Newt Gingrich’s Lessons Learned the Hard Way 1

I started Newt Gingrich’s 1998 book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, which is about Newt’s tenure as Speaker of the House.  I have two items.

1.  On pages 9-10, Newt discusses the National Endowment for the Arts.  He states:

“Nor had we conservatives taken the measure of how reluctant certain important senators were going to be about going along with certain key aspects of our agenda.  For instance, one big disappointment for the conservatives was our failure immediately to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.  Certainly any listing of the most bizarre and extreme misuses of taxpayer money would have to include such examples of NEA artistic grants as that to a certain HIV-infected homosexual ‘performance artist’ whose art consisted of cutting his uninfected fellow performer onstage and dangling the blood over the audience so they could experience the risk of contracting AIDS, or to two professors standing at the Mexican border and handing out $10 bills to illegal immigrants as they cross over into the United States, and so on and on.  Everyone has his own favorite cases.  There is no question that if the majority of ordinary Americans were to see many of the examples of where NEA money goes, they would favor abolishing the system.  Yet in the Senate there has always been strong support for the agency, for the NEA also supports such things as opera, ballet, and art museums, and the major private donors to such honored art institutions are also major supporters for senators.  In any case, the social pressure of the elites—-and what is better loved by the elites than the arts?—-has always been more strongly felt in the Senate than in the House.”

The context of this passage is Newt’s discussion of how the Senate obstructed some of the passionate ideas of House conservatives.  On the one hand, Newt acknowledges that George Washington wanted for the Senate to be a place of moderation, for Washington described “the Senate as the cooling saucer into which the hot coffee from the cup of the House should be poured” (Newt’s words on page 6).  On the other hand, Newt wonders if Washington intended for that moderating influence to go as far as it does, and to be as obstructive as it is!

Newt’s discussion of the NEA stood out to me because Newt chose to highlight that the performance artist was a homosexual.  I’m not sure that this would float nowadays.  Granted, Newt expresses conservative views on marriage being between a man and a woman, and he criticizes what he considers to be governmental attacks on the religious freedom of Catholic charities to discriminate against gay couples who want to adopt.  But he doesn’t publicly treat people’s homosexuality in a pejorative sense.  My impression (and I am open to correction) is that few public figures do criticize people for being homosexual these days, at least not in public.  In the 1990′s, however, it was different, for homosexuals were criticized by many right-wingers for being homosexuals.  (Here’s what wikipedia says about the case that Newt is discussing.)

Regarding his comments on the NEA, I thought that Newt made somewhat of an effort to understand the motivations of Senators and also to see why many would consider the NEA to be valuable, for the NEA does good things, such as supporting the opera, ballet, and art museums.  But I thought that his balance ended when he treated art as something for the elite—-as if others cannot be edified by a little culture.

2.  On pages 16-17, Newt states:

“The key to those years was to keep focused on what I dreamed of bringing about for the country in general rather than on the liberal city in which I was spending most of my working life.  For remember: To work in Washington is to wake up each morning surrounded by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the national television networks, National Public Radio, lobbyists who even if they are personally conservative are focused only on who’s got the power today, the Washington bureaucracies, and the Washington social scene.  From the time you wake up until the time you go to bed, unless you take steps to defend against it, you are bombarded with opinions, signals, and agendas that are antithetical to a conservative’s own.”

The context of this passage is Newt’s discussion of how transformative leaders should hold fast to their vision for the country, even though they will be criticized.  Newt refers to Ronald Reagan, who did not care what the elites thought about him (going back to his days as a B-movie actor), and also to Margaret Thatcher, who chose not to read negative press stories about her.

One reason that I liked this passage was that it highlights that not all criticism is constructive criticism.  We have to sift through what is constructive and what is not.  Another reason is that Newt says that even a conservative can become wrapped up in a Washington culture that is antithetical to his or her values.  Conservatives believe in less government, and they tend to champion advancement through hard work, merit, and productivity rather than through political machinations and ingratiating (think of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and contrast them with James Taggart).  But Washington, D.C. is all about using political machinations and ingratiating yourself with the “right people” to get what you want, and conservatives can fall victim to this!  I’ll add that such is the case even with progressives, who may go to Washington intending to serve the people and to bring about reform, yet they find themselves part of a system that likes the way things currently are, and there is pressure on them to abandon their commitment to change.

