Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

"Faludi’s book is a classic piece of journalism. Again, it’s a first draft of history, published at the very beginning of the 1990s. It’s very clearly a feminist critique, quite a lengthy one, of the culture of the 1980s. There is just so much in it that is forgotten now, that it’s a trip back in time to read it. For the portrait of Randall Terry and Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion group that he organized, alone, the book is worth reading. But there’s much else besides — from television shows to self-help gurus. It’s like a gallery of horribles, as Faludi presents it. But she is a very skilled writer. She was predicting or hoping to fuel a new feminist era in the 1990s and I don’t think that really happened, but her look backward at the 1980s is highly informative. I think the portrait of Randall Terry and Operation Rescue is fabulous. It also provides insight into the conservative movement at the time. Operation Rescue was a very militant anti-abortion group. A big issue for Christian conservatives in the 1980s and afterwards was to combat the moral scourge of abortion through legal means but also through direct action. Operation Rescue was probably the most militant of the direct action groups that arose in the 1980s. They descended upon reproductive health clinics where abortions were performed and tried to get in the face of women who were getting abortions, as they said, to persuade and love them, through Christian nurture, out of making a terrible choice. But most of the women felt they were being intimidated. Randall Terry did things like carry around a jar with an aborted fetus. He was so militant that many other prominent anti-abortion groups didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Faludi goes into his biography and explains how he was raised by a group of feminist women. She portrays his turn towards this highly militant born-again Christianity and anti-abortion activism as an expression of male insecurity and a backlash against rising women’s power and independence. Whether you agree with that psychological portrait or not, it is quite an absorbing portrait. Faludi, as a journalist, wields a sharp knife as she dissects people rather mercilessly. I think she was a factor. It’s interesting to note, though, that his first wife, Jane Wyman, when she filed divorce papers against him, cited his growing involvement with conservative politics and his preoccupation with the threat of Communism, both in the United States and abroad, as a major grievance and a reason she wanted to end the marriage. So his political preoccupations were there already, although Reagan didn’t become a conservative Republican until around the time he married his second wife, Nancy Davis Reagan. So she did play a role. Reagan was comfortable with strong women. That may sound like a rationalization of his very conservative gender politics, but it’s not. Reagan did believe, as so many conservatives did in the 1970s and the 1980s, that the feminist movement was a bad thing. Reagan was personally opposed to abortion, although he had signed a law, when he was Governor of California, that expanded the range of legal abortions. He later said he regretted that, that it was a mistake and he took up a clear anti-abortion position. But as president he didn’t do much about it. By the end of the 1980s, Christian conservatives were expressing a lot of unhappiness and even anger. They felt they hadn’t gotten much out of their support for Reagan and the Republican Party in the 1980s. Reagan was very clear that this was a question of priorities. He was against abortion, but he wasn’t going to make it his top priority. Economic policy and foreign policy were his main agenda items and other things were really on the backburner. In some ways we still do live in their world, the world of the 1980s, in Reagan’s world. In some ways we don’t. The Cold War has passed and there’s a different global affairs environment. But there are broad patterns that you can see going back all the way to the Cold War. In terms of the issues that are central to American life, they’ve changed somewhat. In the early 1980s people were very concerned about inflation — it was probably the most important issue in getting Reagan elected in 1980. It’s not really an issue for most people today. Today we’re concerned about economic inequality and wage stagnation, which were certainly present in the 1980s but weren’t as widely talked about. Today people are very worried about mass incarceration and its effects, and that was just beginning in the 1980s. Some of the issues that we deal with today are legacies of that time. We have trouble getting beyond the partisan views that animated the 1980s, but it’s important to understand the way in which the choices that people made in the 1980s helped to produce some of the pressing issues that people face today. That’s true about developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, some of which were fuelled by superpower policy in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s true of economic inequality, wage stagnation and mass incarceration. These are all issues that are very much with us today, and can be traced back to policy choices that were made in the 1980s."