Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America explores the country’s psychological response to the attacks, especially how they affected women. She argues that after the attacks, the media and government pushed “traditional” gender roles on Americans, praised stay at home mothers, and portrayed men as heroes.
She writes about how women journalists almost disappeared after 9/11, and replacing them were men who praised heroic men, stay at home mothers, and who unleashed strings of profanity onto anyone who thought to ask what America might have done to bring on the attacks. According to Faludi, after 9/11 there was an intense backlash against women. The only women shown on news programs or written about in books were those who were stay at home mothers-especially pregnant ones- who lost their husbands at the time of the attacks. They were said to be fulfilling their patriotic duty by staying home and raising their children. After the attacks, the media went on and on about how more people were now getting married and starting families of their own. Now, the media said, people are realizing what is important in life and settling down. People who dated aimlessly were getting engaged, and couples were getting pregnant one after the other.
Faludi is relentless in proving her points. I felt as if I was being hit over the head with every argument, every quote, over and over. What’s missing from her argument, however, is any perspective from a man. When she discusses how some older women who were putting off marriage finally decide to get hitched, no where does she take the men’s perspective. The women have to be getting married to someone, right? She portrays these nuptials as a negative, as women “giving in” to traditional values. My question is: what’s so bad about it? As cliché as it might sound, after those attacks people realized that family and friends really are what’s most important in life. We heard terrible stories of thousands of people dying, children losing parents, wives losing husbands. Who wouldn’t gain some perspective on life after that? If the attacks brought people together, isn’t that a good thing? Is it not one of the few positives that can be taken from such a terrible tragedy?
She discusses many things in her book regarding women, including how actual women heroes were ignored. Did you know that two female flight attendants on flight 93 actually boiled water to throw on the terrorists? The men on that flight that were regarded as the real heroes, however, were never proved to have done anything particularly heroic. She writes that several of the men were big, “football” player types, and that friends and family used that fact to say that they must have done something when the terrorists took over the plane, it was just their personality to do so. But there is no proof that they were the heroes. My response to that? Who the hell cares if it was the men or the women who did something “heroic”? Does it hurt those men’s families to believe that maybe their father or husband was the hero that day?
As Faludi continued to beat it into my head that the backlash against women was intense in the few years after 9/11, I thought about the present day state of women in the media. Things sound much better now then what she described. The negative effect that she describes didn’t last very long, but she doesn’t mention any of that. She doesn’t discuss Katie Couric becoming the first female news anchor. She doesn’t discuss Jessica Valenti and Feministing. No where is there a mention of Bitch magazine, Salon's Broadsheet, or any other positive media outlets written by women.
Faludi brings up many, many issues in this book, stemming back to Native American kidnappings in the 1800’s. I skimmed that part. Completely skipped others. There is just too much information spanning too many centuries, histories, cultures and literature.
I believe what she writes about the treatment of women in the media after 9/11. At the time, however, we were trying to make sense of a terrible tragedy, and we didn’t know how to react to it. Does that mean that this backlash against women was right? Of course not. It’s something that should be recognized, although Faludi does seem to use facts that are just convenient to her, and it would have been nice of her to bring up the strides that women in the media have made since 9/11, and she would have had plenty to write about being that the book was published in 2007.
To better help you, reader, in determining if you should read these books I write about, I’m going to steal something that Time magazine uses when they summarize a book.
Toss:
Skim: X
Read:
