Connie Marshner, Part 2

For this my final post of Women’s History Month 2012, I will look at something that Susan Faludi says about conservative activist Connie Marshner on page 243 of her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

“In the winter of 1974, [Connie] discovered she was pregnant.  ‘I assumed I would give it [the job] all up, but then we were dirt poor so I didn’t.’  [Her husband] Bill was in graduate school and she had no maternity medical benefits; her emergency delivery and seven-day hospital stay nearly wiped out their savings.  In 1976, she was pregnant again.  By then, she was holding down two jobs—-as a research consultant for the Heritage Foundation and a field coordinator for the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress.  And she had just accepted a publisher’s advance to write a book on education.  Bill, meanwhile, was enrolled in a divinity graduate program in Texas.  Rather than move west and sacrifice her work, Marshner stayed on in Washington and sent her one-year-old son to her mother’s house in Baltimore.  In the final months of the pregnancy she rejoined her family in Texas, so that her husband could handle the child care and cooking—-’thank goodness for Bill’—-while she finished the book, writing into the night.  ‘I was typing the final draft when I went into labor,’ she recalls.”

It’s tempting to assume that conservatives have no idea about the problems that lower and even middle income people face: women having to bring in a paycheck to support their family, and the threat of having one’s savings wiped out by medical bills.  That may be true with many conservatives, but there certainly are exceptions, as you can see in the passage above.  That said, why would Connie Marshner not support the government making things easier on families that are in the same predicament that hers was at some point—-by helping them with child care, housing, and health care?  Fortunately, she had extended family that could help her.  But what about people who do not have that kind of extended family support?  Perhaps Connie Marshner believes that the government makes things worse, or she supports conservative solutions to problems such as the high cost of health care.  One reason why I switched from Republican to Democrat, however, was that Republicans did not appear to me to be all that concerned about pushing for their proposals to reform health care.  The Democrats, by contrast, strike me as more concerned about the issue.

Connie Marshner

Connie Marshner is a conservative figure whom Susan Faludi discusses in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.  In this post, I’ll talk about the times when I have come across that name.

The first time that I came across the name “Connie Marshner” was when I was in high school.  I had an interest in political conservatism, and I was reading a book from my high school library: Alan Crawford’s Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment.  Crawford referred to Connie Marshner, a lady who became a conservative because she was rebelling against her liberal Catholic parents.  According to Crawford, Marshner wrote a widely-circulated critique of Walter Mondale’s bill for federally-funded child care in the 1970s.  I could identify with Crawford’s picture of Marshner for two reasons.  First of all, one reason that I was a conservative Republican was that I was rebelling against my parents and seeking my own identity.  My parents were not exactly die-hard liberals, for they had conservative ideas.  But my Mom was pro-choice on the abortion issue, and my Dad was so anti-establishment that he distrusted the Republicans and the institutions that they supported, not just the Democrats.  In reaction to that, I was a gun-ho right-wing Republican.  Second, I could identify with Marshner writing a critique of federally-funded child care, for a way that I expressed my conservatism in my high school days was through my writing: I wrote letters to the editor, and I also wrote a monthly newsletter offering a right-wing perspective on issues.  I didn’t become prominent like Marshner through my writing, but it was something that I enjoyed doing!

The second time that I came across the name “Connie Marshner” was when I was getting my M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School.  I had a break from my schoolwork, and I was spending that time reading William Martin’s excellent book With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America.  One of Martin’s chapters was about the White House Conference on Families during the Carter years.  Martin talked about how Connie Marshner led a conservative faction at that conference, a faction that defined the family as nuclear and opposed abortion, homosexuality, and a greater domestic role for the federal government.  I did not realize at the time that this lady was the same person in Alan Crawford’s book, but Martin’s discussion of the White House Conference on Families influenced me to start re-evaluating my right-wing conservatism (which was a long process that did not occur overnight, but Martin’s discussion was definitely a seed).  Martin referred to a philosophical difference between Marshner and John Carr, the executive director of the conference.  Marshner said that feeding the poor should be done by individuals and charities rather than the federal government, whereas Carr thought that private charities were not sufficient to tackle large societal problems.  I’ll quote what Carr said, which is on pages 187-188 of Martin’s book:

