Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  As Christopher Lasch . . .: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) pp. 139-40.

  CHAPTER FOUR. THE “TRENDS” OF ANTIFEMINISM

  The first action of the . . .: Klein, Gender Politics, pp. 23–24.

  (The only two such. . .): Joanna Foley Martin, “Confessions of a Non-Bra-Burner,” Chicago Journalism Review, July 1971, 4:11.

  The “grand press blitz” Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay, 1975) p. 148; Edith Hoshino Altbach, Women in America (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1974) pp. 157–58. For an example of the media using the “bra-burning” myth to invalidate the women’s movement, see Judy Klemesrud, “In Small Town USA, Women’s Liberation Is Either a Joke or a Bore,” New York Times, March 22, 1972, p. 54.

  At Newsday, a male . . .: Sandie North, “Reporting the Movement,” The Atlantic, March 1970, p. 105.

  At Newsweek, Lynn . . .: Ibid.

  (This tactic backfired. . .): “Women in Revolt,” Newsweek, March 23, 1970, p. 78. Helen Dudar, the Newsweek editor’s wife, confessed that after having “spent years rejecting feminists without bothering to look too closely at their charges,” she had become a convert and wrote that she now felt a “sense of pride and kinship with all those women who have been asking all the hard questions. I thank them and so, I think, will a lot of other women.”

  Hanes issued its . . .: Veronica Geng, “Requiem for the Women’s Movement,” Harper’s, Nov. 1976, p. 49.

  UP THE LADDER“Up the Ladder, Finally,” Business Week, Nov. 24, 1975, p. 58.

  Feminism is “dead” . . .: See, for example, Sally Ogle Davis, “Is Feminism Dead?” Los Angeles, Feb. 1989, p. 114.

  “The women’s movement is over . . .”: Betty Friedan, “Feminism’s Next Step,” The New York Times Magazine, July 5, 1981, p. 14.

  In case readers . . .: Susan Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation,” The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 1982, p. 29.

  “What has happened to . . .”: “After the Sexual Revolution,” ABC News Closeup, July 30, 1986.

  Newsweek raised . . .: Eloise Salholz, “Feminism’s Identity Crisis,” Newsweek, March 31, 1986, p. 58.

  (This happens to be. . .): Newsweek, March 7, 1960, cited in Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 19–20.

  The first article sneering . . .: “Superwoman,” Independent, Feb. 21, 1907, cited in Kinnard, Antifeminism, p. 214.

  Feminists, according to the . . .: Ibid., pp. 55–61, xiii–ix.

  And repetition . . .: In 1982, fifty corporations controlled over half the media business; by the end of 1987, the number was down to twenty-six. See Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly(Boston: Beacon Press, 1990) pp. xix, 3–4; Media Report to Women, Sept. 1987, p. 4.

  Fear was also driving . . .: After 1985, profit margins fell steadily at papers owned by publicly traded communications companies. Women, who make up the majority of newspaper readers and network news viewers, were turning to specialty publications and cable news programs in mass numbers, taking mass advertising dollars with them. See Alex S. Jones, “Rethinking Newspapers,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 1991, III, p. 1; “Marketing Newspapers to Women,” Women Scope Surveys of Women, 2, no. 7 (April 1989): 1–2.

  Anxiety-ridden . . .: In a typical media strategy of the decade, Knight-Ridder Newspapers launched a “customer-obsession” campaign to give readers what management imagined they wanted, rather than what was simply news.

  “News organizations are . . .”: Bill Kovach, “Too Much Opinion, at the Expense of Fact,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1989, p. A31.

  NBC, for instance . . .: “Bad Girls,” NBC News, August 30, 1989.

  “The media are having . . .”: “The Next Trend: Here Comes the Bribe,”

  Advertising Age, June 16, 1986, p. 40.

  The “marriage panic” . . .: “Women’s Views Survey: Women’s Changing Hopes, Fears, Loves,” Glamour, Jan. 1988, p. 142.

  In 1988, this “trend” . . .: Mark Clements Research, Women’s Views Survey, 1988.

  Again, in 1986 . . .: Ibid.

  But it wasn’t until . . .: Amy Saltzman, “Trouble at the Top,” U.S. News & World Report, June 17, 1991, p. 40.

  THE UNDECLARED WAR Carol Pogash, “The Undeclared War,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 5, 1989, p. E1.

  Child magazine offered . . .: Sue Woodman, “The Mommy Wars,” Child, Sept.-Oct. 1989, p. 139; Barbara J. Berg, “Women at Odds,” Savvy, Dec. 1985, p. 24.

  IS HE SEPARABLE?” . . .: Kate White, “Is He Separable?” Newsday, May 15, 1988, p. 25.

  The ABC report . . .: Transcript, “After the Sexual Revolution.”

