Susan Faludi quotes

Susan Faludi is an American journalist and author, recognized for her influential work on feminism and gender issues. Her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" sparked significant conversation about the challenges facing women in contemporary society. She continues to write and speak on topics related to social justice, gender, and identity. Here are 16 of her quotes:

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

Susan Faludi

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

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

Susan Faludi

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

Susan Faludi

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

Susan Faludi

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

Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see - and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too - on herself.

Susan Faludi

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

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

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.

Susan Faludi

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

The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance, either; some are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a "fresh” angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their "acceptable” roles - whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object.

Susan Faludi

In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep "concern”. Its lips profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. 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.

Susan Faludi

To blame feminism for women's "lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which 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. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

Susan Faludi