“What we’ve got in family policy and so many other areas is one group that says what we really need are better values—-more personal responsibility, more time with our kids; children need to stop having children; we need more sexual restraint; we need good old-fashioned morality.  Then another group says that what we really need are better policies—-better jobs that pay a living wage, better child care, better health care, less homelessness and hunger.  The fact is that we need both better values and better policies.  We need policies that reflect our best values.  Churches can’t feed every hungry person in America.  I go down to the soup kitchen and I bring my kids.  I think that’s part of what I’m called to do as a believer, but as a society we have got to do something about millions of hungry kids, and that’s not only by making lasagna and bringing it down to the soup kitchen.  It’s also by deciding what kind of policies, what kind of budget priorities we’re going to have, what kind of supports we’re going to give families.”

Carr criticized many of the right-wing delegates for encouraging polarization rather than seeking common ground, whereas Marshner believed that the conference was pushing an extreme left-wing agenda, an agenda that included expansion of the federal bureaucracy, which entailed inflation (as a result of more government spending), higher taxes, and the government supplanting the role of the family to provide for its own needs (in such areas as child care, housing, and health care); a guaranteed annual income and guaranteed jobs; and support for abortion-on-demand, gay rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment.  What surprised me was that Carr actually characterized Dr. James Dobson as a voice of moderation at the conference, for, although Dobson wrote a minority report, he also sought to build bridges and find common ground, as well as declined to walk out of the conference with other conservative delegates.

Reading about Connie Marshner’s stand at the White House Conference on Families was not the same as watching it on television!  Years later, I watched the television documentary With God on Our Side, which was related to Martin’s book.  Although my reaction to what Marshner says changes whenever I watch the episode about the White House Conference on Families (from thunderous applause, to annoyance that she is focusing on trivialities when there are poor families that need help, to seeing her point-of-view as valid), I’ve had to admire her because she is bold, articulate, attractive, stands up to the powerful, etc.  I especially like the scene of the documentary in which she is on the Today Show and she says to Jim Guy Tucker (who was the chair of the conference and was an Arkansas congressman at the time), “Come now, Jim Guy, let’s not con the audience.”  When I saw her on TV, I did not remember that she was the same person as the lady in Martin’s book.  But I was thinking to myself, “Who is SHE?  And why don’t I see her on TV nowadays?”

It turned out that, for years, she was raising her family at home, even as she was writing books.  But it’s been interesting what I’ve found whenever I’ve searched her name on the Internet.  I’ve found some articles that she has written, such as one against expanding S-CHIP, and another arguing (if I recall correctly) that contraception is not effective in protecting teens against certain STDs.  Although there is not a wikipedia article about Connie, there is one about her theologian husband, William.  I was surprised to read the late conservative activist and Connie’s mentor, Paul Weyrich, saying that Connie was shy and learned to come out of her shell (which I liked because I myself am shy).  And I learned that Connie has a business nowadays, Connie Marshner and Associates, which helps people in fund-raising and organizational development.  On her web site, she tells potential clients about her network, which she gained as a leader of the religious right.

Tomorrow, I’ll refer to something about Connie Marshner that I learned from Susan Faludi’s Backlash.

Nancy Barrett, “Poverty, Welfare, and Comparable Worth”

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly edited a 1984 book entitled Equal Pay for UNequal Work: A Conference on Comparable Worth.  I do not plan on reading the entire book right now, but I may do that for a future Women’s History Month (since what I have read so far has been good, even when I disagree).  Yet, I have been blogging about select presentations within it.

What intrigued me as I was looking through the book last night was that Schlafly included three presentations that defended comparable worth—-a policy that mandates some form of pay equity between men and women.  Most of the presentations in the book are by conservatives who are critical of the policy—-who argue that there are legitimate reasons for pay inequity that have nothing to do with discrimination, that comparable worth results in equal pay for unequal work (since women have different jobs from men), or that comparable worth would impose a costly burden on businesses.  But three speakers went to Phyllis Schlafly’s conference and actually defended comparable worth in the presence of an audience of conservatives.  The pro-comparable worth presentation that I read was by Nancy Barrett, an economist at American University who received her Ph.D. in economics at Harvard and has worked for the U.S. Department of Labor and the Urban Institute.

