General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20268 min read

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is a 1991 work of investigative journalism and media criticism by the American reporter Susan Faludi, arguing that the 1980s saw a widespread conservative reaction against the gains of second-wave feminism rather than the post-feminist settlement the era's press described. Originally published in New York by Crown, it became a bestseller and one of the most cited feminist books of its decade.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Author	Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal; she won the 1991 Pulitzer for a report on the human cost of the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores³^•⁴
Publication	New York: Crown, 1991; reissued by Three Rivers Press in 2006¹
Central claim	The 1980s were a decade of backlash, in which media, politics, and popular culture spread the false message that feminism had made women miserable⁵
Trigger	Faludi's 1986 Newsweek investigation of the Harvard-Yale marriage study, which she found was based on very shaky methodology⁶
Coverage	Chapters on media "trends," Hollywood film, television, fashion and beauty, the New Right, popular psychology, the workplace, and reproductive health¹
Definition of backlash	Faludi defines the backlash as a trend, not a conspiracy: a media development that gained force from a cultural zeitgeist already anxious about feminism's apparent successes⁵
Recognition	National Book Critics Circle award; the book reached such wide fame that a 1993 film joked about "the whole book" behind a famous statistic without naming it⁴

Origin in the marriage study

The book began with a statistic. In 1986, Newsweek reported that a Harvard-Yale study had found a college-educated single woman over 30 had only a 20 percent chance of marrying, a figure that fell to 1.3 percent for women over 40.⁷ The claim, widely repeated as proof that education and independence doomed women to unhappiness, was never grounded in research at all; the study Faludi examined was a flawed preliminary one, reported offhandedly in a Valentine's Day article in the Stamford Advocate in 1986.⁸^•⁹ Faludi, then a twenty-six-year-old reporter, found that both the media and government resisted correcting the study's conclusions, and the episode pushed her toward the broader investigation that became Backlash.⁶^•⁸

A rival analysis by a female Census Bureau demographer concluded that a never-married college-educated woman actually had about a one-in-five chance of finding a husband after age forty, but follow-up stories reevaluating the original study received little attention.¹⁰^•⁸

Argument and evidence

Faludi's thesis is that American women in the 1980s were victims of a powerful backlash against the small, hard-won victories of the feminist movement, and that the underlying message of the Reagan-Bush era was that women's problems were a direct result of too much independence.³^•⁶ The backlash message, as one scholarly summary puts it, was twofold: first, that feminism had already changed everything, and second, that feminism itself was the reason women were now "miserable."⁸ Within the media of the time, any choice that could be defined as anti-family, such as remaining single or postponing children, was pathologized and blamed on feminism, which was said to cause infertility, divorce, stress-related disorders, depression, spinsterhood, and other new suffering.⁵

Myths and statistics. Faludi dismantles the era's signature myths, including bra-burning, man shortages, and barren wombs, and argues that the statistics popular culture promoted most heavily were precisely the ones that deserved the most caution.¹¹^•¹² She documents how the press promoted the Harvard-Yale marriage study while ignoring the work of two social scientists whose 1987 findings pointed the other way, and how Census Bureau demographers came under pressure to produce statistics "proving" rising infertility, the risks of abortion, and the ill effects of day care.¹²

Popular culture. The book traces the backlash through Hollywood and television. The book's most famous case study is Fatal Attraction: during pre-production, what had begun as a tale of an unmarried woman mistreated by an insensitive married man was transformed into one about a deranged vixen who seduces a devoted family man and then torments him.¹¹ Faludi also examines the repackaging of the independent woman on screen, restrictive "feminine" fashions and footwear, the cosmetic industry, and the "New Traditionalism" of the period.¹¹^•⁶

Politics. Faludi identifies the "New Right," with its pro-family agenda and religious allies, as leading the backlash, which she attributes to fear of feminism's success.⁷^•¹³ She traces the critical New Right groups to within two years of the two biggest victories for women's rights, Congress's approval of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973.¹⁴ The book details the defeat of the ERA in 1982, the ascent of the anti-abortion movement, and the rise of on-the-job sexual harassment and discrimination.² It also documents the era's rhetoric directly: a Reagan Administration spokeswoman, in a speech titled "Radical Feminism in Retreat," called feminism a "straitjacket" for women, and Michael Douglas, star of Fatal Attraction, told an interviewer, "I'm really tired of feminists, sick of them."⁸

Historical framing. Faludi situates the 1980s within an ongoing cycle of feminist boom and bust in American history, in which periods of reactionary hostility toward feminism follow periods of widespread embrace, and she includes a chapter on backlashes of earlier eras.⁸^•¹

Reception

The book was a bestseller and drew sharply divided reviews. Kirkus Reviews called it a "powerful and long-overdue myth-buster" and "an instant classic."⁶ Publishers Weekly called it "eloquent" and "brilliantly argued."³ Commentary acknowledged that it was thoroughly researched, with 89 pages of footnotes documenting sources, but judged it a thin book whose scholarship masked stick-figure stereotypes.¹⁰ In Reason, Cathy Young criticized Faludi's "selective treatment of facts" and her conclusions about the state of women's liberation.¹⁵ The feminist critic Elayne Rapping, writing in the Women's Review of Books, found the book "ill-thought-out, badly argued and way too often simply erroneous or uninformed," and argued that the term "backlash" was too often used to over-generalize about disparate material; she noted that Faludi treated nearly all media texts as examples of anti-women backlash rather than exploring contradictory readings.¹⁶ A labor-oriented review in Against the Current made a similar structural point: of the book's 460 pages, only 37 went to a chapter on working women's issues, plus 17 pages on reproductive rights in the workplace.¹⁷

The book's reach entered popular culture. Nora Ephron's 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle (Spanish title Algo para recordar) has Meg Ryan's character answer the "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" line with "That statistic is not true! There's practically a whole book about why that statistic is not true!"; the film did not need to name Backlash, because the whole country knew which book was meant.⁴

International reach

The book was translated and adapted abroad. The German edition carried the broader title Men Lash Back: How the Victories of Feminism are Turned Into Defeats and What Women Can Do About It (1993). Angela Merkel, then a newly prominent East German Protestant woman placed in charge of women's and youth affairs after German reunification, reviewed it in the feminist magazine EMMA under the punning headline "The daughters lash back." Merkel praised the diligence and wealth of proof with which Faludi dismantled the manipulations, highlighted the book's technique of making women doubt and feel guilt, and concluded that Faludi had opened a completely new perspective on American developments of the previous ten to fifteen years.¹⁸

Legacy

The book popularized the term "backlash," which has inflected discussions of feminism ever since, though later scholars note that Faludi did not offer a formal feminist definition of the term.⁵^•¹⁹ It appeared the year before a record number of women ran for and won national office, the 1992 "year of the woman," a label the media had in fact already proclaimed in earlier years.²⁰ Historians have also complicated its picture of the decade: a study of the National Organization for Women argues that the conservative backlash energized liberal women into greater political participation, with NOW establishing 81 new political action committees across 40 states, tripling its membership to over 220,000, and quadrupling its annual budget to over $13 million between 1979 and 1982.²

The book's afterlife has grown with later waves of reaction. A 2021 New Yorker retrospective by Molly Fischer argued that Backlash remains, at bottom, a work of media criticism that teaches readers to read between the lines, cataloguing the gaps between the stories spun in advertising, movies, television, and news and the realities of women's lives.⁸ Faludi herself, in a 2025 interview around a new Spanish edition, said she wished she had been wrong; when the book appeared, readers told her they had not noticed the backlash happening, whereas the current reaction, in her view, is far more virulent and less subtle than the one she documented.⁴

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026