| Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Susan Faludi |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Nonfiction |
| Publication date | 1991 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is the title of a 1991 nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi, which argues for the existence of a media driven "backlash" against the feminist advances of the 1970s. Faludi argues that this backlash posits the women's liberation movement as the source of many of the problems alleged to be plaguing women in the late 1980s.
She also argues that many of these problems are illusory, constructed by the media without reliable evidence. According to Faludi, the backlash is also a historical trend, generally recurring when it appears that women have made substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1991.
A 15th anniversary edition (ISBN 0307345424) of the book was released in 2006.
Author Michael Crichton was critical of the book, claiming it was an example of rampant and baseless speculation. In "Why Speculate? A Talk At The International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, California, April 26, 2002" he stated that it "presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false".