Barrett interacts with presentations that appear later in the book, for the book is organized topically rather than according to the order of the presentations as they occurred at the conference.  I read and blogged about some of the presentations that she discusses, such as the ones by George Gilder and Michael Levin.  I especially appreciated that Barrett was trying to find common ground with conservatives, as she acknowledged that the conservative presenters raised valid concerns about comparable worth.  She did this in two ways.

First of all, Barrett acknowledged that George Gilder had valid concerns about welfare, and she affirmed that getting people off of welfare was important.  But she did not think that cutting benefits really solved anything.  After all, the government under Reagan cut benefits and more people then went on welfare, with the result that more money was being spent on it.  Barrett argues that comparable worth—-paying women more—-can help single mothers to support their families and thus keep them off welfare.  She contends that a reason that men are paid more than women (as at hospitals, where men tree-trimmers are paid more than women nurses) is that men are seen as household providers.  But Barrett contends that employers should remember that women, too, are providing for their families.  Barrett also expresses openness to a guaranteed national income (a negative income tax), which was proposed, not by some wild-eyed liberal, but by conservative economist Milton Friedman.

Second, Barrett acknowledges the concern that comparable worth could burden businesses, and she agrees that it would be wrong to make businesses swallow the cost.  One solution she has is to make the women’s jobs more productive, or to give women more productive jobs.  Barrett maintains that, with the right equipment and technology, women can be just as productive as men.  Barrett notes that union firms are higher in productivity than non-union firms because firms with unions “are forced to economize on labor and they do it by getting more capital equipment and organizing work more efficiently” (page 31).  That, even though unions get high pay for the workers.  For Barrett, more production will take care of whatever cost comparable worth imposes.  Another solution Barrett has is that “firms that do raise pay for ‘disadvantaged occupations’ get special tax incentives or tax credits for capital equipment that will raise the productivity of these workers” (page 32).

It would be nice if Barrett’s presentation had some influence on the conservatives at the conference.  When I read Judith Finn of Eagle Forum’s overview of the conference, however, I was not overly optimistic, for Finn refers to Barrett to show that advocates for comparable worth vacillate between saying that women should be paid the same as men because they make as much of a contribution to the business and saying that women should be paid the same due to social justice, since women raise families.  While Finn acknowledges that there was a time when men were given job preference because they were the providers, she does not appear to absorb Barrett’s points, but rather appeals to them to highlight inconsistencies in the arguments of comparable worth supporters.

I liked Barrett’s presentation, though.

Michael Levin, “The Earnings Gap and Family Choices”

An anti-feminist intellectual whom Susan Faludi profiles in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is Michael Levin.  In this post, I will talk about a presentation that Michael Levin gave, which is in a 1984 book that Phyllis Schlafly edited: Equal Pay for UNequal Work: A Conference on Comparable Worth.  It is entitled “The Earnings Gap and Family Choices”.

In essence, many of Levin’s arguments overlap with those of George Gilder, whose essays I discussed yesterday.  Levin maintains that women are not paid as much as men because they gravitate towards jobs that pay less and do not spend as much time working as men do.  Levin cites statistics, and he also refers to studies about the proficiencies of women as compared to the proficiencies of men (i.e., women are talented in performing repetitive tasks, according to certain neurologists).  Levin made an argument that Gilder also made, which I forgot when I wrote my post on Gilder: that women are paid less than men because a large number of women are competing for certain jobs, with the result that companies do not have to pay much to attract women to those occupations.  It’s a matter of supply and demand, according to Levin!  On a similar note, Levin attributes the increasing gap between male and female wages to the reality that, in the 1950′s, women wanted jobs, and so companies paid more to attract them.  In the 1980′s, by contrast, women needed jobs, and so they were more at the mercy of the companies, which could pay them less.

Although Levin dismisses the view that wage disparity is a problem, saying that the wages of married women are being combined with the wages of their husbands, he does have a degree of compassion for the plight of employed women.  He just thinks that the solution is lower taxes and reducing government spending, which can bring down inflation.  Requiring businesses to provide day-care and to pay women more will contribute to inflation, in his eyes.

In a number of cases, I thought that Levin did well to cite statistics, as when he referred to a 1981 study by the Urban Institute comparing how many hours men and women work on the job.  In one case, though, I thought that he should have cited a more appropriate statistic.  Levin was arguing that women do not work as much as men because of their domestic responsibilities, and that single women, who do not have these responsibilities, do not experience as much of a wage gap with men.  Levin then goes on to refer to the wage ratio in Canada between single women and men, which is 99.2%.  In my opinion, he should have mentioned that ratio in America, not Canada.  Whether or not Levin’s argument would apply here in terms of statistics, I do not know, but I did learn from Susan Faludi’s book that single mothers struggle economically.

