I keep reaching for Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.” It explains so much about American politics and culture. It sheds light on matters both serious, like the rise of Donald Trump and the banning of abortion, and absurd, like the “trad wives” of TikTok and Tucker Carlson promoting testicle tanning before he was canned from Fox News.
Faludi argued that in response to the great but unfinished gains of second-wave feminism, reactionary forces sought to convince Americans that women’s dissatisfactions arose from equality rather than the lack of it.
Backlashes, she wrote, “have always arisen in reaction to women’s ‘progress,’ caused not simply by a bedrock of misogyny but by the specific efforts of contemporary women to improve their status, efforts that have been interpreted time and again by men — especially men grappling with real threats to their economic and social well-being on other fronts — as spelling their own masculine doom.”
This was a subtext of Republican politics in the 1980s. In the wake of Trump’s “Lock her up” campaign for president in 2016, it’s simply text, with gender emerging as a central fault line of American politics.
Of course, today’s backlash, like the one in the 1980s, is about more than women’s rights. It’s also a furious response to political assertiveness and incipient gains by racial and sexual minorities. These aren’t the subjects of “Backlash”; its neglect of race feels glaring today. Still, Faludi’s analysis of how conservative forces mobilize together to turn back challenges to traditional hierarchy is useful for understanding more than just feminism and anti-feminism. Consider the violent end to Reconstruction: While progress is often at the heart of the story America likes to tell itself, the backlash to that progress is just as central, if not more so.
A lot has changed since “Backlash” came out, especially in the media, one of Faludi’s prime targets. She was writing at a time when mainstream publications, often with no feminist representation, had far more agenda-setting power than they do today, and they helped drive the anti-feminist backlash in concert with conservative politicians.
But online, the sort of reactionary narratives Faludi wrote about are thriving, often in a newly concentrated and vicious form. See, for example, the right-wing pundit Candace Owens, who boasts about her domestic prowess and questions whether women’s suffrage was really a good idea, or the swaggering misogynist Andrew Tate, the idol of many adolescent boys who is facing charges of rape in Romania.
One of Faludi’s central insights was that backlashes rear up not when women have achieved equality but when they seem to be on the brink of achieving it. It’s a “preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line,” she wrote. America nearly elected a feminist president in 2016, and when it didn’t, women all over the country threw themselves into politics and into the movement to dethrone sexual abusers. The reaction has been a backlash that is in many ways more brutal and angry than what Faludi described, even if the fragmentation of American culture means it’s less all-encompassing.
“The great hope of a j’accuse is that it won’t be reprinted decades later, for the simple reason that by then you want it to be obsolete,” Faludi wrote in an introduction to the 2020 edition. Sadly, she has failed to achieve irrelevance.
Michelle Goldberg | The New York Times (CREDIT: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)
Editor’s note: New York Times columnists were asked to pick the one piece of culture that, to them, best explains America.) This article originally appeared in The New York Times.