Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  Bush hoped especially . . .: Newsweek turned the “wimp” issue into a cover story: “Fighting the Wimp Factor,” Newsweek, Oct. 19, 1987, p. 28.

  I get furious . . .”: “Flash! Bush Is Angry (Or Maybe He Isn’t),” “Campaign Notes,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1988, p. B17.

  “Maybe I’ll turn . . .”: George Will, “The Pastel President,” Newsweek, April 24, 1989, p. 86.

  “We’re not running . . .”: E. J. Dionne, Jr., “Why Bush Faces a Problem Winning Women’s Support,” New York Times, June 19, 1988, p. A1. 285 When Bush summoned . . .: Peggy Simpson, “Games Republicans Play,” Ms., July 1988, p. 42.

  His youthful blond . . .: Ellen Goodman, “Envelope, Please, for Equal Rights Winners,” Boston Globe, Aug. 23, 1988, p. A19.

  (Indeed, the 1988 Los. . .): “The People, the Press, and Politics,” Los Angeles Times Mirror Survey, 1988.

  Paul Kirk, chairman . . .: “Women’s Groups Meet with Kirk,” Eleanor Smeal Report, 5, no. 10 (Dec. 23, 1987): 1; Elizabeth Drew, “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, Aug. 15, 1988, p. 65.

  Meanwhile, the Democratic Leadership . . .: Toner, “Democrats and Women,” p. 10.

  “The major accomplishment . . .”: “Gender Gap,” p. 1.

  But the exit polls . . .: “Election ’88: What the Voters Said,” Public Opinion, Jan.—Feb. 1989, p. 26.

  Donna Brazile, the one . . .: George E. Curry, “A Season in Hell,” Ms., Oct. 1989, p. 59.

  When a few women . . .: Mary Jo Neuberger, “Nice Girls Don’t: Women’s Caucus Shuns Conflict in Atlanta,” The Village Voice, Aug. 2, 1988, p. 24.

  When feminist writer . . .: Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Heart of the Matter,” Ms., May 1988, p. 20.

  In a final press mailing . . .: “America’s Families Need Our Votes,” Women’s Vote Project and National Women’s Political Caucus, Oct. 28, 1988.

  (“I do hope we. . .”): Peggy Simpson, “Child Care: All Talk, No Action,” Ms., Dec. 1988, p. 81.

  Not only was this . . .: And when the U.S. Senate finally passed a watered-down version of the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1990, a bill that only covered 5 percent of all U.S. employers, President Bush promptly vetoed it.

  The day after . . .: The Washington Post’s special section ran on Nov. 9, 1988, pp. 22-43.

  In the week after . . .: Personal review of the New York Times, Nov. 9-16, 1988.

  In January 1989, days after . . .: Nadine Brozan, “Women Meet, Ideology in Back Row,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 1989, p. A10.

  Not NOW . . .”: Jodie T. Allen, “Not NOW—It’s Time for Consensus, Not Conflict,” Washington Post, July 30, 1989, p. C1.

  “NOW Puts Her . . .”: “With Stale Strategies, NOW Puts Her Worst Foot Forward,” Insight, Oct. 9, 1989, p. 16; David S. Broder, “NOW’s Fantasy,” Washington Post, July 30, 1989, p. 7; Judy Mann, “NOW’s Flirtation With Suicide,” Washington Post, July 26, 1989, p. B3.

  Newsweek warned . . .: Eleanor Clift, “Taking Issue with NOW,” Newsweek, Aug. 14, 1989, p. 21.

  The leaders, in fact, had . . .: Eleanor Smeal, “Why I Support a New Party,” Ms., Jan.-Feb. 1991, p. 72.

  The delegates dominating . . .: Personal interviews with convention organizers, 1989; personal interview with Eleanor Smeal, former NOW president and founder of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, 1989.

  I mean, normally . . .”: Personal interview with Eleanor Smeal, 1989.

  Kate Michelman . . .: Allen, “Not NOW,” p. 1; Dan Balz, “NOW’s Talk of New Party Attacked as Self-Defeating,” Washington Post, July 28, 1989; Peggy Simpson, “Reconcilable Differences,” Ms., Oct. 1989, p. 70.

  Is it all over for . . .”: NBC News, Democratic National Convention coverage, July 18, 1988.

