Susan Faludi: An accurate charting of American women's progress throug...

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

voice body forever

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

Susan Faludi

women feminist justice

Feminism's agenda is basic: it asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves-instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

Susan Faludi

time motivational inspirational

We think of a feminist as someone a woman becomes in reaction to personal indignities and social injustices. But the truth is, such inequities only awaken her to the feminist she has always fundamentally been - that is, a person who understands that her first responsibility is to her own humanity. That's why, for my money, the first known use of the word 'feminist' is still the best, appearing in an 1895 book review: a woman who 'has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.

Susan Faludi

fighting responsibility book

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

Susan Faludi

heroism strong men

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

Susan Faludi

justice america years

Gender is really varied and complicated and sort of infinitely individualistic.

Susan Faludi

individualistic gender complicated

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

Susan Faludi

feminism rights justice

The women's movement. . . has proved women's own worst enemy.

Susan Faludi

worst-enemy movement enemy

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. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

Susan Faludi

determination self children

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

complaining culture moving

the point of feminism ... 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.

Susan Faludi

effort simple winning

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.

Susan Faludi

equality choices views

Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

Susan Faludi

real dark past

The backlash against women's rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reagonomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women's momentum in the job market. But the backlash did more than impede women's opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women C it did on the sly.

Susan Faludi

powerful opportunity jobs

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

Susan Faludi

real want people

My feminist view - that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions - is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists.

Susan Faludi

generations feminist views

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

Susan Faludi

divorce men children

It's fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

Susan Faludi

female dresses ideas

the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

Susan Faludi

argument unhappiness responsible

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.