Susan Faludi famous quotes

05-20-2025

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 #Forever #Body
Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.
-- Susan Faludi

#Women #Justice #Feminism
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

#Men #Justice #Identity
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

#Moving #Culture #Fluffy
Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
-- Susan Faludi

#Children #Divorce #Men
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.
-- Susan Faludi

#Media #People #Culture
The system of heroism depends on women to be weak so men can be strong.
-- Susan Faludi

#Strong #Men #Heroism
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

#Movement #Wonder #Neighborhood
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

#Government #Looks #Saws
The modern fairy tale ending is the reverse of the traditional one: A woman does not wait for Prince Charming to bring her happiness; she lives happily ever after only by refusing to wait for him -- or by actually rejecting him. It is those who persist in hoping for a Prince Charming who are setting themselves up for disillusionment and unhappiness.
-- Susan Faludi

#Waiting #Doe #Fairy Tale
Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.
-- Susan Faludi

#Children #Home #Looks
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

#Book #Responsibility #Fighting
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

#Winning #Simple #Effort
the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.
-- Susan Faludi

#Feminism #Lists #Problem
the last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall.
-- Susan Faludi

#Powerful #Lying #Winning
the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.
-- Susan Faludi

#Argument #Unhappiness #Responsible
the heart of the backlash argument: women are better off 'protected' than equal.
-- Susan Faludi

#Heart #Argument #Sexism
My goal is to be accused of being strident.
-- Susan Faludi

#Goal #Accused
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 #Children #Self
The demand that women "return to femininity" is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.
-- Susan Faludi

#Powerful #Demand #Return
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.
-- Susan Faludi

#Employment #Facts #Injustice
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

#Thinking #Hands #People
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

#Years #America #Justice
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

#Rights #Justice #Feminism
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.
-- Susan Faludi

#Enemy #Faces

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