Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, by Susan Faludi (Crown, 552 pp., 24)

PITY POOR Susan Faludi. Just when she thought she had everything-a high-status job as a Wall Street Journal reporter, the joys of single life, power breakfasts, the right to an abortion, even a Pulitzer Prize-suddenly, sometime in the Eighties, she began to feel unloved. Legions of women, instead of following-or at least envying-women like her, began to do unspeakable things: like vote for Reagan, or don miniskirts, or have babies. How to account for this inexplicable backsliding.? Why was feminism losing its hold on women at the moment of its (and Miss Faludi's) greatest triumph? Suddenly an answer came to her: It must be a media conspiracy.

Backlash is her attempt to stretch that threadbare argument into a five-hundred-page manifesto on the glories of hard-core feminism, and for a surprising number of supposedly sophisticated women, it works. Seldom has a book received the kind of unalloyed worship heaped on Backlash. Ellen Goodman sounded a common note by praising Miss Faludi's careful handling of evidence "debunking the studies, experts, and trend stories." To top off the praisefest, Backlash was recently nominated for the National Book Award.

Listen carefully to the roar of applause for Backlash: it is the sound of feminism committing suicide.

For a decade feminist leaders have striven mightily to throw off the reputation they earned in the early Seventies, to convince American women of the existence of a kinder, gentler feminism. Feminism, they said, is ready to enter a Second Stage devoted to helping women balance the needs of family and work and improve relationships between the sexes. Real feminists, they told us, do not burn bras, hate men, or dislike babies.

Susan Faludi is having none of it. Betty Friedan's Second Stage is just "a call for a murkily defined new order that is heavy on old Victorian rhetorical flourishes." If women are losing faith in feminism, it is because we are being brainwashed (poor things) by a male-dominated media conspiracy into believing certain ridiculous myths. Thirty- and forty-something career women like her aren't having trouble finding mates, they just love long hours, lonely nights, and whipping up microwave dinners for one too much to even think of relinquishing their freedom. Divorce doesn't impoverish women or damage children, and the sudden emergence of silk bustiers and pouf skirts is proof that evil men are out to demean and control women.

Evidence is not Miss Faludi's strong point. In fact, while she prides herself on (and has been widely praised for) uncovering errors in other people's statistics, misreporting data appears to be something of a personal hobby with her. On numerous occasions, when she quotes a study or poll with which I happen to be familiar, she seriously distorts the results, and in ways so blatant as to suggest more than mere incompetence at work.

Sometimes she outright misquotes data. For example, to dispute the man shortage, she cites a 1986 government study to the effect that one-third of unmarried women are living with a man; the actual figure is 4 per cent-although the study did note that one-third of currently single women have cohabited at some point in their lives.

At other times, she more subtly misconstrues. She cites a 1986 Newsweek poll as proof' that 75 per cent of working mothers want careers; in fact, according to the poll, only 13 per cent of full-time working mothers wanted to work full-time-a plurality (34 per cent) preferred part-time work, and the rest were divided between wanting more flexible hours or a home-based business, and wanting to be full-time housewives.

The reality that Miss Faludi, like most other feminists, willfully refuses to face is that mothers-even working mothers-overwhelmingly choose to make caring for children their first priority. According to Census Bureau data, almost two-thirds of married mothers either don't work or work part-time. And according to a 1990 poll, even a majority of working mothers now want to go home.

But by far her most common tactic is simply to ignore the voluminous evidence that contradicts her point of view. Her preferred strategy is to pick one study, find some (often trivial) error or methodological quibble, and airily dismiss the whole argument as a media invention. She is convinced, for example, that media revisionism is responsible for Americans' growing reservations about a 50 per cent divorce rate. Lenore Weitzman's famous figures-that women's incomes drop 73 per cent after divorce-are wrong, Miss Faludi maintains: women's income drops only" 30 per cent after divorce. Anyway feminists can't be responsible because they didn't promote no-fault divorce reform, she says, conveniently ignoring that feminists certainly did heavily promote divorce.

And she remains one of divorce's biggest cheerleaders, despite the mounting evidence of its disastrous economic effects on women. Single mothers are six times more likely to be poor than married mothers, and one-third of all divorced women end up on welfare. None of which bothers Miss Faludi in the least. As for the pain divorce inflicts on children-well, she just isn't interested. Judith Wallerstein, whose Second Chances reported that five years after the divorce one-third of the children involved remain clinically depressed, "never bothered to test her theory on a control group" Miss Faludi says, and, having "disposed" of just one of the thousands of studies pointing to the traumatic effects of divorce on children, she quickly drops the subject.

Backlash is an ignorant, nasty, little book, for all its 552 pages and pseudo-scholarly footnotes-small-minded, crafty, conniving, a disgrace even to journalistic standards, and an insult to women. Feminism, Faludi style, ultimately fails because it cannot come to terms with women's unaccountable desire not only to have babies, but actually to spend time raising them, in intact families, with men. Hard experience has taught a growing number of women that the biggest danger facing us today comes not from discrimination in the workplace but from the collapse of the family-a disaster which feminism partly engineered, loudly applauded, and, as the reception of Backlash proves, does not know how to disown.

Miss Gallagher's The Abolition of Marriage will be published in the fall of 1993 by Poseidon Press.