10 Significant Mike Wallace Moments

Mike Wallace has passed on.  In this post, I’ll list what I consider to be ten significant Mike Wallace moments.

1. 60 Minutes would be on in my household every Sunday night.  And Mike Wallace would be the first anchor to introduce himself in the lineup.  He’d say “I’m Mike Wallace” as his head went up and down.  My Dad once said that he saw 60 Minutes preach the Gospel more than the self-appointed Armstrongite preachers who thought that they had a divine mandate.  What my Dad meant by that was that 60 Minutes did us a service by exposing corruption.

2.  As someone with an Armstongite background, I absolutely have to mention Mike Wallace taking down Stanley Rader, who was a key figure in Herbert Armstrong’s movement.  See here and here for information on that.  Not only did I watch the 60 Minutes story, but I also listened via cassette to Wallace’s unedited interview of Rader.  (A relative of mine somehow had a copy of that.)  Rader was a sharp lawyer and accountant who gave Wallace some good back-and-forth, but, ultimately, the interview made neither Rader nor the Worldwide Church of God look that good.

3.  My Grandma told me that she once saw Mike Wallace at the airport.

4.  In his book Born Again, Charles Colson talked about Mike Wallace’s interview of him during the Nixon years.  Colson said that Mike Wallace was quite affable, but then the interview started and it was like “ding, ding, ding”, as Mike jumped on Colson and reminded him of the bad things Colson did or was accused of doing.

5.  At the Hebrew Union College library, I looked at a book that Mike Wallace wrote about his interviews.  Wallace talked about his interview with Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Wallace asked Reagan tough questions, such as how many African-Americans Reagan appointed as Governor, as well as confronted Reagan with an extreme statement that Reagan made about the Vietnam War (I think it was Reagan’s statement that “we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas”).  Wallace acknowledged in retrospect that he was a little unfair to do that, since a lot of people made dumb remarks during the Vietnam War!  When Wallace took a break from the interview, Nancy asked him why he was being so tough on Ronnie when she thought he was their friend, and Ronald Reagan stood near her looking disapprovingly at Mike.  Mike told them that he was just doing his job, and that he wasn’t trying to be mean!

6.  In a Mike Wallace book that I was looking through, Wallace said that he knew he had someone on the ropes when the interviewee kept saying Mike’s name.  “Mike.”  “Mike.”

7.  Mike Wallace in 1979 was interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, which probably took a lot of courage, considering how intimidating the Ayatollah looked.  Wallace challenged Khomeini with a statement by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, whom Wallace called a devout Muslim.  Essentially, Sadat said that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a lunatic.  A few years later, Sadat was assassinated.

8. I remember Wallace interviewing an author who was claiming that Abraham Lincoln was gay.  I recall Mike having an odd expression on his face when the author was saying that, as if Wallace were skeptical.  But maybe I was reading too much into Wallace’s facial expression!  (This article goes into Mike Wallace’s views on homosexuality.  If you read it, be sure to read the whole thing.)

9.  I recall seeing Mike Wallace in the 1957 movie, A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith plays a power-hungry guy who gets a TV show and works with the right-wing.

10.  I’d like to watch sometime Mike Wallace’s 1959 interview with Ayn Rand (see here).  Both were tough cookies!

R.I.P. Mike Wallace.

Susan Faludi, Backlash 22

In my latest reading of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi told some really gut-wrenching stories.  She talked about a pregnant woman with a terminal illness, and how a judge ordered for her unborn baby to be saved, even though the operation could harm the mother.  The outcome was that both the mother and the baby died.  Faludi also referred to a case in which women were forced to choose between sterilization and keeping their jobs, since the women would supposedly be exposed to harmful chemicals.  Faludi considers the whole movement to protect women and their unborn children from chemicals in the work-place to be rather phony, a device to keep women from the workplace, for the Reagan Administration did not rigorously try to make workplaces safer, plus the chemicals could harm men as well, and the men were not being told to be sterilized in order to keep their jobs.  Rather, they could wear protective equipment.

Faludi’s epilogue was powerful.  She affirms that women desire to be fulfilled professionally, and she refers to women on the New Right to support that point.  Faludi also states that women have the numbers to make a difference, and that polls indicate that most women support feminist causes, and so the 90s could be a positive decade for women.  Was it, in her opinion?  Well, she wrote an article in 2008 entitled Think the Gender War Is Over? Think Again.