  “Many Young Women Now Say . . .”: Dena Kleiman, “Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family Over Career,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1980, p. 1. See also “I’m Sick of Work: The Back to the Home Movement,” Ladies’ Home Journal, cover story, Sept. 1984.

  Brain Reserve, which had this . . .: “The Brain Reserve Mission Statement,” press packet, and promotional literature, 1988; “Her Ideas on Tomorrow Pop Up Today,” USA Today, Oct. 5, 1987, p. 1; Tim Golden, “In, Out and Over: Looking Back at the 90’s,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 1990, p. B1.

  “People is my bible . . .”: Gary Hanauer, “Faith Popcorn: Kernels of Truth,” American Way, July 1, 1987.

  “Even if people . . .”: Personal interview with Faith Popcorn, Nov. 1989. 97 The word “just popped . . .”: Ibid.

  “We’re becoming a nation of nesters . . .”: Hanauer, “Faith Popcorn.”

  As one enthusiastic . . .: “Putting Faith in Trends,” Newsweek, June 15, 1987, pp. 46-47.

  “Is Faith Popcorn the ur . . .”: “Eager,” New Yorker, July 7, 1985, p. 22.

  Faith Popcorn is “one of the most . . .”: “Putting Faith,” p. 46.

  Fewer women will work . . .”: Elizabeth Mehren, “Life Style in the ’90s, According to Popcorn,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1987, p. 1.

  “Little in-home wombs . . .”: Ibid.

  Women steadily increased . . .: The American Woman 1990–91, Table 14, p. 376. 98 Opinion polls didn’t support . . .: Harris, Inside America, pp. 101, 96.

  I’m hooked on my work . . .”: Personal interview with Faith Popcorn. (Subsequent quotes are from personal interviews with Popcorn unless otherwise noted.)

  In the press, she cited . . .: See, for example, William E. Geist, “One Step Ahead of Us: Trend Expert’s View,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1986, p. B4.

  Popcorn borrowed . . .: Alex Taylor III, “Why Women Are Bailing Out,” Fortune, August 18, 1986, p. 16.

  The article, about . . .: USA Today’s story was, in fact, a report on the Fortune “findings”: “1 in 3 Management Women Drop Out,” USA Today, July 31, 1986, p. 1.

  A year later at Stanford . . .: Personal interviews with a group of female Stanford MBA students, Summer 1988.

  The year after Fortune . . .: Laurie Baum, “For Women, the Bloom Might Be Off the MBA,” Business Week, March 14, 1988, p. 30.

  Witham is “happier . . .”: Taylor, “Bailing Out,” pp. 16–23.

  “He had this anecdotal evidence . . .”: Personal interview with Alex Taylor III, 1988.

  I told him . . .”: Personal interview with Mary Anne Devanna, 1988.

  The evidence is . . .”: Personal interview with Taylor, 1988. (Subsequent quotes are from personal interview with Taylor unless otherwise noted.)

  “A woman who wants marriage . . .”: Stratford P. Sherman, “The Party May Be Ending,” Fortune, Nov. 24, 1986, p. 29.

  In fact, in 1987, . . .: F. S. Chapman, “Executive Guilt: Who’s Taking Care of the Children?” Fortune, Feb. 16, 1987. A later review of the alumni records at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business for the class of ’76 (the same class that Taylor’s story focused on) found no significant female defection from the corporate world and no differences in the proportion of men and women leaving to st
art their own businesses. See Mary Anne Devanna, “Women in Management: Progress and Promise,” Human Resource Management, 26, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 469.

  The national pollsters were . . .: The 1986 Virginia Slims Opinion Poll; Walsh, “What Women Want,” p. 60. A survey conducted jointly by Working Woman and Success magazines also found that men were more concerned about family life than women and less concerned about career success than women. See Carol Sonenklar, “Women and Their Magazines,” American Demographics, June 1986, p. 44.

  In fact, a 1989 survey . . .: Margaret King, “An Alumni Survey Dispels Some Popular Myths About MBA Graduates,” Stanford Business School Magazine, March 1989, p. 23.

  Finally Fortune . . .: Julie Connelly, “The CEO’s Second Wife,” Fortune, Aug. 28, 1989, p. 52.

  Esquire, a periodical . . .: “The Secret Life of the American Wife,” Special Issue, Esquire, June 1990.

  “A growing number of professional . . .”: Barbara Kantrowitz, “Moms Move To Part-time Careers,” Newsweek, Aug. 15, 1988, p. 64. In fact, the polls were finding that more women wanted to work full-time than stay home, and the proportion of women who regarded a full-time job outside the home as “an integral part” of their ideal lifestyle had been sharply increasing since 1975. See The Gallup Poll, 1982, p. 186.

