Susan Faludi · 594 pages
Rating: (7.8K votes)
“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, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger…. Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“Identifying feminism as women’s enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women’s equality, simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash’s central role and recruiting women to attack their own cause. Some”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle-versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground. Backlash”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“[M]aleness in America," as Margaret Mead wrote, "is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and reearned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play." Nothing seems to crush the masculine petals more than a bit of feminist rain - a few drops are perceived as a downpour. "Men view even small losses of deference, advantages or opportunities as large threats, " wrote William Goode, one of many sociologists to puzzle over the peculiarly hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements to women's rights.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“Randy Terry's backlash against women's rights may be more intimate than people realize, " says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood-- and Randall Terry'aunt. "He was raised at the knee of feminists.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“Under this linguistic strategy, the New Right relabeled its resistance to women's newly acquired reproductive rights as "pro-life"; its opposition to women's newly embraced sexual freedom became "pro-chastity"; and its hostility to women's mass entry into the work force became "pro-motherhood." Finally, the New Right renamed itself- its regressive and negative stance against the progress of women's rights became "pro-family." . . .
In the '20's, the Ku Klux Klan had built support with a similar rhetorical maneuver, downplaying their racism and recasting it as patriotism; they weren't lynching blacks, they were moral reformers defending the flag.
p238”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“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, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
“These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there's one pattern that psychological studies have established, it's that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men's mental health. "Being married," the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, "is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.”
― Susan Faludi, quote from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Susan Faludi
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“Qui craint de souffrir, il souffre deja de ce qu'il craint."
"Who fears to suffer, already suffers what he fears. ”
― Melissa Jensen, quote from The Fine Art of Truth or Dare
“Only enter a fight if you are ready to finish the fight, by disabling or killing your opponent. Only run if you are ready to be chased. Only allow yourself to be chased if you are able to finish the chase with another fight. Do not waste time or energy.” A question popped into my mind. “What if I can just avoid the opponent completely?” “Avoidance is another word for running,”
― Kyle Timmermeyer, quote from Reintroduction
“Look, I have no idea what's going on," I said, catching my breath. "I don't like myself either. I don't know what's happening to me. I don't want to tell you to fuck off. But you gotta understand, everything in my life feels different. I just want so badly to know if you like me. And I know how asinine that sounds. If you want me to leave you alone, I will, but sometimes... sometimes you meet somebody and you know that whatever you did before, whatever your life was before, it must have been right... nothing could've been too bad or gone too far wrong because it led you to this person. You're that person. Do you want me to go away?”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“when something is really “up,” when they don’t feel right, you will notice and respond. when they are overwhelmed—physically or emotionally—normal routines will be suspended. when their well-being is threatened, they will be brought close, be watched, and be cared for. when they are not well, they will be afforded the time and ease to recover their equilibrium. your love will accommodate, and look beyond, their less-than-best selves. they are deeply known and instinctively cared for.”
― quote from Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids
“I think you have forgotten, my young friend, that the blood of the spotless lambs on Passover cover your own sins, too.”
― Tessa Afshar, quote from Pearl in the Sand
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