  A 1989 Yankelovich . . .: The study was conducted for Time—though, strangely, the magazine never shared these findings with its readers. The 1987 Gallup poll conducted for Times-Mirror came up with similar findings: a majority of women identified themselves as feminists or women’s rights supporters, while only a minority called themselves Republicans, Democrats, or even liberals.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE BACKLASH BRAIN TRUST

  These middlemen and women did not ally . . .: What ideology these experts did subscribe to was often difficult to determine. Political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain is one such bewildering example—a seemingly staunch conservative scholar who called herself a feminist and wrote for such liberal and leftist journals as The Progressive and Dissent. She produced a steady stream of antifeminist articles, essays, and books, in which she accused the women’s movement of decimating the family. See Judith Stacey, “The New Conservative Feminism,” Feminist Studies, 9, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 559. For a discussion of attacks on the women’s movement from the left, see Arlie Hochschild, “Is the Left Sick of Feminism?” Mother Jones, June 1983, p. 56.

  By the early ’90s, Reaganite . . .: Lasch proposed such a ban both in a forum sponsored by Harper’s and in a speech before a marriage and family therapists’ convention in 1991. See “Who Owes What to Whom: Drafting a Constitutional Bill of Duties,” Harper’s, Feb. 1991, p. 48.

  When the United States . . .:George Gilder, Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974) pp. 106–7.

  “In their view . . .”: Ibid., p. 107.

  Not only was I . . .”: Ibid.

  A good run . . .”: Ibid.

  As Gilder was puffing . . .: Ibid., p. 108.

  It hadn’t actually . . .: Ibid., p. 110.

  “As I stood . . .”: Ibid.

  The male houseguests wouldn’t . . .: Ibid., pp. 110–14.

  The following year . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989. (Subsequent Gilder quotes are from interview unless otherwise noted.)

  As he recalls later . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989; Gilder, Naked Nomads, p. vii.

  After he wrote . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989.

  In each of them . . .: George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1986) pp. 108, 139.

  Feminists are turning . . .: Ibid., pp. 149, 108.

  “Let us dream . . .”: George Gilder, “The Princess’s Problem (All the Good Ones Are Married, Sort Of),” National Review, Feb. 28, 1986, p. 28. (The essay is also in Men and Marriage.)

  “What does Liberty ask” . . .: Ibid., p. 28.

  Simon won’t leave . . .: Ibid., p. 30.

  Women “have to bet . . .”: Ibid., p. 29.

  He was past thirty . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989; Gilder, Naked Nomads, pp. 5, 22.

  In Naked Nomads, single George . . .: Ibid., pp. 161–62.

  “[S]ingle men are six times . . .”: Ibid., p. 4.

  “The single man is . . .”: Ibid., p. 141.

  Unlike some other backlash . . .: Ibid., pp. 14–21, 27–28, 65–66, 74, 152.

  As in the case of . . .”: Ibid., p. 65.

  “Although they may make . . .”: Ibid., pp. 6–7, 10.

  “[V]irile masculinity,” he writes . . .: Ibid., pp. 129, 158.

  Gilder’s version of . . .: Ibid., p. 75.

  “[T]he older a man . . .”: Ibid., p. 27.

  “[T]he peripheral men . . .”: Ibid., p. 75.

  They will “rape and . . .”: Gilder, Men and Marriage, p. 39.

  The sales figures declined . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989.

  Checking his liberal Republican . . .: Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, pp. 203–4.

  Reagan’s men acted . . .: Ibid., pp. 204, 208, 210.

  The man has the gradually . . .”: George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981) p. 115.

  Nini was, as he . . .: Gilder, Men and Marriage, pp. xiii, xi.

  When they met . . .: Personal interview with George Gilder, 1989.

  “The latest enemy . . .”: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) pp. 65-66, 74-76, 79, 80, 101-101.

>   The feminist project . . .”: Ibid., pp. 101-101, 104-105, 124.

  In The True and Only Heaven . . .: Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991) pp. 33-34.

  In Tenured Radicals . . .: Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990) pp. xi, xvii, 15.

  By 1991 in California . . .: Stephen Schwartz, “Challenge to Campus Policies,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 5, 1991, p. A4.

  A few years after . . .: Personal interview with Allan Bloom, 1989. (Subsequent Bloom quotes are from interview unless otherwise noted.)

  Women, feminist or otherwise . . .: Deborah L. Rhode, “Perspectives on Professional Women,” Stanford Law Review, 40, no. 5 (May 1988): 1175, 1179-80. A 1982-83 survey by the American Association of University Professionals of 2,500 higher-education institutions found that despite a decade of affirmative action, “women have achieved very little.” The association’s report found the least progress at the most elite colleges: at Harvard University, women represented only 4.2 percent of full professors; at Yale, 3.9 percent; at Princeton, 3.2 percent; at Stanford, 2.6 percent. This wasn’t because of a shortage of women: about one-third of job-seeking Ph.D. holders were women.

