Critical Essay | Critical Review by Elaine Showalter

Critical Review by Elaine Showalter

SOURCE: “Selling Sugar and Spice,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 20, 1991, pp. 1, 10.

In the following review, Showalter offers a positive evaluation of Backlash.

Every successful movement for women’s emancipation has been followed by a virulent backlash threatening women with the loss of love and health as the penalty for freedom. Following the admission of women to Oxford and Cambridge in the 1880s, a professor warned one young woman: “If you compete with us, we won’t marry you.” In the 1920s, after the passage of the suffrage amendment, ex-feminists recanted in the pages of popular magazines, explaining that managing a job and a family was much harder than they expected. After World War II, when veterans came home to reclaim their jobs, psychiatrists led the way in proclaiming that modern women had become the lost sex, troubled by emotional discontents caused by too much independence.

The...
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