I agree with Faludi’s argument that many women feel a need to be fulfilled professionally, for Faludi refers to numerous statistics and examples that confirm this, even among New Right women who are promoting traditional family values.  I guess my problem with Faludi was that she acted as if women wanting children was simply the result of them being indoctrinated by the backlash, which was pressuring women to prefer the domestic sphere.  Faludi did this particularly in her discussion about the women who were sterilized in order to keep their jobs.  But why should we assume that a desire for children is not authentic for many women?

Faludi spent a lot of pages lauding the desire of women to be independent, and so I greatly appreciated the following passage on page 457, in which Faludi promotes a sort of interdependence between men and women:

“As much as men fought the female challenge in the ’70s, they also absorbed and incorporated it into their private experience; and when they saw women wouldn’t back down, many men started to make accommodations to keep the women they loved in their lives.  Even blatant antifeminists like Michael Levin, while vocally decrying the equal rights campaign, were quietly cutting domestic deals with their wives.  For what has been largely forgotten in the backlash era—-where women are encouraged to please men by their demeanor or appearance rather than persuade them by the force of their argument—-is that men don’t hold all the emotional cards.  Men need women as much as women need men.  The bonds between the sexes can chafe, and they can be, and have been, used to constrain women.  But they also can promote mutually beneficial growth and change.”

I love the part about men making accommodations to keep the women they love in their lives.

“15 Reasons I Left Church”, and My Musings on My Own Church and Evangelical Experience

Rachel Held Evans has a good post this morning, 15 Reasons I Left Church.  In this post, I will comment on each of her fifteen reasons.  My purpose is not to tell people that they should go to church or not go to church.  Rather, it’s primarily to share with you about my own church and experiences within evangelicalism, and to reflect on those things myself.  For the record, I attend a Presbyterian Church (USA) in a small town.

1. I left the church because I’m better at planning Bible studies than baby showers…but they only wanted me to plan baby showers. 

In most of the churches and evangelical groups that I have attended, women led Bible studies, and they did an excellent job doing that.  But I realize that there is another reality in a number of churches.  I was one time listening to a sermon by Gary DeMar, and, right before the question and answer session, the pastor of the church that was hosting DeMar did not allow women to ask questions, but rather told them to ask their husbands.

2. I left the church because when we talked about sin, we mostly talked about sex.

We talked a lot about sex in a male evangelical small group that I attended in college, but we also talked about other issues, such as pride.  In the Seventh-Day Adventist churches that I attended, sex was not a common topic of conversation.  Come to think of it, I don’t recall them getting overly specific about what “sin” was, period.  At my current church, I don’t hear much about sex.  On the issue of sin, the pastor often encourages us to do the right thing—-love others, for example—-rather than ranting and raving about what’s wrong.

3. I left the church because my questions were seen as liabilities.

I don’t ask a lot of the questions that come to my mind when I’m at church.  In the church’s Bible study group that I attend, I realize that the people there are people of faith.  I struggle in terms of my faith, but I don’t want to ask a bunch of village atheist questions because I would like for the Bible study to be edifying—-for myself and also for them.  If I were to ask a question, I can envision them trying to answer it.  Maybe I’d be satisfied with their answers.  Maybe not.  But I try not to be a destabilizing presence at the group.

Plus, I am unsure about the extent to which my church has wrestled with certain issues in the Bible.  I once asked about church discipline in Matthew 18 and in I Corinthians (which entails excommunication), and they said that their feeling was that everyone should be welcome in church, but that we should be discerning about people who could take advantage of us.  I believe that the people in my church are biblically literate, in that they know where to turn in their Bibles and can quote passages from it.  But they don’t stress out over certain issues in the Bible.

Some groups are easier for me to handle than others.  In my church’s Bible study group, there is not a cultish pressure on me to believe a certain way and to express my overt agreement with certain ideas.  There was that sort of thing in another group that I was in years ago.  As I look back, I am conflicted about whether I should have been the destabilizing presence that I was in that group.  On the one hand, I hopefully did show people that their beliefs are not the end-all-be-all of reality.  On the other hand, I should not have disrupted the inspiration and edification that people in the group could have received.  Looking back, I probably should not have been in the group at all, since I hated being in it so much.

