The War Against Feminism

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What readers may be looking for is an explanation for why, as reported by a TIME/CNN poll last month, 63% of American women do not consider themselves feminists. The answer according to Faludi is not that women are finally free and equal and don't need a movement anymore; or that feminism's leaders, for all their efforts, somehow alienated their constituency; or that finally having choices allows women the luxury of second thoughts. Instead, she argues, women reject feminism because of a backlash against it -- a highly ; effective, often insidious campaign to discredit its goals, distort its message and make women question whether they really want equality after all.

Throughout history, Faludi argues, any time women tried to loosen their corsets and breathe more freely, they met with a suffocating counterattack. In the 1980s this backlash surfaced in the Reagan White House, the courts, Hollywood and, above all, the mass media, whose collective message to women went something like this: Feminism is your worst enemy. All this freedom is making you miserable, unmarriageable, infertile, unstable. Go home, bake a cake, quit pounding on the doors of public life, and all your troubles will go away.

Faludi's book has set off firecrackers across the political battlefield. Conservatives applaud her when she exposes the intellectual laziness of the mainstream press; liberals cheer when she exposes the hypocrisy of conservatives who put their own children in day care so they can travel around the country telling women to be homemakers. And the press loves covering itself and hearing about its power. Columnist John McLaughlin, no special friend of the women's movement, called Faludi "the best thinker of the year," and the National Book Critics Circle just handed her its prize for nonfiction.

Faludi makes an unlikely polemicist. Smart, shy, with a self-deprecating manner, she claims to be more comfortable in front of a terminal than a camera. An alumna of Harvard, the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Constitution, she has left the Wall Street Journal -- where she won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a Journal story tracing the human cost of the $5.65 billion leveraged buyout of Safeway -- in order to handle the flood of speaking requests her book has generated.

A cynic -- Faludi, for one -- might argue that the messenger herself makes the message easier to hear. With her schoolgirl demeanor and easy eloquence, Faludi defies many unfair but well-embedded stereotypes about feminists. PEOPLE magazine photographed her riding her bike in San Francisco and posing beneath a tree with her boyfriend, Dr. Peter Small. The timing of the book helped too, coming just when the Senate and the American media rediscovered sexual harassment and when puzzled talk-show hosts were groping for a new vocabulary to capture the outrage that women expressed. Had the book been published back in the spring when it was scheduled, Faludi says with a laugh, "it would have dropped like a stone. We were in the middle of a war, it | was boys' time. Fall was girls' time because of Anita Hill."