Susan Faludi Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

Susan Faludi
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.

Susan Faludi
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.

Susan Faludi
Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself.

Susan Faludi
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.

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

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

Susan Faludi
Keeping the peace with the particular man in one's life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture.

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

Susan Faludi
An accurate charting of American women's progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.

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

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

Susan Faludi
For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.

Susan Faludi
As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

Susan Faludi
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.

Susan Faludi
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.

Susan Faludi
The 'feminine' woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

Susan Faludi
In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

Susan Faludi
To blame feminism for women's lesser life is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated — and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Susan Faludi
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.

Susan Faludi