4. I left the church because sometimes it felt like a cult, or a country club, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. 

My current church is not a cult.  Is it a country club?  Well, many of the people who go there have gone there and have known each other all of their lives.  Some of them are teachers, and so they naturally like to talk shop with each other.  But I still feel welcomed when I am there.

5. I left the church because I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that humans share a common ancestor with apes, which I was told was incompatible with my faith.

We don’t get into evolution at my church.  My pastor seems to assume that there was a literal and historical Adam and Eve.  But he does not try to defend that view against evolution.  He just assumes that the Bible stories in Genesis 1-3 represent what really happened.

6. I left the church because sometimes I doubt, and church can be the worst place to doubt. 

I just go with the flow when I’m at church.  Granted, when we’re praying for people, I wonder if there is a God who hears and answers prayer, considering all of the suffering and death that exists in the world.  But I then ask myself what the harm is in praying.  And, if the people in the church want to comfort themselves with the notion that God is present even in the afflictions of the world and can bring good out of these afflictions, then who am I to challenge that in their presence (though I can challenge that to myself, in my own mind)?  Hopefully, they’re right!

I think of two incidents at my church that pertained to doubt.  First, one lady was asking me why I did not take communion.  I told her that I had problems with my faith.  Her response was, “Well, every little bit helps!”  Her point was that taking communion can help reinforce a person’s faith.  Second, a deaconess in the church was telling us about how she came to church a few years ago, and since then she has learned that she really had the faith that she thought she didn’t have.  That tells me that the church welcomes those who struggle with their faith.

7. I left the church because I didn’t want to be anyone’s “project.” 

I don’t have this problem in my current church.  I did have it, however, in an evangelical group I was in years ago.  The leader liked to talk about where people were growing or not growing, as if he was an authority on people’s spiritual condition.

8. I left the church because it was often assumed that everyone in the congregation voted for Republicans.

The pastor doesn’t get into politics.  He quoted Reagan once, but that was more in an anecdotal Reader’s Digest way than it was political.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people there are Republicans, though.  It’s a rural area.  A couple of weeks ago in Bible study, the people were lamenting that prayer was not in the public schools.  At the same time, when I was talking with a lady whose son was in the Navy and I said that some of the Republican candidates for President want us to go to war with Iran, she remarked that “We don’t need another war!”  So my church may have Republicans, but I’ve not come across a dogmatic, in-your-face, “true Christians are Republicans” sort of attitude there.

9. I left the church because I felt like I was the only one troubled by stories of violence and misogyny and genocide found in the Bible, and I was tired of people telling me not to worry about it because “God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

I’ve not heard these issues discussed.  One time, though, my pastor did say that the Jews of Jesus’ day had an Old Testament notion that people who prospered were rewarded by God, whereas those who suffered were punished by God for some sin.  That seems to imply that the Old Testament could be mistaken in areas.  But I doubt that this statement by my pastor represents the full extent of his theology and his belief on Scripture.

10. I left the church because of my own selfishness and pride. 

I’ve left groups because I wanted to be more valued and respected within them.  I don’t think that’s wrong, per se.  Why beat a dead horse, when I can find another group that suits me better, in that it’s more accepting?

11. I left the church because I knew I would never see a woman behind the pulpit, at least not in the congregation in which I grew up. 

My pastor is a male, but there occasionally is a woman behind the pulpit.

12. I left the church because I wanted to help people in my community without feeling pressure to convert them to Christianity. 

I don’t know how my church handles this.  There are people in it who believe that we should share our faith.  But does our food pantry give people who need help a little sermon before they can get their food?  I doubt it.

13. I left the church because I had learned more from Oprah about addressing poverty and injustice than I had learned from 25 years of Sunday school. 

We don’t get much into systemic injustice because we don’t get much into politics.  But someone from a charity comes to speak to us every month, and we help support that charity for the month.  In the process, I learn about people in need, due to poverty, lacking family to take care of them, etc.

14. I left the church because there are days when I’m not sure I believe in God, and no one told me that “dark nights of the soul” can be part of the faith experience.

My pastor has preached about the dark night of the soul.  He lost his first wife decades ago, and he has told us about how he believes that God was with him in that experience.

