Susan Faludi kept encountering a familiar message in late twentieth-century popular culture: women’s growing independence was supposedly making their lives worse. Stories about careers, marriage and motherhood were often presented as warnings about the cost of greater freedom.
Instead of accepting the pattern at face value, the journalist examined the claims behind it. Her 1991 book Backlash traced how ideas about women’s unhappiness moved through news coverage, politics, advertising and entertainment.
Faludi argued that blaming independence could divert attention from conditions such as unequal responsibilities at home and inadequate support for working parents. Her investigation followed the warnings through different parts of popular culture, asking how the evidence compared with the message. She presented the resulting pattern as a backlash against women's advances.
Sources: www.penguinrandomhouse.com