In "Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women," Susan Faludi asserts that each wave of significant advances in women’s rights has been met with a societal backlash, and then spends 400+ pages exhaustively outlining examples of just such a backlash. Case studies range from examples within the media, to politics, to the private sector, to academia. No part of American culture is left unexamined. While it can grow numbingly repetitive after awhile, the examples she gives are no less infuriating – especially when you realize how many of these same tactics go on today.

Backlash was published in the early 90s, and so most of the examples are from the 80s. Faludi points at supposed “trends” that, she argues, were put forth to scare liberated women back into their rightful “place." There were the alarming (yet unsubstantiated) statistics about how women over a certain age are more likely to be struck by lightening than to marry. (Of course, these statistics were even more bleak for highly educated women.) Self-help books proliferated during this period, as did case studies of women who claimed that they were miserable until they gave up "trying to be like a man," and became a wife and mother. Then there were film characters like Alex in "Fatal Attraction" - the empowered “modern” woman who also happened to suffer from some a serious case of borderline personality disorder. Finally, changing economic conditions like greater outsourcing of jobs, and stagnating wages, led to feminism being cast as a convenient scapegoat. If women knew their place (back in the home), then there would be more jobs for men.

My biggest problem with the book may be with the term “backlash” – which, to me, implies some kind of organized conspiracy on the parts of Religion, Academia and the Mainstream Media (good luck getting those three entities to collude together on anything). While I'm skeptical that such a conspiracy exists on any sort of conscious level, it’s easy to look around and see how many anti-feminist attitudes still persist. Many women still fear the term ‘feminist’ because they don’t want to seem shrill, castrating, physically unattractive, or otherwise “unfeminine.” Whether this is part of some great conspiracy or not, I think we as women owe it to ourselves to find out just how this negative impression of feminism originated, and ask who, exactly, such misperceptions serve. Faludi proves a wonderful guide for just that kind of journey.