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

"The Sunday magazine This Week advised its female readera; a college education 'skyrockets your chances of becoming an old maid.'

Advertisers reversed their wartime message - that women could work + enjoy a family life - claimed now that women must choose, + choose only home."

"Then as now, late-Victorian religious + political leaders accused women who postponed childbearing of triggering a 'race suicide' that endangered (white) America's future; they were, in the words of president Theodore Roosevelt, 'criminals against the race' + 'objects of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.' Married women who demanded rights were charged, then as now, with creating a 'crisis of the family.'"

"The Victorian era gave rise to mass media + mass marketing -- two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women's aspirations than coercive laws + punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, + claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests."

"This map is in itself harmful to women's rights; it presents women's struggle for liberty as if it were a one-time event, a curious + even noxious by-product of a postmodern age.

It is, as poet + essayist Adrienne Rich has described it, 'the erasure of women's political + historical past which makes each new generation of feminists appear as an abnormal excrescence on the face of time.'"

"In the popular imagination, the history of women's rights is more commonly charted mostly as a flat dead line.

Ignoring the many peaks + valleys traversed in the endless march toward liberty, this mental map of American women's progress presents instead a great plain of 'traditional' womanhood, upon which women have roamed helplessly + 'naturally', eternally passive subjects until the 70s movement came along."

Just finished chapter 2. It's blowing me away that this is a 1990s book. We are so very influenced, still, by the shitty anti-women-biased reporting of the 80s. I had no clue.

"Demographers have collected a vast amount of data comparing the mental health of single + married women. None of it supports the thesis that single women are causing the 'age of melancholy': study after study shows single women enjoying far better mental health than their married sisters (also making more money)."

"As psychological researcher Lynn L. Gigy, one of the few in her profession to study single women, has noted, social science still treats unmarried women like 'statistical deviants.' They have been 'virtually ignored in social theory + research.'"

In 1986, Psychologist Annette Baran speculated that, "the rising mental distress of single women is a phenomenon of this era." In fact, no one knew whether single women were more or less depressed in the 80s; no epidemiological study had actually tracked changes in single women's mental health."

"The 'infertility epidemic' among middle-class career women over 30 was a political program, + for infertility specialists a marketing tool, not a medical problem.

The same White House that promoted the infertility threat allocates no funds toward preventing infertility--and in fact rebuffed all requests for aid."