Brian Ragen; Brian Abel Ragen:Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion (Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers)
- Taschenbuch 2002, ISBN: 9780313313837
Gebundene Ausgabe
Crown Publishers, Incorporated. Good. 159 x 236mm. Paperback. 1992. 618 pages. Cover worn.<br>Winner of the National Book Critics Cir cle award for nonfiction, this controversial, t… Mehr…
Crown Publishers, Incorporated. Good. 159 x 236mm. Paperback. 1992. 618 pages. Cover worn.<br>Winner of the National Book Critics Cir cle award for nonfiction, this controversial, thought-provoking, and timely book is as groundbreaking as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. -- Newsweek . From the Trade Paperback edition. Editorial Reviews Amazon.c om Review A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street J ournal, Faludi lays out a two-fold thesis in this aggressive work : First, despite the opinions of pop-psychologists and the mainst ream media, career-minded women are generally not husband-starved loners on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Secondly, such belief s are nothing more than anti-feminist propaganda pumped out by co nservative research organizations with clear-cut ulterior motives . This backlash against the women's movement, she writes, stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps th at have elevated women's positions have actually led to their dow nfall. Meticulously researched, Faludi's contribution to this tum ultuous debate is monumental and it earned the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Pu blishers Weekly Far from being liberated, American women in the 1 980s were victims of a powerful backlash against the handful of s mall, hard-won victories the feminist movement had achieved, says Wall Street Journal reporter Faludi, who won a Pulitzer this yea r. Buttressing her argument with facts and statistics, she states that the alleged man shortage endangering women's chances of mar rying (posited by a Harvard-Yale study) and the infertility epide mic said to strike professional women who postpone childbearing a re largely media inventions. She finds evidence of antifeminist b acklash in Hollywood movies, in TV's thirtysomething , in 1980s f ashion ads featuring battered models and in the New Right's attac k on women's rights. She directs withering commentary at Robert B ly's all-male workshops, Allan Bloom's prolonged rant against wom en and Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer's revisionism. This eloqu ent, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concerned about gender equality. First serial to Glamour and Mother Jones. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refe rs to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for th e Wall Street Journal , marshals in a sustained and excoriating 5 00-plus pages what many thoughtful women already know: it isn't t hat the goals of the feminist movement have failed, but that they have not yet been tried. Placing the current backlash against wo men squarely in a historical context (in the 19th century so-call ed experts told women that education would atrophy their wombs), she debunks the shoddy scholarship and half-truths that produced the myths we hear today: that women are fleeing the workplace to stay home and cocoon; that their chances of marrying diminish gre atly if they don't marry young; that their lack of advancement is their own fault. She argues that women's anger and resentment ar e not due to their feminism, but occur because women have not yet been the beneficiaries of the justice, fairness, and equity they deserve. Along the way, Faludi demolishes the anti-feminist agen das of Robert Bly's wild men, Allan Bloom ( Closing of the Americ an Mind , LJ 5/1/87), and George Gilder ( Sexual Suicide , LJ 8/7 3), among others. This is most important book. - GraceAnne A. DeC andido, School Library Journal Copyright 1991 Reed Business Infor mation, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews The Pulitzer-winning journalist (The Wall Street Journal, Ms., The Miami Herald) expl ores the real status of American women in the 90's in this powerf ul and long-overdue myth-buster--an instant classic and a valuabl e companion to Paula Kamen's Feminist Fatale (reviewed below). Co llege-educated women over 30 are more likely to be killed by a te rrorist than to marry. Working women enjoy their careers at the e xpense of their children's welfare. If you're female, you can't r eally have it all. So go the modern myths that were born in the 8 0's, despite the era's supposedly ``liberated'' image, and that h ave terrorized American women ever since. The trouble, claims Fal udi, is not only that the myths aren't true, but that through del iberate action or passive collusion the government, media, and po pular culture have ensured their overpowering influence on the pu blic. Her interest sparked by her discovery that the Harvard-Yale marriage-for-women-over-30 study was based on very shaky methodo logy, but that there was resistance in both the media and governm ent to correcting its conclusions, Faludi went on to uncover the unacknowledged but frighteningly widespread backlash against femi nism that has taken place under the surface of 80's careerism. Ta king the reader step by step through the creation of wildly anti- feminist 80's myths and backlashes in popular culture (Fatal Att raction, the ``New Traditionalism,'' the new ``feminine'' fashion s); in politics (reproductive rights, the female New Right); in p opular psychology (``to improve your marriage, change yourself'') ; in the workplace (lack of day care, parental leave, the wage ga p); and in health (white career women's supposed sterility vs. bl ack women's actual, unaddressed, sterility problem), Faludi convi ncingly peels back layers of deliberate and passive misrepresenta tion to reveal what she sees as the underlying message of the Rea gan-Bush era: Women's problems are a direct result of too much in dependence, and no one but feminists are to blame. Historically, backlashes have always followed feminist gains, Faludi points out ; the necessity is to see behind today's hip ``postfeminist'' apa thy to the injustices still being done. Brilliant reportage, with all the details in place--a stunning debut. -- Copyright ®1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Th e backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to hel p us understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue, and t o keep going. -- Alice Walker. Withering commentary... This elo quent, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concern ed with gender equality. -- Publishers Weekly. Backlash is the r ight book at exactly the right time... This trenchant, passoinate , and lively book should be an eye-opener even for feminists who thought they understood what has been going on. -- Los Angeles Ti mes Book Review From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text re fers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Fr om the Publisher Winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction, this controversial, thought-provoking, and timel y book is as groundbreaking as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Se x and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. -- Newsweek. The ba cklash against women is real. This is the book we need to help us understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue, and to ke ep going. -- Alice Walker. Withering commentary... This eloquen t, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concerned w ith gender equality. -- Publishers Weekly. Backlash is the right book at exactly the right time... This trenchant, passoinate, an d lively book should be an eye-opener even for feminists who thou ght they understood what has been going on. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Inside Flap Winner of the Nation al Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction, this controversial, thought-provoking, and timely book is as groundbreaking as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine My stique. -- Newsweek. From the Trade Paperback edition. --This te xt refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title . From the Back Cover The backlash against women is real. This i s the book we need to help us understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue, and to keep going. -- Alice Walker. Witheri ng commentary... This eloquent, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with gender equality. -- Publishers W eekly. Backlash is the right book at exactly the right time... T his trenchant, passoinate, and lively book should be an eye-opene r even for feminists who thought they understood what has been go ing on. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Au thor A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Susan Faludi won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for explanatory journalism and the Nationa l Book Critics' Circle award for Backlash. She is the author of S tiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which was published in 1999, and has written for many publications, including The New Yo rker, The Nation, Newsweek, and the New York Times. From the Tra de Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or un available edition of this title. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permiss ion. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION: BLAME IT ON FEMINISM To be a woman in America at the close of the 20th century--what good fortune. That's what we keep hearing, anyway. The barricades hav e fallen, politicians assure us. Women have made it, Madison Aven ue cheers. Women's fight for equality has largely been won, Time magazine announces. Enroll at any university, join any law firm, apply for credit at any bank. Women have so many opportunities no w, corporate leaders say, that we don't really need equal opportu nity policies. Women are so equal now, lawmakers say, that we no longer need an Equal Rights Amendment. Women have so much, former President Ronald Reagan says, that the White House no longer nee ds to appoint them to higher office. Even American Express ads ar e saluting a woman's freedom to charge it. At last, women have re ceived their full citizenship papers. And yet . . . Behind thi s celebration of the American woman's victory, behind the news, c heerfully and endlessly repeated, that the struggle for women's r ights is won, another message flashes. You may be free and equal now, it says to women, but you have never been more miserable. T his bulletin of despair is posted everywhere--at the newsstand, o n the TV set, at the movies, in advertisements and doctors' offic es and academic journals. Professional women are suffering burnou t and succumbing to an infertility epidemic. Single women are gri eving from a man shortage. The New York Times reports: Childless women are depressed and confused and their ranks are swelling. Ne wsweek says: Unwed women are hysterical and crumbling under a pro found crisis of confidence. The health advice manuals inform: Hig h-powered career women are stricken with unprecedented outbreaks of stress-induced disorders, hair loss, bad nerves, alcoholism, a nd even heart attacks. The psychology books advise: Independent w omen's loneliness represents a major mental health problem today. Even founding feminist Betty Friedan has been spreading the word : she warns that women now suffer from a new identity crisis and new 'problems that have no name.' How can American women be in s o much trouble at the same time that they are supposed to be so b lessed? If the status of women has never been higher, why is thei r emotional state so low? If women got what they asked for, what could possibly be the matter now? The prevailing wisdom of the p ast decade has supported one, and only one, answer to this riddle : it must be all that equality that's causing all that pain. Wome n are unhappy precisely because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation. They have grabbed at the gold ring of i ndependence, only to miss the one ring that really matters. They have gained control of their fertility, only to destroy it. They have pursued their own professional dreams--and lost out on the g reatest female adventure. The women's movement, as we are told ti me and again, has proved women's own worst enemy. In dispensing its spoils, women's liberation has given my generation high incom es, our own cigarette, the option of single parenthood, rape cris is centers, personal lines of credit, free love, and female gynec ologists, Mona Charen, a young law student, writes in the Nationa l Review, in an article titled The Feminist Mistake. In return it has effectively robbed us of one thing upon which the happiness of most women rests--men. The National Review is a conservative p ublication, but such charges against the women's movement are not confined to its pages. Our generation was the human sacrifice to the women's movement, Los Angeles Times feature writer Elizabeth Mehren contends in a Time cover story. Baby-boom women like her, she says, have been duped by feminism: We believed the rhetoric. In Newsweek, writer Kay Ebeling dubs feminism The Great Experime nt That Failed and asserts women in my generation, its perpetrato rs, are the casualties. Even the beauty magazines are saying it: Harper's Bazaar accuses the women's movement of having lost us [w omen] ground instead of gaining it. In the last decade, publicat ions from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to the Nation have is sued a steady stream of indictments against the women's movement, with such headlines as when feminism failed or the awful truth a bout women's lib. They hold the campaign for women's equality res ponsible for nearly every woe besetting women, from mental depres sion to meager savings accounts, from teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexions. The Today show says women's liberat ion is to blame for bag ladies. A guest columnist in the Baltimor e Sun even proposes that feminists produced the rise in slasher m ovies. By making the violence of abortion more acceptable, the au thor reasons, women's rights activists made it all right to show graphic murders on screen. At the same time, other outlets of po pular culture have been forging the same connection: in Hollywood films, of which Fatal Attraction is only the most famous, emanci pated women with condominiums of their own slink wild-eyed betwee n bare walls, paying for their liberty with an empty bed, a barre n womb. My biological c, Crown Publishers, Incorporated, 1992, 2.5, Greenwood, 2002-03-30. Hardcover. Good., Greenwood, 2002-03-30, 2.5<