  Nor are feminist professorships . . .: Mariam Chamberlain, “The Emergence and Growth of Women’s Studies Programs,” The American Woman: 1990–91, p. 318.

  As for dominance . . .: Ellen Carol DuBois, Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S. Robinson, Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1987) pp. 165, 168-69.

  If scholars like . . .: Anne Matthews, “Deciphering Victorian Underwear and Other Seminars,” The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 10, 1991, p. 42.

  “The guns at Cornell . . .”: Bloom, American Mind, p. 347.

  “I was lost . . .”: James Atlas, “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 1988, p. 25.

  Two years into his . . .: Ibid.

  He writes wistfully of . . .: Bloom, American Mind, p. 126.

  He is upset about . . .: Ibid., pp. 120, 16.

  “Women, it is said . . .”: Allan Bloom, “Liberty, Equality, Sexuality,” Commentary, April 1987, p. 24.

  Feminists are against pornography . . .: Bloom, American Mind, p. 103.

  A bachelor himself . . .: Ibid., p. 127.

  He writes that women are . . .: Ibid., p. 124.

  It is the standard paradoxical backlash . . .: Ibid., pp. 107, 131.

  And here is where . . .”: Ibid., pp. 12, 129.

  When he surveys . . .: Ibid., pp. 137, 114. 307 Modern men are . . .: Ibid., p. 124.

  “[A] man without . . .”: Ibid., p. 84. 307 The closest he comes . . .: Ibid., p. 125.

  In his 1988 book . . .: Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987) pp. 3, ix.

  “The Hier-Crowley . . .”: Ibid., p. 83.

  “!Kung juvenile . . .”: Ibid., p. 90.

  “If you want to interview . . .”: Personal interview with Margarita Levin, 1988. (Subsequent quotes are from this interview unless otherwise specified.)

  Despite his position in . . .: Levin, Feminism and Freedom, p. 270.

  “My wife does . . .”: Personal interview with Michael Levin, 1988. (Subsequent quotes are from this interview unless otherwise specified.) 310 In a 1988 article . . .: Margarita Levin, “Caring New World: Feminism and Science,” The American Scholar, Winter 1988, p. 101.

  If women reached . . .: In fact, by the late ’80s, it just wasn’t true that math and science faculties had only a “very few” prospective women to choose from. By 1988, women were earning 40 percent of math masters’ degrees and 49 percent of life science masters’ degrees. (Data from U.S. Department of Education.) And longitudinal studies of boys’ and girls’ math scores found that gender differences were disappearing, too. See Keay Davidson, “Nature vs. Nurture,” San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, Image magazine, Jan. 20, 1991, p. 1–11.

  She found a welcoming . . .: Margarita Levin, “Babes in Libland,” Newsweek, Dec. 28, 1981, p. 8.

  Men are hurting more . . .”: Personal interview with Warren Farrell, 1988. (Subsequent quotes and observations are from this interview unless otherwise specified.)

  Feminism may have . . .: Warren Farrell, Why Men Are the Way They Are (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986) p. xxi.

  “I had seen her . . .”: Ibid., p. xv.

  “Soon after my . . .”: Ibid.

  I was surprised . . .”: Ibid., pp. xv–xvi.

  He organized . . .: “Getting Men to Hold Hands—On the Road to Liberation,” People, Jan. 20, 1975, p. 48.

  “A boy who is not . . .”: Warren T. Farrell, “The Human Lib Movement I,” New York Times, June 17, 1971, p. 41.

  “The truth is that . . .”: Michael Korda, Male Chauvinism (New York: Random House, 1973) p. 160; Marc Feigen Fasteau, The Male Macbine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) pp. 5, 11.

  A four-page . . .: Farrell, “Getting Men to Hold Hands,” p. 48. As Farrell himself . . .: Farrell, “Human Lib Movement.”

  Independent women were . . .: Farrell, Why Men Are, p. 355.

  It is a massive . . .: Robert Bly, “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) p. 3.

  All of you men . . .”: Personal observation at Black Oak Books, 1988.

  Since we are . . .”: Jill Wolfson, “Make Poetry,” San Jose Mercury News, April 16, 1983, p. F1.

  “I began to feel . . .”: Robert Bly, The Pillow the Key (St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press, 1987) p. 19.

  It wasn’t his loss . . .: Ibid.

  “If someone says . . .”: “Robert Bly,” Whole Earth, Winter 1988, p. 68.

