Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats—charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd. Beset by corruption and awash in weaponry boondoggles, military brass blamed the Defense Department’s troubles on feminists who were trying “to reduce combat effectiveness” and on “the feminization of the American military;” commanding officers advised the Pentagon that pregnancy among female officers—a condition affecting less than I percent of the total enlisted force at any one time—was the armed services’ “single biggest readiness problem.” Mayor Marion Barry blamed a “bitch” for his cocaine-laced fall from grace—and one of his more vocal defenders, writer Ishmael Reed, went further, recasting the whole episode later in a play as a feminist conspiracy. Joel Steinberg’s attorney claimed that the notorious batterer and child beater had been destroyed by “hysterical feminists.” And even errant Colonel Oliver North blamed his legal troubles in the Iran-Contra affair on “an arrogant army of ultramilitant feminists.”

  THE NATURE OF TODAY’S BACKLASH

  Once a society projects its fears onto a female form, it can try to cordon off those fears by controlling women—pushing them to conform to comfortingly nostalgic norms and shrinking them in the cultural imagination to a manageable size. The demand that women “return to femininity” is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful. The “feminine” woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

  In times of backlash, images of the restrained woman line the walls of the popular culture’s gallery. We see her silenced, infantilized, immobilized, or, the ultimate restraining order, killed. She is a frozen home-bound figure, a bedridden patient, an anonymous still body. She is “the Quiet Woman,” the name on an ’80s-vintage wine label that depicted a decapitated woman. She is the comatose woman on display in perfume ads for Opium and many other ’80s scents. She is Laura Palmer, the dead girl of “Twin Peaks,” whom Esquire picked for the cover of its “Women We Love” issue. While there have been a few cases—Murphy Brown on TV, or, to some degree, Madonna in music—where a female figure who is loud and self-determined has successfully challenged the popular consensus, they are the exceptions. More commonly, outspoken women on screen and stage have been hushed or, in a case like Roseanne Barr’s, publicly shamed—and applause reserved for their more compliant and whispery sisters. In this past decade, the media, the movies, the fashion and beauty industries, have all honored most the demure and retiring child-woman—a neo-Victorian “lady” with a pallid visage, a birdlike creature who stays indoors, speaks in a chirpy small voice, and clips her wings in restrictive clothing. Her circumstances are, at least in mainstream culture, almost always portrayed as her “choice;” it is important not only that she wear rib-crushing garments but that she lace them up herself.

  The restrained woman of the current backlash distinguishes herself from her predecessors in earlier American backlashes by appearing to choose her condition twice—first as a woman and second as a feminist. Victorian culture peddled “femininity” as what “a true woman” wants; in the marketing strategy of contemporary culture, it’s what a “liberated” woman craves, too. Just as Reagan appropriated populism to sell a political program that favored the rich, politicians, and the mass media, and advertising adopted feminist rhetoric to market policies that hurt women or to peddle the same old sexist products or to conceal antifeminist views. Bush promised “empowerment” for poor women—as a substitute for the many social-service programs he was slashing. Even Playboy claimed to ally itself with female progress. Women have made such strides, the magazine’s spokeswoman assured the press, “there’s no longer a stigma attached to posing.”

  The ’80s culture stifled women’s political speech and then redirected self-expression to the shopping mall. The passive consumer was reissued as an ersatz feminist, exercising her “right” to buy products, making her own “choices” at the checkout counter. “You can have it all,” a Michelob ad promised a nubile woman in a bodysuit—but by “all,” the brewing company meant only a less-filling beer. Criticized for targeting young women in its ads, an indignant Philip Morris vice president claimed that such criticism was “sexist,” because it suggested that “adult women are not capable of making their own decisions about whether or not to smoke.” The feminist entreaty to follow one’s own instincts became a merchandising appeal to obey the call of the market—an appeal that diluted and degraded women’s quest for true self-determination. By returning women to a view of themselves as devoted shoppers, the consumption-obsessed decade succeeded in undercutting one of the guiding principles of feminism: that women must think for themselves. As Christopher Lasch (who would himself soon be lobbing his own verbal grenades at feminists) observed in The Culture of Narcissism, consumerism undermines women’s progress most perniciously when it “seems to side with women against male oppression.”

  The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, “You’ve come a long way, baby” and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. . . . It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.

