Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is an investigation of how the United States in the 1980s told women that feminism had made them unhappy. Its central move is to treat stories about marriage, fertility, work and popular culture not as isolated opinions, but as claims that acquire authority through repetition across journalism, entertainment, advertising and politics. The book first appeared in 1991 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Faludi’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize was for a separate Wall Street Journal investigation of the human costs of Safeway’s leveraged buyout; it was not an award for this book. The ISBN listed here identifies the 2006 15th-anniversary edition, which adds a new preface.

Faludi’s method is a form of investigative media criticism: she follows a persuasive “trend” back to the data, institutions and editorial decisions that produced it. The point is not simply that a headline can be wrong. A repeated account can make an existing political arrangement feel like common sense: if women are said to be lonely, infertile or exhausted because they pursued equality, then unequal care arrangements and barriers to work disappear from view. The alleged remedy becomes women’s retreat, rather than collective change to the conditions under which they work, parent and exercise autonomy.

The marriage-statistic story makes this method concrete. A widely circulated 1986 claim said that an educated woman who remained unmarried at thirty faced only a 20-percent chance of ever marrying; a related line suggested that a forty-year-old woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband. In her 2022 retrospective on the book, Molly Fischer recounts Faludi’s reporting: the study behind the first figure was unfinished and unpublished, rested on inaccurate assumptions and an unrepresentative data set, while the terrorist comparison had no research basis. Census Bureau demographer Jeanne Moorman’s recalculation put the hypothetical thirty-year-old’s marriage odds much higher, near 60 percent. The episode shows how a number can pass from a tentative research exercise to a cultural verdict, while attempts to correct it struggle to travel as far as the original alarm.

Faludi traces a related feedback loop around Fatal Attraction. In Fischer’s account of her reporting, the film grew from a short film about a married man confronting his responsibility for hurting a stranger; producer Sherry Lansing said she initially sympathized with the woman, while later production choices made her more predatory. After release, the film’s image of an independent woman as dangerous could then be cited as confirmation of the social fear the story helped circulate. The feminist question is not whether every film has one political meaning; it is how decisions about whose interior life is legible, whose anger is rendered monstrous and whose fear is treated as reasonable become available for wider social use.

Faludi places these media stories beside arguments about work, care and reproductive rights. Claims about career “burnout” or an infertility “epidemic” often privatize problems whose conditions are social: insecure employment, inadequate childcare, unequal domestic labor and policies that limit bodily autonomy. The book’s final sections move from cultural representation to the political consequences of treating women primarily as potential mothers. That movement gives the title’s “undeclared war” a material dimension: rhetoric matters because it can legitimize decisions about public services, employment and reproductive life, not because representation alone explains every policy outcome.

The book’s reach is also its limit. Molly Fischer notes that Faludi’s most sustained public frame centers an audience that was overwhelmingly white, middle-class and heterosexual, with only brief attention to the right’s particular vilification of Black women. That does not erase the value of her source-tracing; it does mean the book cannot stand for every woman’s experience of 1980s antifeminism. A further theoretical question concerns time. Victoria Browne’s later Hypatia article reads a tension between Faludi’s image of social change as stepwise progress and the book’s account of backlash as recurring repetition. If every recurrence is described only as a setback from an assumed forward path, feminist politics may have difficulty recognizing changes, uneven gains and new forms of resistance. This is a later critique of the framework, not a disproof of the individual investigations.

Read Backlash as both a historically situated record of Reagan-era media and a toolkit for asking who produced a “trend,” what evidence it rests on, whose choices it disciplines, and which structural alternatives it makes difficult to imagine. Its strongest continuing lesson is methodological: verify the statistic, follow its circulation and examine how an apparent personal failure is connected to policy and material life. Its U.S. focus and its period’s language should remain visible when applying that method elsewhere. For edition details see the publisher’s record; the distinction between the book award and Faludi’s separate journalism Pulitzer is documented by the Pulitzer archive. Molly Fischer’s 2022 retrospective, Victoria Browne’s Hypatia abstract and Ann Braithwaite’s article on the later use of “backlash” offer distinct ways to revisit the book’s evidence and its conceptual afterlife.