Of the women who actually seek such treatment, there is not a word—much less sympathy...

...The speed with which Backlash and its message became ubiquitous in the mass media almost defies description...

...She is, however, a feminist, which brings us to Contradiction Seven: the women of Backlash itself are servile, faint-hearted, helpless dupes—except when they are being cunning, treacherous, bold self-promoters...

...Cindy Terry, mother of five and comrade-in-arms of Randall, is portrayed variously as a "goodwife" who mows the lawn and "serves" and "clears the dishes...

...He's not the only one who thinks so...

...The two-income careerist household, another favorite cause, had its frictions...

...Here is what emerges from the opening chapters: As a survey for Cosmopolitan magazine proved, "not only do single women make more money than their married sisters...

...In a move unusual in the world of publishing, Crown (Faludi's publisher) and Little, Brown (Steinem's) jointly promoted the two books together...

...the press, again, is condemned for "predictable women's magazine treacle about the virtues and 'deep-rooted' values of any woman who has 'found her identity' by serving home, husband, and kids...

...Infertility, "toxic" day care, the "man shortage...

...It includes much more information about the key players in the transaction, particularly those in the KKR group...

...At its most powerful, it "lodges inside a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head...

...Terry, the author points out, used to live in a "trailer park...

...By the 1990s...

...Here we have what might be called Contradiction One of Backlash: It is a book conceived in marital neurosis, yet dedicated to the proposition that spinsterhood is the cure...

...Feminism had not been laid flat by its successes, but by a "society-wide backlash," a "relentless whittling-down process that has served to stir women's private anxieties and break their political wills...

...Apart from its subject, thesis, point of view and the list of particulars above, the Journal piece differs significantly from Adler's...

...or for any woman whose opinions differ in any way from Faludi's own...

...P itiful as these women are, their single, childless, working sisters are just as frail...

...A few years ago, the book explains, stories proliferated in the popular culture about the yearning for motherhood among career women...

...Childless and single women, the book mourns, have come to feel like "circus freaks...

...Domestic life is described variously as "inactivity" and "a regressive fantasy...

...Even ardent feminists sometimes balked at what were said .to be the movement's new frontiers—female reporters in locker rooms, mothers in combat, teenage girls in abortion clinics...

...Instead of helping women fulfill their needs, helping the 'total woman,' American women—all these, according to Backlash, were myths...

...She goes so far as to place . the whole brood crowds into the maternity ward, with virtually every woman either rocking a newborn or resting a proud hand on a bulging tummy...

...Back at her job as a staff writer for West magazine, the reporter began devouring the new literature of marital odds...

...Powerful, shocking, thought-provoking, inspiring, and truly groundbreaking," "a must-read for women across the nation": these verdicts by Eleanor Smeal on the book's jacket were soon to be repeated by the score...

...As always, success owed something to timing...

...but by the 1980s, the author complains, "the fetus began to win out...

...Twenty-five million abortions have been recorded since Roe v. Wade...

...For example, in discussing the risks associated with postponing childbearing, Backlash had claimed that "women under 35 now give birth to children with Down syndrome at a higher rate than women over 35...

...Backlash, which weighs in at 460 pages of text and 91 more of footnotes, is a torrential outpouring of social science numbers and jargon...

...Advice writers and pop therapists, matchmaking consultants, plastic surgeons and infertility specialists have both fueled and cashed in on women's anxiety and panic under the backlash...

...As she explained at a bookstore appearance in Berkeley, "One writer said [that] to succeed, feminists need to look at children from a 'children's perspective.' Why should we...

...Backlash has much to say—all of it negative—about doctors who engage in infertility research and offer to help women conceive...

...Actual studies," she reports, prove that day-care children "soon build up immunities and actually get sick less often than kids at home...

...As loyalist Ellen Goodman wrote earlier this year, "What is missing in the women's movement is movement...

...But as Backlash does manage to show, women are free all right—free to insist on double standards everywhere from the bathroom to the boardroom...

...This was an account of the "enormous human costs" and "unintended side effects" suffered by Safeway employees in Texas and elsewhere in the country as a result of the buyout...

...Women did try to resist these new assaults...

...30 The American Spectator October 1992 Women who had learned from feminism to equate running a household with indolence thought again when they tried it themselves—especially with children...

...From the mass media that ignited it, the backlash motored along through the culture...

...Yet the backlash, the author insists, is neither a "conspiracy" nor an "organized movement...

...The entrepreneurs of misery jumped aboard...

...Finally, in what may be the most succinct measure of the book's extraordinary success and clout, its author has reportedly signed a $1.5-million contract for her next book, rumored to be about men...