  The contemporary counterassault on women’s rights contributes still another unique tactic to the old backlash strategy books: the pose of a “sophisticated” ironic distance from its own destructive ends. To the backlash’s list of faked emotions—pity for single women, worry over the fatigue level of career women, concern for the family—the current onslaught adds a sneering “hip” cynicism toward those who dare point out discrimination or anti-female messages. In the era’s entertainment and advertising, aimed at and designed by baby boomers, the self-conscious cast of characters constantly let us know that they know their presentation of women is retrograde and demeaning, but what of it? “Guess we’re reliving ‘Father Knows Best,’” television figures ironically chuckle to each other, as if women’s secondary status has become no more than a long-running inside joke. To make a fuss about sexual injustice is more than unfeminine; it is now uncool. Feminist anger, or any form of social outrage, is dismissed breezily—not because it lacks substance but because it lacks “style.”

  It is hard enough to expose antifeminist sentiments when they are dressed up in feminist clothes. But it is far tougher to confront a foe that professes not to care. Even the unmitigated furor of an antiabortion “soldier” may be preferable to the jaundiced eye of the sitcom spokesmen. Feminism is “so ’70s,” the pop culture’s ironists say, stifling a yawn. We’re “postfeminist” now, they assert, meaning not that women have arrived at equal justice and moved beyond it, but simply that they themselves are beyond even pretending to care. It is an affectlessness that may, finally, deal the most devastating blow to American women’s rights.

  PART TWO

  The Backlash in

  Popular Culture

  4

  The “Trends” of Antifeminism:

  The Media and the Backlash

  THE FIRST ACTION of the new women’s liberation movement to receive national front-page coverage was a protest of the Miss America pageant. Many feminist marches for jobs, pay equity, and coeducation had preceded it, but they didn’t attract anywhere near the media attention. The reason this event got so much ink: a few women tossed some padded brassieres in a trash can. No one actually burned a bra that day—as a journalist erroneously reported. In fact, there’s scant evidence of undergarment pyrotechnics at any women’s rights demonstration in the decade. (The only two such displays that came close were both organized by men, a disc jockey and an architect, who tried to get women to fling their bras into a barrel and the Chicag
o River as “media events.” Only three women cooperated in the river stunt—all models hired by the architect.) Yet, to read the press accounts of the time, the bonfires of feminism nearly cremated the lingerie industry.

  Mostly, editors at the nation’s reigning publications in the late ’60s and early ’70s preferred not to cover the women’s movement at all. The “grand press blitz,” as some feminists jokingly called the media’s coverage of the movement, lasted three months; by 1971, the press was already declaring this latest “fad” a “bore” or “dead.” All that “bra burning,” the media perversely said of its own created myth, had alienated middle-American women. And publications where editors were forced to recognize the women’s movement—they were under internal pressure as women on staff filed sex discriminations suits—often deployed reporters to discredit it. At Newsday, a male editor assigned reporter Marilyn Goldstein a story on the women’s movement with these instructions: “Get out there and find an authority who’ll say this is all a crock of shit.” At Newsweek, Lynn Young’s 1970 story on the women’s movement, the magazine’s first, was rewritten every week for two months, then killed. Finally, Newsweek commissioned a free-lancer for the job, the wife of a senior editor and a self-professed antifeminist. (This tactic backfired when she changed her mind after “my first interview” and embraced the movement.)

  By the mid-’70s, the media and advertisers had settled on a line that served to neutralize and commercialize feminism at the same time. Women, the mass media seemed to have decided, were now equal and no longer seeking new rights—just new lifestyles. Women wanted self-gratification, not self-determination—the sort of fulfillment best serviced at a shopping mall. Soon periodicals and, of course, their ad pages, were bristling with images of “liberated single girls” stocking up on designer swimsuits for their Club Med vacations, perky MBA “Superwomen” flashing credit cards at the slightest provocation. “She’s Free. She’s Career. She’s Confident,” a Tandem jewelry ad enthused, in an advertorial tribute to the gilded Tandem girl. Hanes issued its “latest liberating product”—a new variety of pantyhose—and hired a former NOW officer to peddle it. The subsequent fashion show, entitled “From Revolution to Revolution: The Undercover Story,” merited feature treatment in the New York Times. SUCCESS! was the stock headline on magazine articles about women’s status—as if all barriers to women’s opportunity had suddenly been swept aside. UP THE LADDER, FINALLY! Business Week proclaimed, in a 1975 special issue on “the Corporate Woman”—illustrated with a lone General Electric female vice president enthroned in her executive chair, her arms raised in triumph. “More women than ever are within striking distance of the top,” the magazine asserted—though, it admitted, it had “no hard facts” to substantiate that claim.

  The media’s pseudofeminist cheerleading stopped suddenly in the early ’80s—and the press soon struck up a dirge. Feminism is “dead,” the banner headlines announced, all over again. “The women’s movement is over,” began a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. In case readers missed that issue, the magazine soon ran a second obituary, in which Ivy League students recanted their support for the women’s movement and assured readers that they were “not feminists” because those were just women who “let themselves go physically” and had “no sense of style.”