  More professional career . . .: Barbara Basler, “Putting a Career on Hold,” The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 7, 1986, p. 152.

  “More and more women . . .”: Carol Cox Smith, “Thanks But No Thanks,” Savvy, March 1988, p. 22.

  In 1986, just . . .: Barbara Kantrowitz, “America’s Mothers—Making It Work: How Women Balance the Demands of Jobs and Children,” Newsweek, March 31, 1986, p. 46.

  Colleen Murphy . . .: Ibid.

  “Today the myth . . .”: Ibid., p. 47.

  If Newsweek was vague . . .: Ibid., p. 51.

  “Fathers are doing . . .”: Ibid., pp. 48, 52.

  The media jumped when . . .: Felice N. Schwartz, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” Harvard Business Review, Jan.-Feb. 1989, pp. 65-76.

  The “mommy-tracking” trend . . .: The New York Times, not Schwartz, came up with the phrase. The interview count comes from a personal interview with Schwartz’s media relations director, Vivian Todini, Nov. 1989.

  “Across the country . . .”: Elizabeth Ehrlich, “The Mommy Track,” Business Week, March 20, 1989, p. 126. 104 In fact, at a conference . . .: Ellen Hopkins, “Who Is Felice Schwartz?” Working Woman, Oct. 1990, p. 116.

  Women with this . . .: The Newsweek Research Report on Women Who Work: A National Survey(Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, 1984) p. 32.

  And a year after . . .: The 1990 Virginia Slims Opinion Poll, pp. 79-81.

  That company, Schwartz reveals . . .: Personal interview with Felice Schwartz, Nov. 1989. Apparently Schwartz was no model employer in this regard either. While Schwartz claimed to be “totally flexible about pregnancy,” a Catalyst employee who had had a complicated and difficult pregnancy told Working Woman that when she came back to work, she discovered that her job was no longer available. Schwartz’s explanation to Working Woman’s reporter: The woman “absolutely refused to keep me posted on whether she was coming in or not,” she said, and that was “a ridiculous imposition on Catalyst.” See Hopkins, “Felice Schwartz,” p. 148.

  Only in 1989 did Mobil . . .: Personal interview with Derek Harvey, June 1991.

  “I was not writing . . .”: Personal interview with Felice Schwartz.

  Federal statistics that . . .: Data from division of Health Interview Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics.

  In a turnabout . . .: Felice N. Schwartz, “HBR In Retrospect,” pamphlet published by Catalyst, June 1989.

  “She speaks with a tone . . .”: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, “Blowing the Whistle on the ‘Mommy Track,’” Ms., July-Aug. 1989, p. 56.

  Later that spring . . .: Alan M. Webber, “Is the American Way of Life Over?” New York Times, April 9, 1989, p. 25.

  The New Traditionalist Woman wasn’t . . .: The same year, the New York Times began running “I Read It My Way” ads, in which such women as “Lesley Cooke—Housewife/Mother” recounted the joys of reading the Times’s interior decorating and parenting columns while nestled in her 1920s Colonial home. Country Living issued a similarly pointed ad campaign entitled “Traditions Renew.”

  The New York Times even . . .: Patricia Leigh Brown, “The First Lady-Elect: What She Is and Isn’t,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 1988, p. 22. 106 The accompanying . . .: “The New Traditionalist,” Good Housekeeping ad tear sheets, 1988, 1989.

  As Good Housekeeping publisher . . .: Carla Marinucci, “The New Woman,” San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 4, 1988, p. D1.

  In the ’80s, the circulation . . .: “Seven Sisters Magazines Continue to Lose Readers to Newcomers,” Media Report to Women, Sept.-Oct. 1989, p. 3; Patrick Reilly, “Service Magazines Adapt to Market,” Special Report: Marketing to Women, Advertising Age, March 7, 1988, p. S6.

  Well-established brands . . .”: Marinucci, “The New Woman,” p. D4.

  The magazine’s circulation climbed . . .: Personal interviews with Working Woman managers, 1989; Working Woman “Rate Card,” 1989; Paul Richter, “New Woman Magazines Catch Advertisers’ Eye Amid Industry Slump,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1986, Business section, p. 4.

  After all, even . . .: Personal interviews with Good Housekeeping circulation staff, 1989.

  he problem, . . .”: Personal interview with Malcolm MacDougall, Oct. 1989. (Subsequent quotes are from personal interview with MacDougall unless otherwise noted.)

  “I cheerfully disavow . . .”: Personal interview with Susan Hayward, 1989.

  “In all respects, young . . .”: Philip H. Dougherty, “Women’s Self Esteem Up,” New York Times, May 15, 1974, p. 71.

  Within just . . .”: “Games Singles Play,” Newsweek, July 16, 1973, p. 52.