...That fact alone guaranteed an instant news "peg" for Backlash in many a subsequent musing about politics, sex, and the workplace...

...Here we have what might kindly be called Contradiction Four: that the writer credited with the prize-winning piece on Safeway should deplore the work habits of other reporters...

...This statement, as Lovenheim argued, "flies in the face of all conventional medical wisdom...

...Safeway used to donate 600,000 pounds of food per year...

...Faludi's lawyer, Martin Garbus, has had a number of communications with Carol publisher Steven Schragis about the implications he feels are present in the word "replication" and its perhaps libelous connotations...

...It provides a fuller account of Safeway's buyout and of LBOs more generally...

...Instead of getting angry, they have become depressed...

...Adler writes: The [Safeway Employees Association] was instrumental in forming the food bank in 1982 and Safeway remained the single largest donor—averaging 45,300 pounds of food per month—until the closing...

...Faludi, she wrote, "skews data, misquotes primary sources and makes serious errors of omission...

...it was also, she charged, contradicted by the very sources Faludi cited...

...Neither Bill Adler nor the Texas Observer is mentioned in the Journal's piece...

...The "man shortage," "burnout," "baby fever," and other ills said to be afflicting irresistible peg: that of passing the torch from the old generation of feminists to the new...

...Faludi appears in this line: "The Journal's 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning article on the Safeway [leveraged buyout] was largely a replication of a piece published two years before in the Texas Observer...

...With these accolades came many others...

...Single career women, then, are happier than ever before—except when they are being more miserable, which is an argument that Backlash makes simultaneously...

...Real life seemed to clash with liberation on other battlegrounds, too...

...How, then, did Backlash—a work so riddled with illogic that it cannot accurately be called an argument—become a pillar of reverential worship...

...Women, even girls, now seem freer than ever to do what previous generations would have found unthinkable, or at least unthought-of, from Little League fields to once-male clubs to the combat ranks of the military...

...But a funny thing happened on the way to feminism's latest funeral...

...With this change in the market have come others that once seemed feminist fantasies...

...Consider its discussion of day care...

...To the infertility specialists," the author explains, "humanizing the embryo just made good business sense...

...Both pieces paint sympathetic portraits of two particular workers: James White, a trucker who worked for Safeway for thirty years and killed himself after losing his job...

...Married women, the author reports, are more likely to be plagued by nervous breakdowns, nervousness, heart palpitations, and inertia . . . insomnia, trembling hands, dizzy spells, nightmares, hypochondria, passivity, agoraphobia and other phobias, unhappiness with their physical appearance, and overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame...

...Women, according to Faludi, also continued to demand career-girl's clothes and politically correct television, to postpone their wedding dates, and in general "to want" what "they have always wanted...

...Already under assault from without, the women's movement also found itself divided from within—often for prosaic reasons...

...On May 16, 1990, the Journal published "The Reckoning: Safeway LBO Yields Vast Profits but Exacts A Heavy Human Toll...

...It has "moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear...

...Whatever tension their combination may have implied, Steinem and Faludi were to appear together—in person, in ads, on the cover of Time, and in the reams of commentary on both books...

...According to a piece she wrote later for the Chicago Tribune's Sunday magazine, Backlash was born in 1986, when Newsweek published its cover story about a now-famous study by two Yale sociologists and a Harvard economist...

...This was partly thanks to the medical profession, which had "defined the fetus as an independent patient" and the pregnant woman as a mere "ancillary party...

...Women," the author explains, "want underwear that won't ride up, won't fall apart in the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label...

...The discussion of abortion and its critics brings up Contradiction Six: The successful, Harvard-educated author of Backlash—who of course champions poor against rich, town against gown—in fact views actual members of those groups with the condescension of aristocrats everywhere...

...Some, like Randall Terry himself, were also apparently in it for the cash...

...James White had ended his life as quietly as he lived it: he had shot himself in the head...

...Many feminists, and many working mothers, want to be assured only that day care has no long-term negative effects on children...

...The fashion world exploited the new mood by fobbing off on women an array of repressive attire: miniskirts, baby-doll dresses, low necklines...

...In newspapers and magazines, conservative and neoconservative voices proliferated...

...No-fault divorce, once a cherished cause, did not always seem so equitable in practice...

...Whatever its consolations, then, feminism as a movement has for years careened from crisis to crisis...

...In the movie Parenthood, she notes distastefully, Susan Brownmiller's revisionist book, Femininity, was "footnoteless and fuzzy...

...Like most feminists today, Faludi places women and fetus on opposing sides of the ideological chessboard...

