Page 51 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 45

she then announces that this view ‘does not require a conspiracy’. Likewise, in
the Introduction to Backlash, the book that consolidated the analysis of
contemporary anti-feminism started in The Beauty Myth, Susan Faludi performs
a similar rhetorical manœuvre. Having just given a brief overview of the many
elements of the ‘backlash’ that her book is to deal with, she then warns the
reader that ‘the backlash is not a conspiracy’ (1991:xxii).
This article explores why writers like Wolf and Faludi should insist so strongly
that their analysis does not amount to a conspiracy theory. Metaphors of
conspiracy, I want to argue, have played an important role within a certain
trajectory of popular American feminist writing over the last thirty years in its
struggle to come to terms with—and come up with terms for—what Betty
Friedan famously called the ‘problem with no name’. On the one hand,
conspiracy tropes have been crucial not only in organizing questions of blame,
responsibility and agency, but also in linking the personal and the political in one
transcoding metaphor around which a women’s movement might coalesce. On
the other hand, the language of conspiracy establishes a series of implicit
divisions within American feminism. Conspiracy theory, I will suggest, can
become the site of an unspoken intellectual elitism, producing a situation in
which ‘academic’ (cultural studies) feminism ignores, repudiates and contains its
‘popular’ other, by which I mean that tradition of feminism typified by writers
1
like Betty Friedan and Naomi Wolf. First, I will discuss Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, then trace through the gradual literalization in the use of conspiracy
metaphors in the following two decades, before returning in the final sections to
an analysis of wolf in the 1990s.

The problem with no name

The Feminine Mystique was an immediate success, staying on the New York
Times bestseller list for nearly two years. Its popularity was no doubt due in part
to its lively style: in many places the book reads like a thriller, with Friedan as
the lone detective chasing up the clues to the mysterious mystique. She describes
how she listened to middle-class housewives talking about their dissatisfactions
with married life, until ‘gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no
name was shared by countless women in America’ (1992:17). At the end of her
first foray into suburbia, for example, she writes that:

I reported back to my [psychoanalyst] guide and said that while all four
seemed ‘fulfilled’ women, none were full-time housewives and one, after all,
was a member of his own profession. That’s a coincidence with those
four’, he said. But I wondered if it was a coincidence.
(1992:205)

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:40–63© 1997 Routledge 0950–2386