Quotes from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

“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

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Popular quotes

“I will never let you know how much you hurt me
No, I will never tell you
The lasts few months have sent me into myself
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Time is healing me
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I end up getting myself messed up
I can't take any more beatings like this”
― Henry Rollins, quote from The Portable Henry Rollins

“When the gravity of death first touched me, I'd found preoccupation with the minutiae of daily life meaningless. If we ultimately die, and turn to dust in the ground, should it ever truly upset us if the floor hasn't been swept quite recently enough.”
― Shirin Ebadi, quote from Iran Awakening

“An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal abortions were married. This means that up to two thirds of the botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors are married women. This means that most of the women who risked death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps one million married women each year. They were not shameless sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were, quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one decade. The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. They thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Right Wing Women

“She lied, sir. She has always lied. I don't think she ever spoke a word of truth. But when she spoke, I believed her.”
― Prosper Mérimée, quote from Carmen

“I'd still be a goofy frog because, guess what, I like being a frog.”
― Dandi Daley Mackall, quote from My Boyfriends' Dogs: The Tales of Adam and Eve and Shirley

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