Backlash Quotes - page 2
Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see - and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too - on herself.
Susan Faludi
The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance, either; some are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a "fresh” angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their "acceptable” roles - whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object.
Susan Faludi
In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep "concern”. Its lips profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. 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.
Susan Faludi
The fourth phase of violence starting May 5 saw attacks on Hindu neighbourhoods by mischief mongers with the intent of provoking a backlash. The idea was to influence the scheduled discussion on Gujarat in the concluding session of Rajya Sabha the next day. These stage-managed riots were aimed at misleading the Parliament, as well as the outside world, to believe that the situation in Gujarat was grim and to build a national hysteria around Narendra Modi in order to browbeat Prime Minister Vajpayee into sacking Modi.
Madhu Kishwar
Maybe it wasn't such a great idea for Hillary Clinton to invite Madeleine Albright to campaign for her in New Hampshire. During a campaign event in Concord on Saturday, the former Secretary of State declared: "Young women have to support Hillary Clinton. The story is not over!...They're going to want to push us back," she continued. "It's not done and you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. And just remember, there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." And while it was not the first time Albright muttered that phrase, the backlash was swift and severe. Pointing to Albright's notorious defense of the 1990 sanctions on Iraq, during which she said that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it," observers speculated about someone else who may end up in that "special place."
Madeleine Albright
Experience shows that at this rate of inflation, democracy cannot survive... A middle-class backlash is inevitable. A populist movement. In the end people will not put up with the law being broken and factions of the workers getting away with it with impunity. People will take control into their own hands, or a strong government will use the public forces to seize control. People will get hurt. Quite likely there will be a lot of violence one way or another. But in the end there is a limit to what middle-class people will tolerate.
Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone
