October - Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

Faludi's premise is that the women's movement in the '60s and '70s, which was heralded by the media as a grand success and therefore should have become a chapter closed - was no such thing. To further complicate matters, Faludi proposes that the media with the help of politicians, conservatives and intellectuals using anecdotes and ignoring the general population, created a backlash against women moving forward financially, politically and culturally in America -- halting the progress that was gained and in most cases leaving the movement merely a figment of imagination or at most - only a thread of real progress achieved.

This winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991 Faludi's work received high marks from Alice Walker and several respected publications, though also was strongly criticized by science-fiction author Michael Crichton for not using a scientific basis for her conclusions.

In an excerpt published on her website, Faludi offers several reality checking questions to measure the level of equality that women had actually attained at the time she was writing the book (first published in 1991). Her style was to compare women's lot to men of matching education levels. For example, she contends that the majority of women then held marginally paid and traditionally female jobs (secretary, support workers and sales clerks) versus the opportunities available to men with the same educational levels who accessed higher skilled work, and better pay. Two thirds of all "poor adults" were women, and were twice as likely as men to live in "poor housing" and to have no retirement benefits. The courts were overwhelmingly male dominated, and she contends that American women faced "the worst genderbased pay gap in the developed world."

Faludi went on to say that not only did the media, experts and pols herald the success of the womens' movement while at the same time declaring it no longer necessary, they undermined the sanity of the whole effort, pointing to women's (somewhat rare) professional successes as the cause of an alleged spike in the number of miserable, lonely and lost women. Describing working women as family-breakers or crazed hormone driven characters like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and the cause in escalating crime against women.  One government report explained the increased number of rapes as due to more women being on campus and making themselves vulnerable to being raped.

Faludi posited with research and insightful commentary that in fact women were not all that successful in their strides for equality, and now they were suffering even more in the workplace because of the media, etc.'s complete misrepresentation of the situation.

Her 2006 publication contains a new preface but is a snapshot of the facts from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
But...just in case you want to update your facts on the position of women in politics, here are a few current measures...(Maybe someone else can compile a snapshot of salaries and job distributions for the discussion or the progress of women's control over their own health options.)

Currently women are Speaker of the House, Secretary of State (interestingly that seems to be a quite popular place for women to be granted access) and in the Obama administration there are 7 women (including Secy of State) serving in cabinet positions. There are 17 women (out of 100) serving in the US Senate - arguably the most powerful electors in our system, and 78 out of 541 (14%)  in the House. There are 2 out of 9 (22%) on the Supreme Court, and  6 women governors (12%). To be fair, recently we had 8 women governors, but three women recently left their office as governor, (2 to become Cabinet Members of the Obama admin -- so actually already counted here, and the third to pursue her political career) but only one of them (Napolitano) was replaced with another woman (Jan Brewer).