Good and Mad

Good and Mad CHAPTER ONE SLEEPING GIANT
The contemporary reemergence of women's rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze. The years following the great social movements of the twentieth century-the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement-were shaped by deeply reactionary politics. When Phyllis Schlafly led an antifeminist crusade to stop the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment-the twenty-four-word constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed equal rights regardless of gender-finally succeeding in 1982, it was a sign that the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, and the righteous fury that had ignited it, had been sidelined.

More broadly, the Reagan era, in which increasingly hard-right reactionary politics had joined with a religious "moral majority," gave rise to a cultural backlash to all sorts of social progress. Under sharp attack were the benefits, rights, and protections that afforded poor women any stability, as well as the parts of the women's movement that had produced legal, professional, and educational gains for middle-class women, better enabling them to live independently, outside of marriage, the patriarchal institution that had historically contained them and on which they had long depended.

The right wing of the 1980s was driven to restrict abortion access and deregulate Wall Street while simultaneously destroying the social safety net, which Ronald Reagan had made sure was embodied by the specter of the black welfare queen. A 1986 Newsweek cover story, meanwhile, blared the news that a single woman at forty was more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married. That later-debunked study was a key point of Susan Faludi's chronicle of the era, Backlash, in which she tracked the varied, suffocating ways in which women's anger was muffled throughout the Reagan years: how feminist activism was blamed for the purported "man shortage"; the day-care that enabled

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour and Marie Claire. She is the author of All the Single Ladies and the award-winning Big Girls Don't Cry. She lives in New York with her family.