The War Against Feminism

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She decided to write about "the marriage crunch," only to discover what demographers already knew: the figures were based on unorthodox calculations of unrepresentative samples. More men than women were rushing out to dating services, and in the prime marrying years of 24 to 34, there were 119 single men for every 100 single women. What bothered Faludi was not just that the numbers were wrong; it was that many of the stories read like morality tales, whispering threats about the cost of postponing marriage in favor of having a career. Fear of spinsterhood stormed into the popular culture, giving birth to a whole generation of desperate movie heroines, frantic sitcom spinsters, myriad self-help books.

Struck by the eagerness of the media to hype dubious scholarship, Faludi examined other trend stories to find their hidden message. In 1982 the New England Journal of Medicine urged women to re-evaluate their goals in light of findings that a woman's fertility plunged after age 30. The tyranny of the biological clock, warning women about putting work before family, made front- page news; but the story was based on a French study of women with infertile husbands who had tried to get pregnant through artificial insemination -- hardly a representative sample.

Digging further, Faludi found that the rash of "toxic day-care" stories, which instilled guilt among working women by recounting the epidemic of abuse in day-care centers, masked the fact that the vast majority of child abuse goes on in the home. She also found fault with the stories about women with Harvard M.B.A.s dropping out to go home and raise their children, the Good Housekeeping ads of the New Traditionalist, the notion of the Mommy Track; to her, they all implied that the postfeminist woman was the one who had sampled having it all and preferred to give most of it up. In fact, the pattern of the '80s was dictated by economic reality: 69% of women 18 to 64 work today, in contrast to 33% in 1950. "There may be women being laid off, but they are not going home because they want to," says Karen Nussbaum, executive director of 9 to 5, an advocacy group for working women.

But Faludi has a frustrating habit of pushing her case too far, at times at the price of her own credibility. She rightly slams journalists who distort data in order to promote what they view as a larger truth; but in a number of instances, she can be accused of the same tactics.

On the infertility studies, for example, Faludi is right to point out how the results of a small survey were exaggerated. But there are indeed health risks that confront older mothers. Faludi writes that contrary to popular belief, "women under 35 now give birth to children with Down syndrome at a higher rate than women over 35." This is not true. There are more babies born with Down syndrome to women under 35, but that is because there are more babies born to women under 35. The risk of Down and other genetic abnormalities increases with age, according to Gertrud Berkowitz, a Mount Sinai School of Medicine professor, and it is misleading to mix rates with absolute numbers.