...On the day Faludi won the award," Dubose says wryly over the phone, "I called Bill up early in the morning to congratulate him for winning the Pulitzer...

...C3 "Women," the author explains, "want underwear that won't ride up, won't fall apart in, the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label...

...Both private corporations and government have devised benefits aimed at the working mother, and both are under pressure to devise more...

...she writes, women's "reproductive freedoms" were in "greater jeopardy" than they had been in years...

...To the contraceptive devices already widely offered, the FDA has lately added Norplant, whose five years' duration may soon make the vaunted Pill, with its enduring "human error" factor, seem positively antique...

...aludi's Backlash, in any event, had an inspiration all F its own...

...In a fascinating omission, Faludi nowhere mentions that pre-eminent critic of modern feminism, Midge Decter...

...34 The American Spectator October 1992 Afew words about that "evidence...

...Their discontent had nothing to do with "wedding rings and bassinets," everything with "justice for their gender...

...For one thing, children appear safer there...

...lingerie tailored to men's fantasies...

...In many universities, female students now outnumber males...

...Prohibited from working in a division of the plant that management believed to be dangerous to the human fetus, all five women had themselves sterilized—a decision that subsequently tormented, and was regretted by, each...

...Alongside these triumphs, though, our 1960s feminists would have seen setback after amazing setback...

...teddies, under-wire bras and girdles...

...As Ellen Goodman, who has tried harder to promote Backlash than almost any other journalist in print, put it gently, "Ms...

...vehement national debate aside, the number of reported terminations is holding steady at about 1.5 million a year...

...As the camera pans over row upon row of gurgling diapered babies, it is hard to remember that this is a feature film, not a commercial break for Pampers...

...Lesser figures are merely dismissed with contempt...

...We're adults...

...Time called Backlash "one of those landmark books that shape the opinions of America's opinion makers...

...Based on previous American marriage patterns, the authors of the study had argued, it would appear that never-married college-educated women faced a decreasing likelihood of marriage as they grew older...

...Broad similarities aside, a number of details appear in both accounts...

...Faludigoes further...

...it is, apparently, preferable...

...As David Streitfeld reported in April of this year for the Washington Post: Faludi already has had recourse to a lawyer to protect her reputation...

...In the matter of underwear, for example, they spurned the G-string and thong and "just kept reaching for the all-cotton Jockeys...

...the Los Angeles Times, "the right book at exactly the right time...

...In her eagerness to show that women remain single by choice, Faludi had greatly over-represented the number of single women who are presently cohabitating...

...But the "most blatant and violent agents" of the backlash remained the anti-abortion activists...

...They are a bovine lot, these modem American women—reeling from their simple faith in Newsweek and Good Housekeeping, duped by everyone from the nefarious Hope Steadman on "thirtysomething" to nefarious Republicans in the White House, and all the while victimized by nefarious doctors and bosses—even their nefarious underwear...

...In addition to the workers in Dallas, the Journal piece also mentions workers in Denver, Oakland, San Francisco, and some other cities...

...Hollywood," for example, "hastened to the aid of the intimate-apparel industry, with garter belts in Bull Durham, push-up bras in Dangerous Liaisons, and merry-widow regalia galore in Working Girl...

...Sexual liberation itself seemed rife with unexpected problems: "date rape," "sexual harassment," venereal disease, rising illegitimacy...

...It lost a founding member and its leading contributor...

...The actual language of that study, according to Lovenheim: "4 percent [of American women aged 19 and over] were actually cohabitating, about one-fifth had cohabitated before marriage, and almost one-third had cohabitated at some time...

...In Washington itself, meanwhile, the backlash was busy "dismantling the federal apparatus for enforcing equal living wage...

...Similarly, there is no kind word in Backlash for any woman who chooses not to be promiscuous...

...On television, the hit show "thirtysomething" dis"scooped ice cream" and "sold jalopies" for a living...

...In another case, as she attempted to rebut fears of a "man shortage" for older career women, Faludi had pointed out that bachelors in fact outnumber never-married women...

...The people who spoke for the movement," she argued, "were never completely honest with women...

...At the wedding itself, "watching her trip down the aisle, the gray Harvard MBA suit shucked in favor of a white lace gown, I found myself unaccountably mournful, passed over...

...That happened when she saw the description of a forthcoming book, The Power and the Money: Inside the Wall Street Journal, a muckraking effort by Francis X. Dealy, Jr...

...All this freedom, it is clear, makes feminists very happy...

...Both pieces also mention the North Texas Food Bank...

