Susan Faludi Quotes

#1. As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.

Susan Faludi

#2. The culture used to move relatively slowly, so you could take aim. Now it moves so fast, and is so fluffy and meaningless, you feel like an idiot even complaining about it.

Susan Faludi

#3. The point of feminism ... is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated - and enormously effective - efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles.

Susan Faludi

#4. Identifying feminism as women's enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women's equality, simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash's central role and recruiting women to attack their own cause. Some

Susan Faludi

#5. That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

Susan Faludi

#6. The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.

Susan Faludi

#7. Self-esteem is the basis for feminism because self-esteem is based on defining yourself and believing in that definition. Self-esteem is regarding yourself as a grown-up.

Susan Faludi

#8. The backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

Susan Faludi

#9. A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.

Susan Faludi

#10. The women's movement ... has proved women's own worst enemy.

Susan Faludi

#11. The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.

Susan Faludi

#12. The demand that women "return to femininity" is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.

Susan Faludi

#13. The system of heroism depends on women to be weak so men can be strong.

Susan Faludi

#14. The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.

Susan Faludi

#15. Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. I like your anger ... . Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.

Susan Faludi

#16. Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.

Susan Faludi

#17. The "feminine" woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

Susan Faludi

#18. Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to choose between public justice and private happiness.

Susan Faludi

#19. In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

Susan Faludi

#20. The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

Susan Faludi

#21. Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.

Susan Faludi

#22. What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.

Susan Faludi

#23. The central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

Susan Faludi

#24. I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.

Susan Faludi

#25. When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.

Susan Faludi

#26. Part of me has certainly been motivated by wanting to take a stand against the restrictions that made Mother give up so much.

Susan Faludi

#27. At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.

Susan Faludi

#28. Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

Susan Faludi