On page 131, Levin states that “Women in every culture have been the ones responsible for childcare and allied domestic tasks, while men have pursued extrafamilial activities.”  Elsewhere in the presentation, however, I get the impression that he acknowledges exceptions to this generalization.  He says on page 132: “Liberated female mammals, as heedless of their offspring as male animals tend to be and as feminists would like human females to be, went extinct a long time ago.”  Yet, in his mind (it seems), that set-up did exist at one point!  On page 134, he states: “Left to their own devices, responding to the contingencies of the environment and the unalterable constraints of the human condition, men and women in modern technological society develop skills which tend to be exchangeable in a ratio of roughly 6:10.  In other societies the ratio might be different.”  So there can be a degree of variety in how societies arrange their responsibilities.  Overall, though, Levin appears to believe that traditional gender roles are logical, and perhaps even natural: women are nurturers who have children and bond with them, whereas men are strong and competitive and thus provide for their families.  See here for my post on Rosemary Ruether’s discussion of gender roles.

George Gilder and Susan Faludi

For today’s Women’s History Month post, I will talk about two articles by conservative economist George Gilder, whom Susan Faludi talks about in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.  The first article is “The Relationship of Women to Wealth and Poverty”, and it appeared in a 1984 book that conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly edited, entitled Equal Pay for UNequal Work: A Conference on Comparable Worth.  The second article is “Child Care in a Gender-Neutral Society, and it appeared in a 1989 book that Schlafly edited, entitled Who Will Rock the Cradle? Two Conferences on Child Care.

Gilder believes that the nuclear family is essential for a growing economy, for men are particularly motivated to work when they have to support their families.  As a matter of fact, Gilder maintains that the shift from the extended to the nuclear family played a significant role in the rise of the industrial revolution.  Consequently, Gilder thinks that society should support, promote, and encourage the nuclear family rather than families headed by single-mothers or couples who do not have children.  That’s a reason that religion is so important, Gilder argues: it promotes monogamy.  Gilder regards families headed by single-mothers and couples who do not have children as parasitic, for many single mothers are poor, their children are more likely to become delinquents than kids from a nuclear family, and people who do not have children are being supported in their old age by other people’s children, through Social Security.  Gilder believes that the United States does the opposite of what it should be doing, however, for, although fathers who head the nuclear family are increasing in their incomes, taxes are a burden on them.  Meanwhile, welfare programs subsidize single-parent families, and that discourages single mothers from getting married, for their needs are already being met by the government.  Gilder quotes Jack Kemp, who said that “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it.”

Gilder thinks that women should get married when they are in their twenties.  At least in these articles, he buys into an idea that Susan Faludi spends pages trying to refute—-that women decrease their chances of getting married the longer that they wait.  For Gilder, the feminist movement is so abrasive because its adherents realize that they have made the wrong decision and are going overboard trying to justify it.  Gilder seems to believe that women should stay home with the children and should wait until their children are grown before pursuing a career.  Gilder regards women as nurturers, and he also thinks that women gravitate towards the home.  He cites a poll that indicates that women prefer part-time work over full-time work, and he believes that this is because women desire flexibility so that they can take care of their kids.  The reason that women are paid less than men, according to Gilder, is that men work harder, and women are not willing to put in the time and the energy to do what is necessary to make a higher income, since that would interfere with their parental duties.  Women also gravitate towards sedentary jobs rather than jobs that demand intense physical labor, and so Gilder thinks that it is mistaken to treat men and women as exactly the same.  Gilder also believes that federal funding for child care is a bad idea, for it takes mothers out of the home, thereby depriving children of a mother, and it also puts women in competition for work with men who are trying to support their nuclear families.  Because Gilder would prefer for women to stay at home raising the kids, he is critical of certain conservative proposals for welfare-reform, which encourage workfare and support child care institutions.

