A new edition of the feminist classic, with an all-new introduction exploring the role of backlash in the 2016 election and laying out a path forward for 2020 and beyond Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award • “Enraging, enlightening, and invigorating, Backlash is, most of all, true.”—Newsday First published in 1991, Backlash made headlines and became a bestselling classic for its thoroughgoing debunking of a decadelong antifeminist backlash against women’s advances. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Susan Faludi brilliantly deconstructed the reigning myths about the “costs” of women’s independence—from the supposed “man shortage” to the “infertility epidemic” to “career burnout” to “toxic day care”—and traced their circulation from Reagan-era politics through the echo chambers of mass media, advertising, and popular culture. As Faludi writes in a new preface for this edition, much has changed in the intervening years: The Internet has given voice to a new generation of feminists. Corporations list “gender equality” among their core values. In 2019, a record number of women entered Congress. Yet the glass ceiling is still unshattered, women are still punished for wanting to succeed, and reproductive rights are hanging by a thread. This startling and essential book helps explain why women’s freedoms are still so demonized and threatened—and urges us to choose a different future.
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Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Baffler, among other publications.
Maggi-Meg Reed has performed as an actress and singer both on and off-Broadway. She is a narrator of many popular audiobooks, including A Very Long Engagement and The Time Traveler’s Wife. She is the winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards.