Copy of Backlash to Feminism

Hello class.

I'm recording this lecture because I asked you if you

had any questions and this is one of the questions

that you asked about was why so many people say

so many bad things about feminism.

Um this can only be a 15 minute lectures, we're

going to go through this kind of quickly, but maybe

we can talk about it later.

I'm using a new software.

Hopefully it's a little easier for you to access.

So, um it's called the feminist Backlash and uh there's

a there's a name for it, and Susan Faludi published

a book on it, F A L U.

D. I with the theory.

So, I'm going to present to you some stuff that

comes from her theories, but also related a little bit

to some feminist theory I've always already presented to you.

So in 1996 this was the cover of Newsweek, which

was a very popular and widely read news magazine from

the States, um before the internet, everybody read magazines.

So it said here, if you're a single woman here

are your chances of getting married.

And it says marriage probabilities for college graduates and years

of age.

So what, this is a quote from the article, not

intersectional at all classes and racist.

It said white college educated women who failed to marry

in their twenties, Um, basically wouldn't get married at all.

That the more educated a woman is the lower her

chances are of getting married and they have this famous

statistic that like if a woman is 35 and has

a college degree and is not married, she has a

better chance of being killed by a terrorist Then of

getting married.

Now this is not true and to newsweek's credit, 20

years later, they went, they interviewed some women for this

article um in 1996.

Women in their twenties and they went back 20 years

later and most of them were happily married and we're

fine and some were stay at home moms for that

case. But what you can see here is that the

message was, hey women, you think you're getting ahead um

by becoming college graduates, but you're not going to get

a man.

I thought I would start with that little historical tidbit.

Right? So I want to talk through some of the

backlash is to feminism because it's nothing new right, you

might have heard of the suffragette movement and that sort

of generally describes the movement for women to get the

vote. Now to be clear.

And we had this on a a hoot in class

last week.

Um Even though in 1918 women who were citizens were

allowed to vote, it was only a very small percentage

of women who actually could vote.

Uh, this excluded Inuit first nations, Japanese indigenous Maiti south

asian and chinese NBC associate the asian and chinese NBC

Ornella to vote.

And in Saskatchewan, chinese people were also excluded from voting

and Japanese women as well.

NBC. So there was a very long movement that took

started kind of the 18 seventies 18 eighties.

Um really picked up speed around the late 18 nineties

and I'm going to show you some images from this

time. So when women were trying to get the right

to vote, um I want to see if I can

zoom in on these pictures a little bit here.

I want to show you think actually do I have

a zoom in on my next what's my next slide?

Um Yeah, okay, so on the left, we have one

that says what I would do with the suffragists.

Um and you see that she's being pressed now, the

£56.56 is a reference to something, I don't actually quite

remember what it's a reference to, but you can look

that up if you're interested and her head is being

squeezed and what is important, her head is squeezed and

it's locked so that she can open her mouth.

So specifically she is being silenced because nobody wants to

hear her.

And at the time, um women who were like the

ugliest woman possible was thought to be a woman who

was like very skinny and not married and then she

would be kind of like red in the nose that

was like a stereotype of like the ugliest woman possible.

Um You see that on the right again origin and

development of a suffragette at 15, a little pet and

you can see what she's doing, she's holding a doll.

So she understands her quote unquote like natural impulse towards

motherhood. Uh at 20, a little coquette, a coquette is

a word for like a cute flirty young woman that's

definitely gone out of out of fashion.

And you can see also in this, in this Image

this drawing, she has a kind of bust.

So her silhouette is appropriately feminine and she's not too

skinny and she's got nice pink cheeks at 40, she's

not married, so she somehow has failed to acquire a

husband, Which makes her skinny and ugly.

And at 40 she's going great, she's very skinny, her

face is red, she has a hatchet and she's angry.

She says votes for women.

So what this is suggesting is that women who want

power, political power, they wanted because they failed to get

mad. They failed to fulfill their natural world.

And we see this in the middle with a little

boy. Um the little girl is dressed up as a

suffragette, and he's pointing at her and saying a woman's

place is in the home, like he's a clear with

these dolls and look at her baby.

Look at the baby doll in the middle, It's face

down what a bad mom she is, right?

This is what will happen if you try to go

out and get the right to vote one of a

husband will neglect your your babies, they will probably die,

etcetera. Um if you look at these other images underneath,

we can see feeding a suffrage at by force.

Um I see W T.

That is the the acronym for one of the suffragette

organizations, right?

So they're holding her down physically non consensually.

The thing about pouring soup in her face, there's two

parts of that one is that um she can't talk.

So once again she is silence.

That is the great desires to silence suffered as to

silence women wanting um any participation in the public sphere.

And the reason she's being forced fed soup is that

suffragettes were um hunger striking and they were vegetarian.

So their hunger strikes were when they force fed them,

they force fed them with meat Roth on purpose.

Um there's a very interesting analysis of the history of

vegetarianism and early feminism.

And even like 2nd 3rd way for even now, veganism

has a a crossover with intersectional feminism, which is another

interesting topic.

Um and then this one, what will men wear when

women wear pants with suspenders?

Because I guess we would just women would just wear

all the pants and there there wouldn't be enough pants

any more for anyone to wear.

Um something I want to because some of you also

said like even some women hate feminism.

Well, that is nothing new.

This this is josephine dodge.

And this apparently this photo is from 1911 in the

states and actually in 1899 is when she became involved

and became the head of she was actually the head

of the National Association opposed to women's suffrage, right?

But if you look at the headquarters, here's the headquarters,

quite a lot of gentlemen and hats.

Um and she worked in daycares.

