Susan Faludi Quotes - Page 2

the last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.

the heart of the backlash argument: women are better off 'protected' than equal.

the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

My goal is to be accused of being strident.

Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.

the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean?

To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.

I've never believed that women have some special, essentialist qualities, or were more nurturing, cooperative, and morally superior.

I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

It's fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

Hungary is now on the brink of becoming a neo-fascist state.

The piles of makeup and the insistence on frills and ribbons and bows was not at all attuned to my feminist views.

The economic victims of the era are men who who know someone has made off with their future- and they suspect the thief is a woman.

Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or "nuptialitis," as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.

The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation.

What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.

The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.

The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.

That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime.

The demand that women "return to femininity" is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.

Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.