So Gilder believes that the nuclear family is necessary for a prosperous economy.  Yet, he notes that Sweden is one of the richest countries in the world and has an “illegitimacy rate” of 40 per cent.  Does that undermine his argument by showing that a country can be prosperous yet be deficient in the area of the nuclear family?  Not so fast.  Gilder states that European welfare states “have gained virtually all their growth for a decade from increased government consumption and exports to America.”  Gilder’s point here may be that the prosperity of the European welfare states is dependent on the United States, where the nuclear family is the bedrock of its strong economy.

How would Susan Faludi respond to these arguments?  In Backlash, she makes some claims that may strike one as contradictory, or as demonstrative of how complex reality is:

On the one hand, Faludi argues that no-fault divorce does not hurt children because the women eventually recuperate from the economic setbacks of the divorce and make more money.  This appears to undermine Gilder’s argument that single-parent families are generally poorer than nuclear families.  On the other hand, Faludi presents the economic plight of single women who are struggling to raise their kids on their own, yet have to deal with a discriminatory workplace that does not pay them the same as men and that prefers for them not to be there in the first place.

On the one hand, Faludi argues that women are not competing with men for jobs because the work that they’re doing is often low-income work that men don’t want to do anyway.  On the other hand, she does present women seeking the jobs that men are doing and finding fulfillment in work outside of the home.  She thinks this undermines the conservative argument that women do not want those jobs that men are doing, and she also believes that women are justified to seek more fulfilling occupations.  Against the argument that they end up competing with men who have families to support, Faludi notes that the women have to support families as well.

On the one hand, Faludi believes that women are willing to do full-time work.  On the other hand, she notes that they leave their jobs reluctantly because the workplace will not provide them with a flexible schedule, which takes into account their parental responsibilities.  Faludi believes that federally-funded day care can take care of a lot of this, and, unlike Gilder, she does not think that everything the federal government sets its hand to do will be disastrous.  She argues that day care is a place where children can learn social skills, and that federally-funded day care is better than other kinds of day care because less abuse occurs in institutions that are federally funded and certified.

As far as I could tell, Faludi does not interact with the conservative argument that men are more suited than women for physically-demanding labor.  But she does argue that women are discriminated against regarding sedentary jobs as well, and other jobs that do not have intense physical requirements.

Faludi would probably also disagree with what seems to be Gilder’s solution to the problem of female poverty—-to encourage women to marry—-for she discusses examples of abuse and unhappiness within marriages.  She does appear to want for women to have a degree of independence and autonomy so that, if they’re in a relationship, it’s because they want to be in it, not because they have to be in it.

I think that both Gilder and Faludi make good points, but I doubt that either comes up with a comprehensive narrative that takes everything and everyone into consideration.

Abby Johnson’s Conversion

I was rummaging through some old papers recently, and I found something that I picked up at the Latin mass that I attended in Cincinnati.  It was the Cincinnati Right to Life News Brief, and it was talking about Abby Johnson, who worked (and eventually became director) at the Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas—-until she became a pro-lifer.

Abby narrates that she became a pro-lifer when she was performing an abortion on ultrasound.  “I could see the whole profile of the baby 13 weeks head to foot”, she says.  “I could see the probe.  I could see the baby try to move away from the probe.”  Abby witnessed the baby crumble as it was vacuumed out of the lady’s uterus.  As this procedure was occurring, Abby realized that she and her husband had recently seen an ultrasound picture of their own baby, who was the same age.

Abby’s story has been disputed.  According to the documented wikipedia article about her: “Johnson’s description of her conversion has been questioned. Planned Parenthood stated that its records do not show any ultrasound-guided abortions performed on the date when Johnson says she witnessed the procedure, and the physician who performed abortions at the Bryan clinic stated that Johnson had never been asked to assist in an abortion. Although Johnson said the abortion was of a 13-week-old fetus, records from the Texas Department of Health show no such abortions performed at the Bryan Clinic on the date in question.”

In my opinion, even if Abby’s account of events is incorrect, her point is still valid.  Unborn babies still crumble when they are vacuumed out of the uterus.  And it is ironic that expectant parents can see ultrasounds of their unborn children and rejoice, whereas children that are that very same age somewhere in America are being eliminated through abortion.  Something’s not right here.

Susan Faludi argues in Backlash that the anti-abortion movement is about economically-insecure men who are worried about losing control of their women.  That is probably a generalization, for there are women in the pro-life movement, but Faludi may have a point somewhere in there.  Why, after all, are these men so agitated over abortion, when there are innocent people dying from all sorts of other things that don’t appear to be on their radar?  What draws these men’s attention to the abortion issue, exactly?  Moreover, Faludi may have a point that opposition to abortion has historically served to keep women down.

