Susan Faludi

“As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.”

“I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.”

“What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.”

“Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.”

“Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to choose between public justice and private happiness.”

“At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.”

“Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.”

“The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.”

“The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.”

“The system of heroism depends on women to be weak so men can be strong.”

“Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger…. Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.”

“The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.”

“A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.”

“The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.”

“The culture used to move relatively slowly, so you could take aim. Now it moves so fast, and is so fluffy and meaningless, you feel like an idiot even complaining about it.”

“Part of me has certainly been motivated by wanting to take a stand against the restrictions that made Mother give up so much.”