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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“Hatori: "You won't get very far if you try to threaten me in THAT outfit."
Yuki: "Thank you. So much.”
― Natsuki Takaya, quote from Fruits Basket, Vol. 2
“Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from A Man Without a Country
“One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“Frank's bio prompts us to to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have either to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some shit...Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
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