"The backlash against women is real. This is the book we need to help us understand it, to struggle through the battle fatigue, and to keep going."—Womanist and award-winning author Alice Walker, on Susan Faludi's 1991 book Backlash, a landmark book in the feminist critique of "conventional wisdom," media memes, and pop science about women, and the subject of today's Sunday Book Club.
One of the most important contributions Backlash made to the conversation is attacking head-on the simultaneous myths that women have achieved equality and that equality is making women miserable, found at the root of so many narratives regarding women and employment, parenting, and marriage, used to discredit feminism by suggesting its goals leave women unfilfilled. Faludi's premise is that those narratives are bunk, for the simple reason that women have not achieved equality, and demonstrates as much by asking some very basic questions like: "If women have achieved equality, why do they still make less than men? Why are women disproportionately poor? Why are women 52% of our population, but only 16% of our Congress?"
This is week one of our discussion of Backlash.
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