 15. I left the church because one day, they put signs out in the church lawn that said “Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman: Vote Yes on Prop 1,” and I knew the moment I saw them that I never wanted to come back.

We don’t get into gay marriage or how we should vote.  I wouldn’t be surprised if people at my church are socially conservative, since a number of them support prayer in public school.  But people don’t get into my face about how I should vote on gay marriage.

Susan Faludi, Backlash 19

In my latest reading of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi talks about the Sears case, in which Sears was being investigated for sex discrimination.

The defense for Sears brought on the stand a feminist named Rosalind Rosenberg, who argued that women simply preferred the low-paying salesclerk jobs to higher-paying jobs in commission sales because they were less competitive and did not want to work in the night-time or on the weekends because that “could interfere with their child-rearing duties” (Faludi’s words on page 381).  Rosenberg said that “Many women choose jobs that complement their family obligations over jobs that might increase or enhance their earning potential”, and that “women are less likely to make the same educational investments as men” (Rosenberg’s words).  Faludi mentions Clarence Thomas, who at the time was the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Ronald Reagan, and who “maintained that all the pay, hiring, and promotional inequities in the Sears docket could be explained by such factors as education, and, curiously, commuting patterns” (page 384).  Faludi states that Thomas was so outspoken that the lawyers for Sears considered calling Thomas as a witness!

Faludi does not accept such arguments (which, by the way, are still used by many conservatives).  She says that some lower-income women preferred to work at nights because that was when their husbands were at home and could take care of the children.  Faludi also argues, on the basis of a 1982 survey of Sears, that many of the saleswomen did not prefer part-time work because they themselves bore a “major responsibility for supporting their household”, since their husbands made less than $25,000 a year.  Regarding the argument that women are unwilling to invest in education that could help them advance, Faludi asks what educational investments are necessary in order to sell Sears sofas on commission.  And, against the argument that women do not even want higher-paying commission positions, Faludi refers to the number of women who have applied to such jobs, as well as women who are discontent with the un-challenging work that they are doing (sometimes after having been demoted from more challenging positions).

Susan Faludi, Backlash 15

In my latest reading of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi critiqued four intellectual opponents of feminism: George Gilder, Allan Bloom, and Michael and Margarita Levin.

I found Faludi’s discussion of George Gilder to be interesting.  I knew of Gilder from some of the Phyllis Schlafly books that I have, as well as other things that I have read, but I did not know much about him.  Apparently, he was raised by the Rockefellers when his Dad died, and he was a contributor to a liberal Republican publication.  He gained notoriety and opposition after writing a piece that was critical of proposed child care legislation.  When he observed that he was getting attention from a lot of women who wanted to argue with him, he decided to become a prominent anti-feminist.  He wrote books that criticized the feminist movement for taking away the chance for men to fulfill their inner desire to provide for their families, and also for discouraging women from marrying, which deprived men of the support that they needed to advance and contributed to men becoming violent criminals.  Most of those books did not do overly well, but he achieved more success when he became a speech-writer for Ronald Reagan and wrote Wealth and Poverty, a defense of supply-side economics.  Gilder long desired to get married, and his stories about how a hypothetical career woman should marry a drab writer probably was his reflection on his own situation.  Although Gilder believed that women should make less money than men so that the men could feel better about themselves as providers, the woman he married, Nini, was an architectural historian who wrote several books.  I enjoyed reading about George Gilder because I could not help identifying with him and even liking him, even though I have drifted from right-wing conservatism.  I identified with his hope to get married, his desire that women marry the drab men, his climb to success, and also the story about how he invited some anti-war protesters to crash at his place, but they wouldn’t leave—-and they were smoking dope and eating his food.  That never happened to me, but that story would discourage me from letting strangers crash at my place!

Faludi’s discussion about Allan Bloom discussed his complaint that feminism is so dominant on college campuses.  Faludi, however, cites statistics to the contrary, arguing that there are not many women professors, let alone feminist ones, and that it’s harder for women Ph.D.s to find work than it is for men with doctorates.  I wonder if things have changed since then.  There have been a number of women professors at some of the places of higher education that I have attended.  They’re not the majority, I don’t think, but there are a lot of them.