Still, I wish that pro-choice feminists would at least realize that what pro-lifers say about abortion could have some validity: that there is a problem when an unborn child is being vacuumed out of the uterus in a clinic, when elsewhere a child that very same age is being celebrated by expectant parents.

Does that mean that we should all become right-wing Republicans?  I personally don’t go that route.  I recognize that abortion is not a decision that is reached lightly, for having children takes a physical and an economic toll on women.  I also do not believe that simply banning abortion will solve the problem, for, as Faludi notes, there are countries that ban abortion that have high abortion rates.  Meanwhile, there are countries where abortion is legal and yet the abortion rate is lower, and these countries provide universal health care.  Overall, I wish that both sides of the debate would acknowledge the strengths of the other side: that pro-choicers would not reduce the entire debate to “choice” but would see that abortion is problematic, and that pro-lifers would do more to create a society that supports women who are having children.

Charlotte Allen’s Critique of Susan Faludi’s Backlash

For this post, I will share some comments that I read on Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. I will focus primarily on a February 1992 article by Charlotte Low Allen in Commentary, but I will also bring into my discussion a comment by an Amazon reviewer who goes by the name “Hieronymus Braintree” (see here).

Overall, I did not care for Allen’s piece.  Allen spent a lot of time making fun of Faludi’s book, without refuting Faludi’s overall argument—-that there is a cultural push for women to retreat from the workplace into the domestic sphere, even though many women feel fulfilled when they are working for money.  For example, Allen states:

“Backlash, an exceedingly long book, is also representative of the prolix new genre of 80′s-bashing, already a little tired though we are only two years into the 90′s. Most 80′s-bashing books fixate on junk bonds and undertenanted office towers, twin symbols of the debt-loaded culture of the Reagan era. To Faludi, the same decade also witnessed a ‘backlash’ against feminism that ‘moved through the culture’s secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear.’…Faludi, a Wall Street Journal reporter, writes with a journalist’s easy flair and an occasional striking turn of phrase reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich, who works the same ideological turf in a much more original fashion. (Ehrenreich has her own 80′s-basher out, tellingly titled The Worst Years of Our Lives.)”

So Faludi bashes the 80s.  Perhaps the 80s were not perfect but had their flaws like every other decade.  And so what if the 80s are over?  Faludi believes that developments in that decade had profound and lasting effects on the American economy, such as the stagnation of wages and the decline of American manufacturing. And so what if Faludi was not terribly original (which is not to say that Allen is right on this, but let’s assume that Allen is correct)?  Faludi is talking about real-life injustices here.  That shouldn’t be blithely dismissed by treating Faludi’s book as a theater-critic would treat a movie.

There was one time (as far as I could see) in which Allen presented a fact that contradicted Faludi’s thesis.  Allen states: “Did George Bush happen to get 49 to 50 percent of the female vote in the 1988 election? That was ‘not a real majority,’ sniffs Faludi.”  Similarly, Hieronymus Braintree in his Amazon review accuses Faludi of cherry-picking facts: “For example, she paints Republican administrations as being totally antithetical to the ambitions of women but omits any mention of Reagan’s appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court or the fact that the first Bush administration had twice as many women in it as Carter’s.”  Granted, life is too complex to boil down into a neat thesis that takes all factors into consideration.  But does that mean that Faludi is not noticing real-life problems?  She provides enough statistics and anecdotes to convince me that she’s on to something, even though there may be times when I have a hunch that there is another side to the story or a feeling that perhaps issues are more complex than Faludi is presenting.

I didn’t particularly care for this line from Allen: “Faludi faults Gary Bauer because his wife is a full-time homemaker. Then she turns around and faults Michael Levin, an anti-feminist professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, because his wife has a career as a mathematician. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.”  In my opinion, what was significant in Faludi’s discussion of these figures was the commonalities that she observed: that women had a desire to be fulfilled outside of the home and that they enjoyed working outside of the domestic sphere.