...Here is the Journal: The following spring, the entire Dallas-area division was shut down, and nearly 9,000 more employees were dismissed—employees with an average length of service of 17 years...

...Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their acceptable roles—whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object...

...In a letter to the New York Times, Barbara Lovenheim, author of Beating the Marriage Odds: When You Are Smart, Single, and Over 35, was more blunt...

...They didn't tell the truth...

...The "birthing festival" on 1980s television, Faludi writes, was "benign enough, if a little monotonous...

...That Pulitzer came equipped with a story of its own...

...Backlash again...

...Faludi was profiled in countless magazines, including People...

...Even her most fervent admirers have felt compelled to demur on the subject of Faludi's use of numbers...

...When the book appeared in stores a year ago, Most of America was devouring the spectacle of Clarence Thomas's nomination hearings...

...He said that several other people had already called with the same message...

...Sylvia Ann Hewlett, revisionist author of A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America, sits at a "well-buffed" boardroom table and "live[s] . . . at a fashionable Manhattan address with her investment banker husband...

...Instead of uniting their prodigious numbers, they have splintered and turned their pain and frustration inward...

...As Quinn acknowledged, this latest round of obituaries was in fact just a postscript to the revisionism that had been going on among feminist leaders for years...

...choice" in the feminist sense...

...cern of feminists then and now, continues apace...

...As the author explained to Time, "In an odd way I was playing more by the boys' rules—saying, O.K., you men will listen to data and 'rational arguments' and statistics, and the body of evidence will convince you...

...She read the Newsweek piece en route to a friend's wedding "and landed at LaGuardia in a black mood...

...A staffer at the Reagan White House is mentioned only to enable the crack that she "was most celebrated for her sexual status as a twenty-nine-year old The American Spectator October 1992 35 virgin...

...Women had not been made miserable by feminism, but by a "powerful counter-assault on women's rights...

...In the gap between what the Harvard-Yale team had actually said and the sensationalism attached to those findings by the mass media, Faludi detected the makings of a "myth...

...Here is Adler's description of James White's death: . . . [A] year to the day after James White worked his final day for Safeway...

...The backlash also benefited from synergy...

...The result four years later was Backlash...

...Thus the backlash in action...

...With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, anti-feminists of all kinds moved from what was once thought to be the lunatic fringe into the very warp and woof of political power...

...Faludi even takes on the commonplace fact—which she attributes to "media reports"—that children in day care are exposed to more illnesses, and hence get sick more often than children at home...

...Both pieces paint unsympathetic portraits of Safeway's then-44-year-old chairman, Peter Magowan...

...Here is the Journal's: In 1988, [James White] marked the one-year anniversary of his last shift this way: First he told his wife he loved her, then he locked the bathroom door, loaded his .22 caliber hunting rifle and blew his brains out...

...He still feels there are a number of points of "finite commonality" between the Journal and the Observer pieces...

...Faludi makes much, for example, of five women who worked at an American Cyanamid plant in West Virginia...

...But did they really feel that bad...

...This strategy created another nearly In a move unusual in the world of publishing, Crown (Faludi's publisher) and Little, Brown (Steinem's) jointly promoted the two books together...

...Here we have Contradiction Two...

...Young and old women, nonideological undergraduparticularly career women, would ever marry at all...

...Another study is said to show that "single women reported the greatest satisfaction with their lives," still another, that "single women who worked . . . were in far better mental or physical shape than married women, with or without children, who stayed home...

...In part, the answer lies in the awesome size of the book's equipment...

...Then there are the collaborators...

...Many others suffer from "high marital panic," "depression," and increased "anxiety and guilt...

...Faludi marshals her evidence, but leaves out pieces that don't fit her puzzle...

...f feminists of the 1960s could have looked ahead to the present, what they spied would in some ways have resembled the promised land...

...It was not until Terry started Operation Rescue, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations started rolling in, that he was able to make a played "a complete pantheon of backlash women," "from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman...

...the "eyes" of the fetus in sneer quotes—a move that takes her beyond even the pro-abortion advocates of fetal tissue research, who at least know a spare part when they see one...

...In the hands of Newsweek and other popular magazines, the dry data provided by the study soon became grist for many a hair-raising speculation about whether older women, holds true: 'Marriage may be hazardous to women's health.'" "Study after study shows single women enjoying far better mental health than their married sisters...

...That force is the decade-old (sometimes age-old) cultural backlash against feminism...

...So heavy was the demand for personal appearances that she left her job as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal to join the lecture circuit...

...that won't appear until fall at the earliest but is already causing a bit of consternation at the paper...

...Time, Working Woman, and other friendly sources have politely said the same...