We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation.

These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there’s one pattern that psychological studies have established, it’s that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men’s mental health. “Being married,” the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, “is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.

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.

Randy Terry’s backlash against women’s rights may be more intimate than people realize, ” says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood – and Randall Terry’aunt. “He was raised at the knee of feminists.

It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle-versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground. Backlash.

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

All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.

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.

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.

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.