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Books
Bennetts, who was a reporter for The New York Times for ten years, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.
BACKLASH: THE UNDECLARED WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WOMEN BY SUSAN FALUDI, CROWN PUBLISHERS. 552 PP. $ 24
I came away from Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women feeling not only that it should be required reading for all Americans, but that every representative of any media organization in the country should be locked in a room until he or she has finished the last page. The unrelenting series of revelations provided by Susan Faludi's explosive and exhaustively researched new book is galvanizing enough for any citizen, let alone female; but for a journalist, Backlash is one long epiphany.
Faludi's analysis of the unthinking and utterly irresponsible contributions of the mass media to the aforementioned war is enough to make any journalist's blood run cold. There are precious few among us who are not guilty of buying into at least some of the unquestioned and, as Faludi makes clear, almost entirely erroneous assumptions the sheep-like herd has been purveying for lo these many years. On subjects relating to women, the performance of the national media during this period has all too often been a disgrace.
If Faludi's book were merely a polemic, however eloquent, one might disagree with such conclusions. But Backlash is a stunning work of reportage, complete with eighty pages of footnotes (including, I regret to say, one citing a story by this reporter), and the sheer accumulation of facts makes many of its arguments virtually unassailable. Particularly shocking are the author's case studies of how the media played several important and emblematic stories about women and their lives. If she demonstrates in excruciating detail the extent to which lazy practitioners of the worst kind of trend journalism failed to do their own homework, no one can say Faludi didn't do hers.
The most famous case in point is the notorious Harvard-Yale study on women's marriage patterns, word of which hit the front pages, network news programs, and talk shows of America like a bombshell in 1986. The thrust of the study was that women who failed to marry young could basically kiss off their chance for marrying at all: the so-called "man shortage" was allegedly so severe that, as Newsweek so memorably put it, by the age of forty an unmarried woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find her way to the altar.
The numbers provided by the study, which was both unpublished and unfinished, were chilling indeed. The only problem was that they weren't true -- something that virtually nobody managed to report, although a single telephone call to the U.S. Census Bureau might quickly have indicated that something was amiss. Even a cursory check of population charts reveals that there were substantially more bachelors than unwed women in the age groups in question. "If anyone faced a shortage of potential spouses, it was men in the prime marrying years," Faludi notes. When a Census Bureau demographer named Jeanne Moorman recalculated the study's figures, she found that at the age of thirty, a college-educated woman who hadn't yet married had three times the chance posited by the Harvard-Yale report; at the age of thirty-five, her odds of getting married were seven times higher than those predicted in the study;l and at forty, her shot at wedlock was twenty-three times higher than the study had indicated.
Unfortunately, no one seemed to want to hear that the study was wrong -- and when Moorman started talking to the press, Reagan administration officials clamped down and ordered her not to discuss the marriage study because it was "too controversial." (She was told to work instead on a study "about how poor unwed mothers abuse the welfare system.") However, Moorman completed her own analysis of marriagepatterns and released it -- but, as Faludi notes, "The media relegated it to the inside pages, when they reported it at all."
Within the field of demography, the Harvard-Yale study received so much criticism about its methodology and conclusions that by the time it was finally published three years later its authors had decided to leave out the infamous statistics about the "marriage crunch." But by then, of course, the damage was done: the perception of a bleak and lonely future facing the millions of working women who had foolishly delayed marriage in favor of career was firmly established in the national consciousness. As Faludi demonstrates, the media had succeeded not in reporting the news but in making it. Before the Harvard-Yale study was publicized, most attitudinal surveys found a high level of contentment and little anxiety about marriage among single women. But within a year of that terrifying blast of publicity, the proportion of all single women who feared they would never marry had nearly doubled, according to one yearly indicator, the Annual Study of Women's Attitudes. The barrage of warnings had succeeded in inspiring a tremendous level of distress among women who -- until they found themselves assailed at every turn by dire pronouncements that they had made a terrible mistake and might already have ruined their lives forever -- had been quite happy with their choice.
Equally instructive is Faludi's comparison of the difference between the way the media played the work of two social scientists -- one overtly hostile to women's independence, the other sympathetic. When Shere Hite published the results of her national survey on sexuality and relationships, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, she was immediately ripped to shreds by the press, which seemed more interested in "attacking Hite personally," as Faludi puts it, than in any evenhanded treatment of her findings. To be sure, the results of Hite's inquiry were guaranteed to make many men uncomfortable: she found that most women were upset about the refusal of the men in their lives to treat them as equals, and about the domestic friction that resulted as they sought some respect. "Hite's findings were largely held up for ridicule, not inspection," Faludi states.
The treatment was very different for a man with opposing views. "At the same time the press was pillorying Hite for suggesting that male resistance might be partly responsible for women's grief, it was applauding another social scientist whose theory -- that women's equality was to blame for contemporary women's anguish -- was more consonant with backlash thinking," Faludi continues. Dr. Srully Blotnick, a Forbes magazine columnist and self-appointed media "expert," concluded that success at work "poisons both the professional and personal lives of women." His survey was widely and favorably reported by the national media. No one questioned his methodology, in contrast to the ferocious attacks on Hite's approach. This was unfortunate because, although Blotnick claimed his was a groundbreaking twenty-five year longitudinal study, he would have been only seventeen years old when he purportedly began his data collection. The "Dr." title he had adopted "turned out to be the product of a mail-order degree from an unaccredited correspondence school," Faludi reports. When a U.S. News & World reporter finally investigates Blotnick's credentials, it was discovered that "almost nothing on his resume checked out" -- but U.S. News never published that story. It was only after New York State launched a criminal fraud investigation against Blotnick that Forbes finally discontinued his column. News of Blotnick's fall from grace, however, was almost completely ignored by the press. As with the Harvard-Yale marriage study, the flaws in Blotnick's argument were never publicized, his conclusions never exposed as propaganda rather than legitimate social science. Because his "findings" confirmed preexisting negative biases about working women during the backlash era, the media never bothered to check out their validity or his credibility.
An even more egregious example of media malfeasance was provided by the treatment accorded a French study on what seemed to be a sudden and dramatic epidemic of infertility among women over thirty. The New York Times played the story on page one, praising the report as "unusually large and rigorous" and "more reliable" than previous studies that had indicated a considerably later onset of fertility problems among most women. The alarmist new study spawned not only the familiar round of national media attention but also a subsequent onslaught of books about women's "biological clock," not to mention a steady escalation in the fearsome statistics. "A self-help book was soon reporting that women in their thirties now faced a 'shocking 68 percent' chance of infertility -- and promptly faulted the feminists, who had failed to advise women of the biological drawbacks of a successful career," Faludi reports.
However, the scare stories conveniently omitted a few salient facts. The patients used in the French study were all married to completely sterile men -- hardly a representative sampling of the population -- and were trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination in a process using frozen sperm, which is far less potent than fresh sperm. The study also pronounced as infertile any woman who was not pregnant after only a year of trying -- a ridiculous cut-off, since it takes even newlyweds a mean time of eight months to conceive (and another study found that fully 80 percent of couples who failed to conceive after one year eventually succeeded). Indeed, although the national media had given the French study their uncritical approval, experts in the field debunked it so thoroughly that its own authors finally announced apologetically that they "never meant their findings to apply to all women."
But as usual with such sagas, it was too late. As Faludi observes, "Neither their retreat nor their peers' disparaging assessments attracted press attention." Nor did a nationwide fertility survey of 8,000 women later released by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, which found that infertility had actually declined slightly, not only among women in their thirties, but even among women in their forties. Thanks to the shoddy performance of the press, American women had once again been needlessly terrorized by a grossly flawed report that, because it confirmed a reactionary stereotype that the punishment for uppity women who delay childbirth was the probability of forfeiting it entirely, received virtually no critical scrutiny whatsoever.
It would be comforting if examples like the ones cited above were the exception rather than the rule,l but Backlash is full of them. And even in the sections dealing with the offenses committed against women by institutions other than media outlets, the press often played an important role in helping to promote those offenses. Susan Faludi has laid it all out in sickening detail. Now that she'd done the hard work of ferreting out the truths that battalions of her peers had failed even to look for, it will be instructive indeed to see whether the major media organizations repeatedly cited in her reporting actually do anything to improve their coverage on such politically charged subjects as women's rights. Judging by past performance, I wouldn't bet the ranch.
