By Eva Cox
On the back of Susan Faludi's book is a 90-year-old quote from Rebecca West, acknowledging some of the problems in defining feminism. Said West: "I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat".
Those who prefer doormats need to discredit feminism. Faludi's book exposes some of the tactics used to do this in the current undeclared war against women.
Faludi is North American, but this is a universal problem, neatly illustrated by some local media responses to her book. An extract in the Weekend Australian shows the sort of tactics routinely deployed in this war. "Free, Equal and Miserable" shrieks the headline, while the graphics suggest a corporate woman longing for a more "feminine" role. Ironically the extract itself is about the way the media misleadingly suggest the demise of feminism by the use of headlines and hype such as this.
Marilyn French's The War Against Women is also a response to the anxious and ever more frequently posed question: are we in a post-feminist era? Faludi's book examines and explains the way this assumption is being promoted as part of the backlash against feminism.
French treats the same problem historically, and concludes that it was ever thus.
Faludi is 33, French into her 50s. Together they span the generations of women in this latest wave of feminism. This generation gap is important; Faludi and the even younger Naomi Wolf are the angry children of the three decades of the US women's movement. They are the offspring of Reagan's America, an altogether more pessimistic cohort, a lot less able to sustain dreams than were the children of Kennedy's America.
Many of this disaffected generation have looked at what we older feminists did in the 70s and wondered what went wrong. Why are they still facing the many problems we sought to alter? Faludi's analysis is the healthy anger of young women who assume that the problem is "out there" and not — the response of many others — that we got it wrong.
French is legitimately angry because the revolution she helped to start seems to have stalled, and she looks for reasons dating back to the beginning of time. Faludi deals with the problems in the here and now and places the blame fairly and squarely on present-day men.
Faludi both damns and praises new right women who often lead the fight against feminism: she pillories them for their e way they defy their own precepts to be stay at home wives.
She debunks a range of media-created myths: the mommy track, the retreat of women to traditional roles, the infertility scares and the child-care furphy. She shows a malign media seeking out stories which rubbish feminism and ignoring the stories which counter these. Her analysis of Hollywood images and TV responses is readable and apposite to current local debates.