SOURCE: “Phony War,” in Reason, Vol. 23, No. 6, November, 1991, pp. 56-8.

In the following review of Backlash, Young finds shortcomings in Faludi's “selective treatment of facts” and distorted conclusions about the current state of women's liberation.

While watching the recent PBS rerun of I, Claudius, I was struck by the extent to which our notions of history are shaped by the writings of inevitably biased contemporaries. If our civilization were to perish like the Roman Empire, and if Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women were one of the few books to survive from the late 20th century, our descendants would think of the 1980s and early '90s as a dark age for women, “one long, painful, and unremitting campaign to thwart women’s progress.” They might wonder how we ever survived.

Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal (which should not...