Book Review: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
One of my grand reading "plans" that I always seem to have but rarely goes anywhere is my "Read the Things I Studied in College" plan. (The other is my "Read the Books Mentioned in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.") It's not that I wouldn't have wanted to read these books during college, but we were usually assigned them in excerpted form in an anthology. Classes like Survey of Western Political Theory and History of Feminism were big on this, and both of them have interesting enough books that I've wanted to discover them in their unexpunged version.
Recently, I read one of the History of Feminism books: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Written by Susan Faludi in the early 1990s, the book's central premise is that after the women's rights successes of the 1970s, various cultural forces congealed to form a "backlash" against women that succeeded in stopping their success, beginning a slow chip away at women's rights and blaming all of women's problems on feminism. I really like the title of the book, and its subtitle, although while reading the book I would sometimes amuse myself by thinking up alternate but still appropriate subtitles, like Backlash: I DON'T Love the '80s or Backlash: You Think Dubya Was Bad? REAGAN, Bitches! Although I don't know if Faludi would approve of my use of the word "Bitches!"
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Recently, I read one of the History of Feminism books: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Written by Susan Faludi in the early 1990s, the book's central premise is that after the women's rights successes of the 1970s, various cultural forces congealed to form a "backlash" against women that succeeded in stopping their success, beginning a slow chip away at women's rights and blaming all of women's problems on feminism. I really like the title of the book, and its subtitle, although while reading the book I would sometimes amuse myself by thinking up alternate but still appropriate subtitles, like Backlash: I DON'T Love the '80s or Backlash: You Think Dubya Was Bad? REAGAN, Bitches! Although I don't know if Faludi would approve of my use of the word "Bitches!"
( Read more... )