What I'm Reading: Susan Faludi, "Backlash"

This book is written around a really interesting concept: rather than a history of feminism and feminist progress it’s a history of the steps backwards taken as a result of misogynist reactions to feminism, what Faludi calls the Backlash.

The book came out in 1992, and so it covers the Reagan Era most thoroughly, though the patterns it identifies are still operating today so in some ways it’s also very prescient. It doesn’t discuss trans women much at all, so for a look at the link between transphobia and misogyny I still recommend Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl.

This is 100% recommended reading for the person in your life who says that sex discrimination in hiring or pay doesn’t happen because it’s illegal: through multiple detailed case studies Faludi shines light on the sneaky underhanded ways women have been kept down, for instance the women workers of the American Cyanamid Corporation who in 1976 - nineteen seventy six - were offered a choice between losing their jobs or undergoing medical sterilisation thanks to the company’s “foetal protection policy” that was based on zero evidence and by its own logic should have applied equally to male workers. See also Sears, Roebuck and Company vs EEOC, a 1986 case where Sears & Roebuck were taken to court for systematically excluding women from higher-paying sales jobs and argued, in an actual legal court, that women “just chose” lower paying, less-demanding jobs because they weren’t interested in the big ticket work - a conclusion they reached by asking zero of their female employees. In these cases (and many, many others) the onus was on the female employees, who often had families to support, to spend time and resources mounting legal cases, and run the risk of being fired or muscled out for rocking the boat.

Faludi also covers the Backlash in popular media, both news and entertainment, and in fashion - including in one fantastic section about the workings of the lingerie industry whose all-male Intimate Apparel Committee just flat out made shit up in 1987 to sell underwear that women didn’t want: they sent out a press release saying that “more and more” women were buying sexy underwear, and the fashion press dutifully repeated it, but in fact the opposite was true! Lingeries sales were falling because companies hardly ever asked women what they actually wanted their underwear to be like: The Limited, the company who bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982, conducted no market research but instead asked their male managers what their ‘romantic fantasies’ were! The exception was Jockey, who, despite objections from senior executives, marketed a line of women’s underwear in 1983 that was based around actual market research asking women what they wanted - within 5 years they were the biggest women’s underwear company in America. This success went all but ignored in the rest of the lingerie industry, who instead mass-marketed the thong, so the 80s saw an extremely sexy overproduction crisis.

I said the book was prescient, and you might notice the parallel between the Sears case and the now infamous Google Bro Manifesto by James Damore, in which Damore argued similarly that women are underrepresented in tech jobs because they just have different interests and dispositions, a conclusion he, like Sears, reached by consulting zero of his female colleagues. That’s an incredible thing about Backlash - the arguments that antifeminists make come up again, and again, and again, and almost never change. In particular, the ‘Women are taking over male spaces!’ argument was made by Cato in circa 198BC when Roman women were permitted to drive chariots - imagine saying women were taking over male spaces when women couldn’t even vote! See also the ‘feminism has made women unhappy’ argument which dates at least to Victorian times.

This is an astonishing, detailed, and very accessible book. You can get it here, and it comes highly recommended! Thank you to Nkanyiso Khwane, who sent it to me from my Amazon wishlist!