Michael and Margarita Levin believe that women should be the cooks and that men are the ones who are good at math, even though Michael helps his son to cook, and Margarita is a renowned mathematician (who sees herself as the exception to the rule).  Their story appears to be similar to how Faludi profiled women in the New Right: they oppose feminism, but their family lives are quite progressive and non-traditional.

Susan Faludi, Backlash 5

I have two items for my write-up today on Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women:

1.  Faludi talks about how the backlash against the advancement of women encourages women to be “forever static and childlike” (page 70)—-when the entertainment media lacks assertive women (with some exceptions), when women are objectified, etc.  And, according to Faludi, this has occurred under the guise of supporting women, which is comparable to Ronald Reagan appropriating “populism to sell a political program that favored the rich” (page 71).

2.  Faludi talks about how the media perpetuates the myth that women are preferring to leave the work place and to come home, even though (1.) the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s statistics indicate that’s not true, and (2.) the women who do leave the work-place do so on account of discrimination, or their work-places not being flexible in allowing them to work and also to raise their children.

In my last post on this topic, I referred to Faludi’s argument that blue-collar males are merely receptors of the backlash against the advancement of women, which is being perpetuated by the elites.  In my reading today, Faludi said that the media is a mere receptor of prevailing cultural images.  I wonder where exactly the buck stops, in her eyes.  Who is not a mere receptor, but an actual perpetuator of the backlash?  And what is the motive of the perpetuators?  For Faludi, blue-collar men are blaming women because they are economically-insecure, and elites have presented women to them as convenient scapegoats.  The media merely reflects the backlash rather than being the origin of it, according to Faludi.  So what elites are perpetuating the backlash, and why?

Susan Faludi, Backlash 4

In my reading of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash, Faludi disputes conservative arguments against day-care, as well as discusses the historical backlash against the advancement of women whenever they have made progress.

Regarding day-care, she states that research demonstrates that day-care makes children “slightly more gregarious and independent” and helps them to profit because they meet a wider range of adults, plus day-care children are more broad-minded about gender roles (page 43).  She disputes the notion that there is an epidemic of abuse in day-care centers, noting that, statistically-speaking, there are much higher numbers of abuse at home.  She also refers to a 1982 National Academy of Sciences panel that concluded that “children suffer no ill effects in academic, social, or emotional development when mothers work” (her summary), and she states that research “offers scant evidence of diminished bonds between mother and child” (page 43).  Against the conservative argument that kids are more exposed to illnesses at day-care institutions, Faludi says that “the actual studies on child care and illness indicate that while children in day care are initially prone to more illnesses, they soon build up immunities and actually get sick less often than kids at home” (page 43).

Faludi notes that, while the media gives a lot of exposure to arguments attacking day-care, it does not highlight the studies that refute those arguments.  For Faludi, that is the case for a number of anti-feminist myths that are supported by studies (or supposedly supported, since Faludi argues that those studies are flawed), such as the myth that women need to get married right away rather than focusing on their career since their marriage prospects and their fertility decline with age.  According to Faludi, this is part of the backlash.

Faludi looks at backlashes in the mid-1800s, the early 1900s, the early 1940s, and the early 1970s.  In these cases, we see a pattern: Women are making advancements in terms of work or political rights, and those advancements are followed by a backlash—-an attempt by men and even a lot of women to reverse or clamp down on those advancements.  This has taken the form of laws that limit women’s opportunities in the work place, or opposition to laws that can help them to advance; criticism of feminism, even by one-time leaders of the feminist movement; efforts to restrict women’s reproductive independence; a view that women have already made great strides when their advancement has actually been meager; and the list goes on.  While Faludi focuses on the time-periods that I listed, she notices a pattern of backlash even before that—-for example, there was a “rise of restrictive property laws and penalties for unwed and childless women of ancient Rome” (page 47).

Why have there been backlashes?  Faludi states that the backlashes are often perpetuated by elites—-such as businessmen, politicians, the media, etc.  In my reading so far, she has not yet clued us in as to their motivation.  But she believes that the backlash is accepted by men in lower economic rungs, who feel economically insecure and blame the influx of women into the work-force for their predicament.  Faludi notes that the times of the backlashes are often times of economic insecurity.  And, for her, the stagnation of wages and the replacement of good manufacturing jobs with lower-paying service jobs in the 1980s have not helped matters.  While men blame women, Faludi contends that the blame is mis-placed, for women are actually taking a number of lower-paying jobs that men do not even want.  Faludi also states that men feel insecure and unhappy about women working because men root their self-worth in being providers for their family.