  Mainstream newspapers hailed . . .: Jerry Carroll, “Father Figure to the New, New Man,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 1986, p. 36.

  By 1990, his self-published . . .: Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

  Bly’s success inspired . . .: See Men’s Resource Hotline Calendar, 5, nos. 1–3, The National Men’s Resource Center, 1989; Trip Gabriel, “Call of the Wildmen,” The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 14, 1990, p. 36; Phil McCombs, “Men’s Movement Stalks the Wild Side: Lessons in Primitivism,” The Washington Post, Feb. 3, 1991, p. F1.

  In New York City and Oakland . . .: Personal observation and interviews with staff at the Sterling Institute and participants in the weekend seminars, 1988.

  Bly’s weekend retreats . . .: “The Gender Rap,” The New Republic, April 16, 1990, p. 14.

  On Bly’s retreat roster . . .: Chapple and Talbot, Burning Desires, p. 200.

  “I remember . . .”: Robert Bly, Pillow & the Key, p. 2.

  “I see the phenomenon . . .”: Robert Bly and Keith Thompson, “What Men Really Want: A New Age Interview with Robert Bly,” New Age, May 1982, p. 30.

  “Men’s societies are . . .”: Bly, Pillow & the Key, pp. 13-14. 320 Too many women . . .: Ibid., p. 14.

  The single mother’s son . . .: Ibid., p. 2.

  To restore the nice . . .: Ibid., p. 5. 320 The young man . . .: Ibid., p. 9.

  At Bly’s all-male . . .: Jon Tevlin, “Of Hawks and Men: A Weekend in the Male Wilderness,” Utne Reader, Nov.-Dec. 1989, p. 50.

  As he [Bliss] spoke . . .: Ibid., pp. 53-54.

  In two full days . . .”: Trip Gabriel, “Call of the Wildmen,” p. 37.

  “Men young and old . . .”: Chapple and Talbot, Burning Desires, p. 189.

  When one of . . .: Ibid.

  Indeed, the Bly retreat . . .: Ibid., pp. 187, 195-96.

  What’s the matter? . . .”: Personal observation at Jung Center seminar, 1988. (Subsequent quotes are from personal interview with Robert Bly and observations of the same event.)

  “I grew to understand . . .”: Personal interview with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 1988.

  “In a profound way . . .”: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: T
he Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (New York: Warner Books, 1986) pp. 208, 216.

  In one case . . .: Ibid., pp. 202-3.

  This is a strange . . .: Personal interviews with Joyce Brookshire and other former mill workers, 1991.

  Women’s liberation wants . . .”: Ibid., p. 329; George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: The New York Times Book Co., 1973) p. 6.

  “I don’t have . . .”: Personal interview with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 1991.

  “The American [women’s] movement . . .”: Hewlett, Lesser Life, p. 217.

  But most American women . . .: Ibid., p. 216.

  By concentrating . . .: Ibid., p. 179.

  Feminism “threw the baby . . .”: Ibid., p. 188.

  Hewlett’s book proposal . . .: Personal interview with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 1988.

  As a Washington Post . . .: Beryl Lieff Benderly, “Motherhood and the Fast Track,” The Washington Post Book World, April 6, 1986, p. 6.

  As Hewlett observes . . .: Hewlett, A Lesser Life, pp. 406, 413.

  Gals Are Being HURT . . .”: Arline and Harold Brecher, “Gals Are Being HURT—Not Helped—by Women’s Lib,” National Enquirer, July 22, 1986, p. 32.

  Hewlett indicts . . .: A Lesser Life also claims that the infertility rate is climbing sharply, citing the 1982 French study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which, as we have already seen, had been widely rejected by demographers by the time she was at work on her book. See Lesser Life, pp. 1900, 443.

  “It is sobering . . .”: Lesser Life, p. 211.

  The majority of women . . .: Ibid., pp. 208, 201.

  The only other . . .: Ibid., p. 203.

  If she had checked . . .: By May 1987, the Harris Poll found that figure had risen to 75 percent. The Louis Harris Poll, April 1982, found 63 percent support.

  According to a 1982 . . .: The Gallup Poll, June 1982, pp. 139–41.

  But the ERA would have had . . .: Deborah L. Rhode, “Equal Rights in Retrospect,” Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 1, no. 1 (June 1983): 19–21; Wendy Kaminer, A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990) p. 80; Catherine East, “Critical Comments on A Lesser Life,” National Women’s Political Caucus, unpublished paper, p. 27; Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986) p. 153.