  The stereotype got so bad . . .: Susan Jacoby, “49 Million Singles Can’t All Be Right,” The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 17, 1974, p. 12.

  “Dropout Wives . . .”: Enid Nemy, “Dropout Wives—Their Number Is Growing,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1973, p. 44.

  According to Newsweek . . .: “Games Singles Play,” p. 52.

  Newsweek was now . . .: Eloise Salholz, “The Marriage Crunch: If You’re a Single Woman, Here Are Your Chances of Getting Married,” Newsweek, p. 54; Jane Gross, “Single Women: Coping With a Void,” New York Times, April 28, 1987, p. 1.

  “TOO LATE FOR . . .”: Salholz, “Marriage Crunch,” p. 54.

  On the front page . . .: Gross, “Single Women,” p. 1.

  New York magazine’s . . .: Patricia Morrisroe, “Born Too Late? Expect Too Much? You May Be Forever Single,” New York, Aug. 20, 1984, p. 24.

  Loveless, Manless . . .”: “Loveless, Manless: The High Cost of Independence,” Chatelaine, Sept. 1984, p. 60.

  “Feminism became a new form . . .”: Tricia Crane, “Are You Turning Men Off? Desperate and Demanding,” Harper’s Bazaar, Sept. 1987, p. 300.

  New York’s story . . .: Morrisroe, “Born Too Late?” p. 30.

  ABC’s 1986 special . . .: ABC News, “After the Sexual Revolution.” 110 Between 1980 and 1982 . . .: Trimberger, “Single Women and Feminism in the 1980s.”

  The headlines spoke . . .: “The Sad Plight of Single Women,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 30, 1980; Kiki Olson, “Sex and the Terminally Single Woman (There Just Aren’t Any Good Men Around),” Philadelphia magazine, April 1984, p. 122.

  McCall’s described . . .: Peter Filichia, “The Lois Lane Syndrome: Waiting for Superman,” McCall’s, Aug. 1985, p. 55.

  In the late Victorian . . .: Kinnard, Antifeminism, p. 202.

  May not some . . .”: Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 255.

  Why Is Single Life . . .”: “Why Is Single Life Becoming More General?” The Nation, March 5, 1868, pp. 190–91.

  The ratio was so bad . . .: “Wives at Discount,” Harper’s Bazaar, Jan
. 31, 1874, p. 74.

  By the mid-1980s . . .: Billie Samkoff, “How to Attract Men Like Crazy,” Cosmopolitan, Feb. 1989, p. 168.

  “The traumatic news . . .”: Salholz, “Marriage Crunch,” p. 25. 112 A few months later . . .: David Gates, “Second Opinion,” Update, Newsweek, Oct. 13, 1986, p. 10.

  “We all knew . . .”: Personal interview with Eloise Salholz, July 1986.

  The New York Times William R. Greer, “The Changing Women’s Marriage Market,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 1986, p. 48.

  But when it came time . . .: AP, “More Women Postponing Marriage,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 1986, p. A22.

  And almost a year after . . .: Gross, “Single Women,” p. 1.

  “It was untimely . . .”: Personal interview with Jane Gross, 1988.

  The article dealt with . . .: Gross, “Single Women,” p. 1.

  The Newsweek story . . .: Salholz, “Marriage Crunch,” p. 55.

  “Do you know that . . .”: Promotional letter from Dell Publishing Co., from Carol Tavoularis, Dell publicist, Dec. 5, 1986.

  A former Newsweek bureau . . .: Personal interview, Oct. 1986.

  Newsweek’s preachers . . .: Salholz, “Marriage Crunch,” pp. 61, 57.

  For many economically . . .”: Ibid., pp. 61, 55.

  Susan Cohen wishes . . .”: Ibid., p. 57.

  “CBS Morning News” devoted . . .: “CBS Morning News,” “What Do Single Women Want,” Nov. 2-6, 1987.

  ABC took television . . .: ABC News, “After the Sexual Revolution.”

  Apparently still not . . .: ABC, “Good Morning America,” “Single in America,” May 4-7, 1987.

  There wasn’t any time . . .”: Personal interview with Richard Threlkeld, 1988.

  “wHY WED?” . . .: Trip Gabriel, “Why Wed?: The Ambivalent American Bachelor,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 15, 1987, p. 24.

  Having whipped . . .: Brenda Lane Richardson, “Dreaming Someone Else’s Dreams,” The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 28, 1990, p. 14.

  In what amounted to . . .: See, for example, Barbara Kantrowitz, “The New Mating Games,” Newsweek, June 2, 1986, p. 58; James Hirsch, “Modern Matchmaking: Money’s Allure in Marketing Mates and Marriage,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 1988, p. B4; Ruthe Stein, “New Strategies for Singles,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1988, p. B1.