Faludi cites a lot of research.  Sometimes, I wonder how certain facts can co-exist.  For example, Faludi notes a trend of men becoming more conservative and women becoming more liberal.  She refers to a poll in which men applauded the Reagan 80s and feared that its economic gains would be reversed.  How could men applaud the Reagan 80s, when that is a time of economic insecurity?  Is the backlash so strong that they would see the Reagan 80s as a time of prosperity, even when they themselves are not prospering, and then blame women for their lack of prosperity?

Susan Faludi, Backlash 2

For my write-up today on Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash, I’ll use as my starting-point something that Faludi says on page 17:

“The mental health data, chronicled in dozens of studies that have looked at marital differences in the last forty years, are consistent and overwhelming: The suicide rate of single men is twice as high as that of married men.  Single men suffer from nearly twice as many severe neurotic symptoms and are far more susceptible to nervous breakdowns, depression, even nightmares.  And despite the all-American image of the carefree single cowboy, in reality bachelors are far more likely to be morose, passive, and phobic than married men.  When contrasted with single women, unwed men fared no better in mental health studies.  Single men suffer from twice as many mental health impairments as single women; they are more depressed, more passive, more likely to experience nervous breakdowns and all the designated symptoms of psychological distress—-from fainting to insomnia.  In one study, one third of the single men scored high for severe neurotic symptoms; only 4 percent of the single women did.”

In my latest reading of this book, Faludi was attempting to refute a study by Harvard and Yale researchers that stated that there was a man shortage and that women’s opportunities for marriage decreased as they grew older.  According to Faludi, the problems with this study were that they assumed that women usually marry men who are two-three years older than them, and that it only included 60,000 households.  Faludi cites a study by Jeanne Moorman of the U.S. Census Bureau, which looked at 13.4 million households and found that, while opportunities for marriage declined for women as they grew older, the percentages for the chances-at marriage-with-age were much higher than the Harvard-Yale study indicates, and that college-educated women at thirty were more likely to marry than their counterparts who only had a high-school diploma.  Faludi also cites the Census Bureau’s figures that there are 119 single men for every 100 single women.

The passage with which I opened this post fits into Faludi’s argument because it shows that there is not a man-shortage: that there are many men who actually want to get married.  Faludi talks about how matchmaking programs had much more men than women, and so women were offered huge discounts.  But Faludi states that the Harvard-Yale study scared single women to get more interested in finding a husband, for it convinced them that their opportunities to marry would dramatically decline as they got older.  The message that they got was that it’s now or never!

Of interest to me was how the media and the Reagan Administration did not publicize or sought to suppress Moorman’s findings.  According to Faludi, Moorman was told by Reagan Administration officials not to talk publicly about her findings on marriage because they were too controversial, and to focus instead on a study of how poor single mothers abused the welfare system.  For Faludi, a number of myths are being perpetuated, while voices that prove those myths wrong are ignored or kept secret.

The passage with which I opened this post stood out to me because I’ve wondered if I’d be happy being married.  I like my independence, but I can also understand why many men want feminine admiration, companionship, and support.  At first, I wondered if Faludi was being cold: Does she think that women should be neglecting marriage, when there are plenty of us depressed men who need them as our wives?  Faludi’s answer may be (and I’m guessing here) that there’s plenty of time for that—-that single women could someday desire marriage, and so men should wait.

Newt Gingrich’s Critique of Reagan; the Forging of Ron Paul’s Worldview

I have a couple of interesting political links for today:

1.  In honor of Reagan’s birthday, here is Newt Gingrich’s 1986 critique of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War policies.

2.  The New York Times has an article on Ron Paul and how he arrived at his political opinions over the course of his life.  There’s a lot of good stuff there, but perhaps the most jarring part concerned how Ron Paul became pro-life on the abortion issue:

“Abortion was still illegal, but, increasingly, legal exceptions were being made for psychiatric reasons. Mr. Paul traces his opposition to the procedure to the time when he wandered into an operating room there and saw a pregnancy terminated by Caesarean section, with a 2-pound fetus, delivered alive, left in a corner to try to breathe, try to cry, and die.”