But Allen did make good points.  Here are some of them, along with my responses:

After quoting Faludi, Allen states that Faludi’s argument is slippery because it is “impossible to gainsay.”  Allen elaborates:

“It requires no proof; indeed, the very lack of proof demonstrates the insidiousness of the phenomenon, a seamless and invisible spider web stretching into every corner of contemporary culture. By maintaining that the backlash is a ‘movement’ yet not an ‘organized’ movement, a ‘struggle’ that appears ‘not to be a struggle at all,’ a chimera-like phenomenon that exists now as concrete ‘threats’ from the militant Right, now as mere media-generated ‘ephemera,’ now as disembodied feelings ‘in a woman’s mind’ with no objective correlatives whatsoever, Faludi can have it all ways, can seize all sticks with which to beat her opponents.”

I thought that Faludi did a decent job in demonstrating that there is a backlash against the advancement of women and that similar backlashes have occurred throughout history.  But I was disappointed that Faludi did not offer ideas about who or what was perpetuating the backlash, and why.  She said that insecure blue-collar workers are not responsible for the backlash because they are absorbing ideas from the elites, and that the media are not responsible for it because they are merely receptors.  So who is responsible for it?  Right-wing men from the elite who do not want women on what they consider to be their turf?  Even if Faludi does not consider the backlash to be a conspiracy, I think that she should have spent some time explaining why there was a backlash, rather than merely demonstrating that a backlash exists.

Allen states: “In truth, feminism is merely a part of a larger and longer-range trend of universal liberation, not just from oppressive husbands and fathers but from all demands, erotic and otherwise, that have seemed burdensome, annoying, or irrational. People in general have become free to pursue their self-interest—careers, wealth accumulation, romantic passions, sexual desires—unhindered…Or, looking back further in time, one might see feminism’s roots in the Enlightenment idea of the social contract: people would be better off if their ties to others and to institutions were strictly voluntary, a matter of rational choice directed by mutual self-interest. This has naturally wreaked havoc upon the family, for hardly anyone would freely choose the grab-bag of embarrassing and uncongenial characters who happen to be his relatives. Having first stripped the family of its tribal, multigenerational character, social-contract theory then went to work on marriage itself—hence, easy divorce, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement.”

While it’s easy to conclude that Faludi thinks this way, since Faludi does appear to be down on the domestic sphere, I do not believe that she ultimately does.  At times, she argues that women can have both careers and also families, and she praises men and women cooperating so that this can occur.  She does not believe that no-fault divorce is necessarily harmful for children (after all, parents fighting with each other can hurt the children, too), and she wants for the government to make things easier on women who work and have families—-either because it’s economically necessary for them to work outside of the home (since the family depends on their income), or because they are seeking fulfillment.  I do not believe that Faludi is anti-family.  I just wish that, in her book, she spent more time affirming the importance of family.  When she praises women who delay marriage and children (and, in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that), one can easily get the impression that she is down on those things.

Allen states: “Many women have found universal liberation to be as disturbing as it is supposed to be exhilarating. The disruption of traditional courtship and marriage patterns that has accompanied liberation means that young middle-class women spend years wondering when and where they will ever find a husband, all the while feeling varying degrees of dissatisfaction, contempt, and rage at the men they do meet and sleep with, or fight off sleeping with. Women who marry discover that it is more exhausting than glamorous to pursue a career outside the home while being a wife, let alone a mother of small children, at the same time.  Perhaps, as Susan Faludi suggests, it is wrong and reactionary for women to want to be wives and mothers—status roles left over from the days before all human relationships became matters of the marketplace. Yet most women do so want, and if Susan Faludi means to ‘liberate’ them from those desires, she is talking about liberating them from womanhood itself. No wonder American women feel so ambivalent about feminism. Today, they will read Backlash; tomorrow, it will be Smart Women, Foolish Choices. Today, they will fret about the ‘glass ceiling’; tomorrow, they will have their chins resculpted. They will feel faintly discontented or wildly desperate. They will blame it on feminism, or on men, or on the media, or on themselves. But it is not a backlash. It is more a case of wanting and not really wanting to go back.”

Allen presents women as people who don’t really know what they want: they seek fulfillment outside of the home, yet they also long for the domestic sphere.  I thought that Faludi did an excellent job demonstrating that many women are fulfilled when they are working outside of the home.  At the same time, the impression that I got was that she felt that women who craved a husband, children, and physical beauty were merely absorbing the values of the backlash.  I find that approach to be one-sided, based on the women whom I have known.  In my opinion, Faludi really shone when she argued that women could have it all, as well as advocated society making it easier for them to have it all.  I wish I had seen more of that in Faludi’s book.

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I finished Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.  Specifically, I read the end-notes and the Acknowledgments.  I have three items:

1.  I have long heard the argument (and when I was a conservative I used the argument) that the conservative group Concerned Women for America speaks for more women than the feminist National Organization for Women because CWA has far more members than NOW.  On pages 507-508, Faludi responds to that claim:

“Barrie Lyons, Beverly LaHaye’s sister and CWA’s vice-president, told an interviewer that the organization arrived at a figure of a half-million constituents by counting as a member anyone who expressed ‘interest’ in the group by requesting a newsletter or signing a petition.  About 150,000 women, on the other hand, were actually official members who paid the minimum $15 dues each year.  Most of the media, however, accepted CWA’s inflated roster claims.  A Time cover story, for example, described CWA as having more members ‘than the combined following of the National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the League of Women’s Voters.’  (‘Jerry Falwell’s Crusade,’ Time, Sept. 2, 1985.)  NOW, in fact, had more dues-paying members than CWA.”

2.  I talked a few days ago about the Supreme Court decision Johnson vs. Santa Clara County (see here), in which Paul Johnson made a claim of reverse discrimination when Diane Joyce was hired (as a result of her seeking affirmative action) instead of him.  Faludi argues that Joyce was actually more qualified, but, in the endnotes, on pages 529-530, she provides more nuance, even as she effectively reaffirms her central point that discrimination against women is alive:

“The county’s ‘Rule of Seven’ hiring policy mandates that the applicants with the top seven scores be treated as equally qualified for the job, because the differences in the top scores are typically minimal.  Later in the press, Johnson would nonetheless make much of the two-point difference between his and Joyce’s scores—-citing it as proof that he was ‘better qualified.’  What Johnson failed to mention when he made this claim, however, was that when Joyce had applied for a county foreman’s job in 1985, she ranked first on the orals test—-yet lost out to the man who scored fifth.”

3.  As an aspiring academic, I appreciated Faludi’s acknowledgments, in which she described the process of developing a crisp thesis, which was muddled at first.  She acknowledged the role that discussions with others played in arriving at that crisp thesis.  I can identify with this process.

Tomorrow, I will look some at critiques of Faludi’s Backlash.

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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.

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In my latest reading of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi talks about how the anti-abortion movement—-along with its sympathizers among individuals, politicians, and judges—-has created an environment in which it is very difficult for women in the United States to get a safe and legal abortion.  But the demand for abortion has not gone down, and so women are driven to the back-alley, where abortions have a greater potential to be unsafe for the mother.  Faludi also discusses a growing tendency to obsess over the health of the fetus—-to go after pregnant women who are smoking, drinking alcohol, or eating unhealthily.

My reading of Faludi was making me mad.  I could see her point that there is a trend to prioritize the unborn baby (or, according to Faludi, the “fetus”) over the mother.  Many women who have abortions do not make the decisions lightly, for there is a physical, emotional, financial, and vocational toll that accompanies pregnancy and having children.  But, at first, I felt that Faludi was going to the opposite extreme, in that she was devaluing the unborn baby in favor of the mother.

But I thought that Faludi then went on to make a decent case that current trends are not helping the unborn babies, either.  As Faludi states on page 426: “At the same time that legislators were assailing low-income mothers for failing to take care of their fetuses, they were making devastating cuts in the very services that poor pregnant women need to meet the lawmakers’ demands.  How was an impoverished woman supposed to deliver a healthy fetus when she was denied prenatal care, nutrition supplements, welfare payments, and housing assistance?”  According to Faludi, “severe rollbacks in health insurance and available medical care in the early ’80s”—-including the reductions in Medicaid—-slowed the decline in infant mortality, for “The leading causes of early infant deaths in the ’80s weren’t drug related; they were ailments like influenza, infections, and pneumonia, all easily prevented or treated by basic health care” (page 428).  And even treatment for low-income pregnant drug addicts was declining, Faludi documents.  Moreover, with all of the alleged concern for the well-being of the fetus, putting pregnant women in jail certainly did not help their unborn child, as Faludi notes (even though she does not call him or her the unborn child).