She established very early daycares in the, in the 1890s

that were for women working in factories and she really

believed that women should not vote, they should be home

with their families.

She thought that like having to put Children in daycares

was terrible.

Um, and also that generally it was bad for women

to try to vote, that they should rather they should

support their husbands.

And she wrote all sorts of pamphlets and things and

because of that, you can find some of the stuff

that she wrote.

So there have always been women involved in um saying

that other women should not have rights.

Um, if you think of the images I showed you

this one is particularly intense where women vote, there is

no rest.

So take a look at this picture, the man is

wearing a sort of apron type dress, which is, you

know, showing to view this is supposed to be extremely

humiliating in his right hand, He's got, he's got some

kind of like sponge or something and there's like a

bucket and then he has a feather duster in his

other hand.

So he is being forced to do housework and the

one and so he's dressed in this very kind of

drab apron and the woman is dressed up, very fancy

lee because she's going to go out and she doesn't

have to do housework and she's grabbing him by the

head, right, forcefully saying, get back to work, right?

Where if women vote, they will vote in things like

that. They should never have to do housework I wish.

But that has not happened.

The main argument of the anti suffrage movement was that

public and domestic fears spheres should be kept separate, that

men belonged in the public and women belonged in the

private domestic spaces.

And that when these spaces were violated, there would be

a breakdown of the gender rules, right?

And if you think back to what we learn about

sexism and gender roles, it all rests on this idea

that there's a natural order to society and that natural

order requires that women fulfill these submissive, helpful supportive roles

and men are in the public kind of leading and

being admired and being active, right?

So this is huge anxiety about these spaces being shifted.

And you can see this thing's actually one really interesting

space to see this anxiety isn't like horror movies and

movies or anything scary happens.

You often see a kind of shift for like the

woman is not at home anymore and the man is

at home and like that's bad and something bad is

gonna happen.

So look for that note in popular culture.

Um there was another woman who was opposed to suffrage

who's she's actually one of my favorite writers and a

very interesting feminist writer and she was against women's suffrage

for a totally different reason because it was not radical

enough. And she found most of the women she talked

to extremely conservative.

They were like, oh I do what my husband says.

And you know, they're kind of racist and classist.

And she was like very against most women she met,

she didn't like, I guess, and she was an anarcho

feminist. So she was radically against capitalism and radically against

any sort of hierarchical government and very much against patriarchy.

Um and also interestingly enough against monogamy and marriage.

So she had multiple lovers and was public about it,

which was pretty unusual at the time.

Um she thought that voting wouldn't change anything because that

you would still have this like triangular structure with men

who would be the only ones who had actual financial

and political power.

Women would just think that they had power when they

voted, but they wouldn't actually have power.

So I want to bring you to the 1980s and

then I think this lecture might be over and I'll

do a second part to this recording.

Um so whoops, I think this is one of my

I made this presentation a long time ago and I

was a little less skilled at making making these.

So uh there's Susan Faludi's book backlash the undeclared war

against american women, right.

Um if we look back to the anti suffragette movement,

we see that they argue that equal education would make

women infertile, it would make them bad mothers and they

would reject outright, they would reject marriage.

Right? So it's this anxiety about the breakdown of the

traditional gender rules, right?

That they're sort of uteruses would be compromise and they

wouldn't be able to have babies and when they were

like, well, is this true or not?

What they used to say, this is true and work

and this is a true thing and we have a

right to be worried.

It was always clergyman.

So they would get like a priest or a reverend

who would say, absolutely, we have seen it, this is

true. When women vote, then the next thing they want

is education, then they want jobs, and then they can't

have babies anymore and this is a disaster.

This is not how God wanted it.

So that was kind of the argument then, right.

Um By the 1980s, so, I'm kind of skipping ahead

to the 1980s, because the backlash follows the water sometimes

called the waves of feminism or the major kind of

public movements forward of feminism.

Right? So the suffragette movement was a very public kind

of celebrated part of feminism is also very white and

upper class.

It's another reason it was seen as a big part

of feminism And when we get to the 1980s, this

is the time after in the 1960s and 70s.

A lot of the legislation that made it easier for

women to take part in the public sphere had started

to show effects.

We had more women, like leading corporations or being elected,

um publishing books, taking control of things, um having the

capacity to like ask for spousal support and child support

when they're when they're marriages ended, for example.

So there was this anxiety kind of spiked again, right

at this time, Instead of citing clergy, anti feminist, the

feminist backlash, they decided therapists now to be a therapist,

a person does not have to have a psych degree

or any kind of degree.

This is going to end in about two minutes.

So I'll pause and then I'll start it up again

in a second recording.

Um they said that when women have access to education

and career and childcare, the women end up unhappy, infertile

and unable to marry, you might be like, why would

they say they're infertile?

What they say is that women will, like put off

childbearing too late And then they won't be able to

I will say that claims that women's fertility drops to

zero after the age of 30 are wildly overstated.

You can absolutely get pregnant well into your 30s and

40s accidentally.

So don't listen to these, you should listen to your

doctor when you're trying to decide if you're fertile or

not what they said that only staying home, keeping Children

very close and performing a very particular kind of domestic

femininity would lead to real happiness.

So here's a quote is Flutie describing some of these

kind of therapy messages that were sent out of the

time. Take the rocky road to selfish and lonely independence

or the well paved path to home and flickering hearth.

No middle route was visible on the trend stories map

of the moral, feminine universe.

There were and the way this was kind of shared

and expressed.

This message was through those morning talk shows and self

help books, which were very popular.

Now there's instagram, but at that time there were all

these self help books and I'm going to show you

some covers of them in just a minute.

When we get to the next part of the lecture.

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