A backlash against women’s rights is nothing new. Indeed it’s a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.
The economic victims of the era are men who who know someone has made off with their future- and they suspect the thief is a woman.
Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or “nuptialitis,” as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.
To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.
An accurate charting of American women’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.
For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.
The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation.
A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.
I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power – and it isn’t even clear who they are.
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women’s mental health: employment improves it.
Women are enslaved by their own liberation.
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.
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.
The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.
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.
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.
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.
At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.
Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.
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.
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.