Susan Faludi > Quotes

“When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.”
― Susan Faludi

“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.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women

“The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger…. Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distrusting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty in 'fifth column' feminists - in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only increase itself against a mythical female weakness - we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction (p. 295).”
― Susan Faludi

“It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle-versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground. Backlash”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women

“The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“Identifying feminism as women’s enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women’s equality, simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash’s central role and recruiting women to attack their own cause. Some”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“[M]aleness in America," as Margaret Mead wrote, "is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and reearned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play." Nothing seems to crush the masculine petals more than a bit of feminist rain - a few drops are perceived as a downpour. "Men view even small losses of deference, advantages or opportunities as large threats, " wrote William Goode, one of many sociologists to puzzle over the peculiarly hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements to women's rights.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there's one pattern that psychological studies have established, it's that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men's mental health. "Being married," the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, "is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“Randy Terry's backlash against women's rights may be more intimate than people realize, " says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood-- and Randall Terry'aunt. "He was raised at the knee of feminists.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“Under this linguistic strategy, the New Right relabeled its resistance to women's newly acquired reproductive rights as "pro-life"; its opposition to women's newly embraced sexual freedom became "pro-chastity"; and its hostility to women's mass entry into the work force became "pro-motherhood." Finally, the New Right renamed itself- its regressive and negative stance against the progress of women's rights became "pro-family." . . .

In the '20's, the Ku Klux Klan had built support with a similar rhetorical maneuver, downplaying their racism and recasting it as patriotism; they weren't lynching blacks, they were moral reformers defending the flag.

p238”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“Yet Hirschfeld espoused an ethic directly at odds with the dualism that would come to prevail in the United States later in the century. “The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,” Hirschfeld wrote in 1910. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics equally match in kind and number.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“IN THE DARKROOM”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“The masculinity crisis would return with each backlash. The fledgling Boy Scouts of America claimed one-fifth of all American boys by 1920; its founder's explicit aim was to staunch the feminization of the American male by removing young men from the too powerful female orbit.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”
― Susan Faludi

“Feminists have always optimistically figured that once they demonstrated the merits of their cause, male hostility to women's rights would evaporate. They have always been disappointed.”
― Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“masculinity lies rather in the problem of identity,” Schlesinger concluded”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family’s sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment’s attitudes toward Jews.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“The story belonged to Christine Jorgensen, the first sex-change celebrity.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“Hungarian citizens filed 30,000 denunciations”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom