Top 35 Susan Faludi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.”

— Susan Faludi

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Susan Faludi

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6. “My goal is to be accused of being strident.”

— Susan Faludi

7. “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.”

— Susan Faludi

8. “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

9. “For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.”

— Susan Faludi

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

— Susan Faludi

11. “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

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

— Susan Faludi

13. “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

14. “The economic victims of the era are men who who know someone has made off with their future- and they suspect the thief is a woman.”

— Susan Faludi

15. “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

16. “Feminism’s agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to ‘choose’ between public justice and private happiness.”

— Susan Faludi

17. “Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime.”

— Susan Faludi

18. “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

19. “It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle-versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground. Backlash.”

— Susan Faludi

20. “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.”

— Susan Faludi

21. “Self-esteem is the basis for feminism because self-esteem is based on defining yourself and believing in that definition. Self-esteem is regarding yourself as a grown-up.”

— Susan Faludi

22. “The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.”

— Susan Faludi

23. “As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women’s mental health: employment improves it.”

— Susan Faludi

24. “Keeping the peace with the particular man in one’s life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture.”

— Susan Faludi

25. “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

26. “To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.”

— Susan Faludi

27. “Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.”

— Susan Faludi

28. “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

29. “Women are enslaved by their own liberation.”

— Susan Faludi

30. “Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or “nuptialitis,” as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.”

— Susan Faludi

31. “The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.”

— Susan Faludi

32. “That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.”

— Susan Faludi

33. “Identifying feminism as women’s enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women’s equality, simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash’s central role and recruiting women to attack their own cause. Some.”

— Susan Faludi

34. “The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation.”

— Susan Faludi

35. “At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.”

— Susan Faludi

36. “We have won so many contests, leveled so many barriers, that the changes wrought by the women’s movement are widely viewed as irreversible, even by feminism’s most committed antagonists. Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation.”

— Susan Faludi

37. “Randy Terry’s backlash against women’s rights may be more intimate than people realize, ” says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood – and Randall Terry’aunt. “He was raised at the knee of feminists.”

— Susan Faludi

38. “These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there’s one pattern that psychological studies have established, it’s that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men’s mental health. “Being married,” the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, “is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.”

— Susan Faludi