Quotes from Susan Faludi

Part of me has certainly been motivated by wanting to take a stand against the restrictions that made Mother give up so much.

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

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.

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

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

I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean?

The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.

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.

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

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

Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger…. Don't you let anyone talk you out of 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.

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

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

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.