  This time around, the media did more than order up a quiet burial for the feminist corpse. They went on a rampage, smashing their own commercial icons of “liberated” womanhood, tearing down the slick portraits that they themselves had mounted. Like graffiti artists, they defaced the two favorite poster girls of the ’70s press—spray-painting a downturned mouth and shriveled ovaries on the Single Girl, and adding a wrinkled brow and ulcerated stomach to the Superwoman. These new images were, of course, no more realistic than the last decade’s output. But their effect on live women would be quite real and damaging.

  • • •

  THE PRESS first introduced the backlash to a national audience—and made it palatable. Journalism replaced the “pro-family” diatribes of fundamentalist preachers with sympathetic and even progressive-sounding rhetoric. It cosmeticized the scowling face of antifeminism while blackening the feminist eye. In the process, it popularized the backlash beyond the New Right’s wildest dreams.

  The press didn’t set out with this, or any other, intention; like any large institution, its movements aren’t premeditated or programmatic, just grossly susceptible to the prevailing political currents. Even so, the press, carried by tides it rarely fathomed, acted as a force that swept the general public, powerfully shaping the way people would think and talk about the feminist legacy and the ailments it supposedly inflicted on women. It coined the terms that everyone used: “the man shortage,” “the biological clock,” “the mommy track” and “postfeminism.” Most important, the press was the first to set forth and solve for a mainstream audience the paradox in women’s lives, the paradox that would become so central to the backlash: women have achieved so much yet feel so dissatisfied; it must be feminism’s achievements, not society’s resistance to these partial achievements, that is causing women all this pain. In the ’70s, the press had held up its own glossy picture of a successful woman and said, “See, she’s happy. That must be because she’s liberated.” Now, under the reverse logic of the backlash, the press airbrushed a frown into its picture of the successful woman and announced, “See, she’s miserable. That must be because women are too liberated.”

  “What has happened to American women?” ABC asked with much consternation in its 1986 special report. The show’s host Peter Jennings promptly answered, “The gains for women sometimes come at a formidable cost to them.” Newsweek raised the same question in its 1986 story on the “new problem with no name.” And it offered the same diagnosis: “The emotional fallout of feminism” was damaging women; an “emphasis on equality” had robbed them of their romantic and maternal rights and forced them to make “sacrifices.” The magazine advised:

  “‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. So it would seem to many of the women who looked forward to ‘having it all.’” (This happens to be the same verdict Newsweek reached when it last investigated female discontent—at the height of the feminine-mystique backlash. “American women’s unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women’s rights,” the magazine reported then.)

  The press might have looked for the source of women’s unhappiness in other places. It could have investigated and exposed the buried roots of the backlash in the New Right and a misogynistic White House, in a chilly business community and intransigent social and religious institutions. But the press chose to peddle the backlash rather than probe it.

  The media’s role as backlash collaborator and publicist is a familiar one in American history. The first article sneering at a “Superwoman” appeared not in the 1980s press but in an American newspaper headline at the turn of the century. Feminists, according to the late Victorian press, were “a herd of hysterical and irrational she-revolutionaries,” “fussy, interfering, faddists, fanatics,” “shrieking cockatoos,” and “un-pardonably ridiculous.” Feminists had laid waste to the American female population; any sign of female distress was surely another “fatal symptom” of the feminist disease, the periodicals reported. “Why Are We Women Not Happy?” the male-edited Ladies’ Home Journal asked in 1901—and answered that the women’s rights movement was debilitating its beneficiaries.

  As American studies scholar Cynthia Kinnard observed in her bibliography of American antifeminist literature, journalistic broadsides against women’s rights “grew in intensity during the late 19th century and reached regular peaks with each new suffrage campaign.” The arguments were always the same: equal education would make women spinsters, equal employment would make women sterile, equal rights would make women bad mothers. With each new historical cycle, the threats were simply updated and sanitized, and new “experts” enlisted. The Victorian periodical press turn
ed to clergymen to support its brief against feminism; in the ’80s, the press relied on therapists.

  The 1986 Newsweek backlash article, “Feminism’s Identity Crisis,” quoted many experts on women’s condition—sociologists, political scientists, psychologists—but none of the many women supposedly suffering from this crisis. The closest the magazine came was two drawings of a mythical feminist victim: a dour executive with cropped hair is pictured first at her desk, grimly pondering an empty family-picture frame, and then at home, clutching a clock and studying the hands—poised at five minutes to midnight.