Beka’s Reviews > Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women > Status Update

"In 1985, a massive study of 8,000 American women found that between 30-34 years old faced only a 13.6%, not 40%, chance of being infertile. That's only 3% higher than women in their early 20s face.
In fact, since 1965, infertility had declined slightly among women in their early/mid-30s, and even among women in their 40s."

"Public support for liberalizing divorce laws, which had been rising since 1968, fell 8% from the 70s. And it was men who contributed most to this downturn; nearly twice as many men as women told pollsters they wanted to make it harder for couples to divorce."

"The nation's largest study on the long-term effects of divorce found that 5 years after divorce, 2/3 of the women were happier with their lives; only 50% of the men were."

Dude. Seems like society needs to give men more and better quality tools for living without women making the men's lives easier inside and outside the home and partnership. Social lives, household maintenance, etc.

"...women report they were the ones actively seeking divorce 55 to 65% of the time. A 1982 durvey of divorced people a year after the breakup found that 60% of women were happier, compared to only 50% of men; a majority of women said they had more self-respect, while only a minority of men felt that way."

"In the 1970s, many states passed new 'no-fault' divorce laws that made the divorce process easier.

In the 1980s, these 'feminist-inspired' laws came under attack: the New Right painted them as schemes to undermine the family, + the media/popular writers portrayed them as inadvertent betrayals of women + children, 'throwing middle-class women into impoverished states'."

"What is going to happen to marriage + childbearing in a society where women really have equality? The more economically independent women are, the less attractive marriage becomes." -Princeton demographer Charlie's Westoff, 1986

Hardest eyeroll over here. Shit. I wonder why. To begin with...men need to be raised to be efficient co-partners in parenting + household care, that's what. Sheesh.

"In the 1980s, the Public Health Ssrvice censored information on the beneficial health effects of abortion + demoted + fires federal scientists whose findings conflicted with the administration's so-called pro-family policy."

Wait...you mean that something giving women the ability for choice and waiting and prioritizing how and when to procreate.... was hidden and shut down? Color me surprised. #patriarchy

"In the Reagan administration, U.S. census bureau demographers found themselves under increasing pressure to generate data for the government's war again women's independence, to produce statistics 'proving' the rising threat of infertility, the physical + psychic risks lurking in abortion, the dark side of single parenthood, the ill effects of daycare."

"As the backlash consensus solidified, statistics on women stopped functioning as social barometers. The data instead became society's checkpoints, positioned at key intervals in the life course of women, dispatching advisories on the perils of straying from the appointed path."

"Just when women were starting to mobilize against battering + sexual assaults, the federal government stalled funding for battered-women's programs, defeated bills to fund shelters, + shut down its Office of Domestic Violence -- only 2 years after opening it in 1979."