70 Quotes by Susan Faludi

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.

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

A backlash against women’s rights is nothing new. Indeed it’s a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

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.

Keeping the peace with the particular man in one’s life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture.

Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or “nuptialitis,” as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman’s proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

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.

An accurate charting of American women’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.