The War Against Feminism

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Faludi acknowledges the presence of strong female figures in films, but she notes that their strength is often directed at protecting their young, which even in a backlash era is an acceptable female preoccupation. This takes care of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Jessica Lange and Sally Field in Country and Places in the Heart. Overall, Faludi finds that female characters were more likely to be portrayed as obsessed with career at the expense of family (Broadcast News), burning out from the rat race (Baby Boom), abandoning their children (Three Men and a Baby) or exploring the rewards of prostitution (Pretty Woman).

It makes an interesting parlor game for contrarian readers to provide the counterimages, ones that dispute Faludi's thesis by showing that women were also often portrayed as strong and fulfilled. Was Hope Steadman any more an archetype of the '80s than Murphy Brown? The fashion press may have lauded Christian Lacroix's baby-doll dresses, but real women ignored them in favor of Donna Karan's comfortable professional clothes, or the Gap's gender-neutral everyday wear. For every virulent misogynist, such as Andrew Dice Clay or rappers with songs about mutilating "bitches," there was a Sandra Bernhard, a Lily Tomlin, above all a Roseanne Arnold.

Faludi dispatches Roseanne and Madonna in one subclause of a sentence, which deprives readers of what would surely have been a lively discussion of two of the decade's most influential symbols. Writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich have praised Roseanne for helping root feminism in the family and give it a raw eloquence. "Roseanne gave working-class feminism a face," says Ehrenreich. "The typical image of a feminist in the media has been the Murphy Brown type -- the very successful, very slender, very perfectly organized professional woman. And we didn't have a media image of another kind of feminist who, obviously, is not slender or successful or organized."

Madonna too became a symbol in the '80s of a maturing feminism, at least in the eyes of flame-throwing author Camille Paglia, who considers herself a feminist. "Madonna has enabled the young women of the world to recover their sexuality and yet to remain assertive, independent beings," Paglia says. "She was able to fuse this overt and almost pornographic sexuality as a woman with this dominant, managerial aptitude. It has been an extraordinary influence on women."

More broadly, Faludi's feminist critics view her book as flawed and condescending because it treats women as victims, passively accepting what the culture imposes on them. Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck argued that "for all her feminist tenets, Faludi sells women short. The millions of women who are rethinking their full-time commitment to a job and are finding their primary satisfactions in family are, in her view, silly sheep being pushed back into the kitchen and the bedroom by men who want them to stay subordinate."