SOURCE: Greene, Gayle. “The Empire Strikes Back.” Nation (10 February 1992): 166–70.

In the following excerpt, Greene offers a favorable assessment of The Beauty Myth.

Those who are living through change may be the last to know it, until something we read brings things together in a way that makes us see that yes, things really are different—it's not just us growing older. These books [Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Susan Faludi's Backlash]—both written by young women, both bristling with indignation—demonstrate that something has changed profoundly in the culture's attitudes toward and representations of women, that we are undergoing a “cultural onslaught” that is the more “remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon at all.” Both books contextualize this backlash in relation to earlier backlashes—in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and the fifties—and both explain its ferocity in economic terms...