Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Be critical...

Before deciding whether to spend your time reading this book, check out Christina Hoffman Sommers' book: Who stole feminism? She mentions this book throughout her book, which is good, by the way.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

An Intellectual masterpeice

I read this book and found it very educational. Faludi looks at the state of women's rights in the Reagan years. One of the most helpful chapters was her look at the American Pro-life camp. She allows readers to see that this group are not in the business of 'saving babies' but using fetuses as a catalyst to legally put women in the victorian and non-treatening mold they find most comfortable. That of demure, passive, nurturing wife and mother.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book is a feminist 'Bible'

This is my favorite book ever. It is an important resource for people born in the eighties and nineties, to get a handle on what happened after the civil rights and women's movements, and how the political parties shifted to the right, etc. It really puts the current 'backlash' or resistance to feminism in a historical perspective. The words feminist and feminism first were used around 1900 (before women had the right to vote) and the meaning has never changed. A feminist is a person who believes that women should have political, social and economic equality with men. There have been other backlashes (such as in the 1920s after women got the right to vote)--and this one, too, shall pass. As Faludi makes clear in this book, society was first declared 'post-feminist' in the 1920s--not the 1980s. American history, from the founding of this country, demonstrates the continuing need for feminism and how the simpliest most obvious demands women have made (like that for 'voluntary motherhood,' universal health care, equal pay for equal work and for individual men to shoulder half the household duties) have for the most part went unanswered for almost 250 years now. . . .

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

A reviewer

I found this book interesting and well written, but maybe a bit over the top. Listening to Ms. Faludi's recent interview on bn.com, she's an intelligent and likeable person. She's also not afraid to tell you what she thinks...for a good 500 pages. This is an apparently well researched book, but not being a scholar of feminism, I can't place it in its proper historical context. She seems to be trying to get a reaction out of people, however, with a bit of shock value, and I thought a journalist wasn't supposed to do that? It's fun to draw a comparison between Ms. Faludi and Elizabeth Wurtzel, who's the author of Prozac Nation and other controversial books. The two women: are similar in age, are Harvard graduates trained in journalism, are dare I say attractive, do not censor their speech (or at least their writings), seem to enjoy getting a reaction out of people, probably have plenty of detractors (Wurtzel certainly does), are feminists (slightly more overtly in the case of Ms. Faludi), had hugely successful books at a young age. Maybe the two are friends!

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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