Michiko Kakutani tears apart Susan Faludi's silly new book in today's New York Times. Writes Kakutani:
[Faludi] insists, 'a feminist perspective on any topic was increasingly AWOL' after 9/11. Thus, she argues, various antifeminist impulses ('the cumulative elements of a national fantasy') surfaced after 9/11, including 'the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls.' Not only are many of these assertions highly debatable in themselves, but Ms. Faludi's overarching thesis in this book rings false too. In fact, her suggestion that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the same fears and narrative impulses as those unleashed by our frontier ancestors' 'original war on terror,' leading to a muffling of feminist voices and a veneration of 'the virtues of nesting,' runs smack up against her own 'Backlash,' which suggested that similar assaults on women's independence were being unleashed in the 1980s - a time not of war or threat but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war. Such errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book - a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.
Kakutani neglects to mention in her review - I wonder why! - that many of the administration's criticisms of the Taliban are grounded specifically in the rhetoric of women's rights. The U.S. secretary of state is a woman. A woman is in charge of promoting America's image in the Middle East. A woman is speaker of the House of Representatives and second-in-line for the presidency. A woman currently is the frontrunner for president of the United States. The power of these women hasn't diminished since 2001. If anything, it has increased.