I recently completed
The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi. She brings a fascinating feminist perspective to the way the nation reacted in the aftermath of 9/11. To tell the truth, I found much of what she said completely surprising and realized that I was not at all aware of some of the events she writes about. She talked about the backlash against feminism that caused women journalists who took the "wrong" viewpoint on 9/11 to be shut out of the media. In fact, she claims that even the conservative women who agreed with the conservative line were dropped into near invisibility.
I have to admit that I did not notice any of this. In 2001 we still had a TV set but of course, destruction of the Twin Towers ruined a major broadcasting point, and for several months we could only get a single channel. It was grainy, at that. If you had cable TV, which we did not and still don't (in fact, we've lived without a TV set at all for about 3 years), you got good reception, but ours was terrible. So I missed out on broadcast news reports, and I wasn't paying that much to print or radio after the initial horror sank in.
To tell the truth, I didn't see much of what Ms. Faludi reports. I didn't experience a surge of media propaganda urging me back into housewifery after 9/11 so the big brave men could rescue us helpless females. Maybe that's because I was already a stay at home Mom at that time, and had just finished a four year stint of homeschooling Jason. I was, and am, in favor of mothers staying home with their children, though I would never presume to tell the next woman that she was "wrong" for making the opposite choice.
What I did see was some people choosing to get out of Manhattan out of a valid concern for their own safety. This affected men and women alike. I know one man who worked in a nearby building, so close that he is now haunted by memories of seeing unknown objects hurtling from the upper floor windows, and then realizing to his horror that these were people, jumping to their deaths to avoid death by fire. He gave up his government job and stayed home in New Jersey, choosing to take an early retirement and run his own business from home.
So what I think really happened is that those who could find an alternative to working in lower Manhattan got out of there, and I can hardly blame them. Particularly now that we are hearing that the air quality was not safe as we were led to believe, these people made the smart choice.
If there was a conspiracy to cast women as the victims and men as the heroes, I wasn't aware of it. I was aware that some people were doing chest-beating and blaming American policies for bringing this terrorist attack on ourselves, and that made me quite angry. People were murdered, everyday people who went off to their jobs in all innocence that morning. Maybe some were greedy CEO's but there were also working Dads and Moms who had no part in any international conspiracy to rip the third world off, and they didn't get to come home again. There were janitors and other low-level workers probably getting minimum wage, to all intents and purposes pretty darn oppressed themselves, and they died too.
So I was angry when I heard these apologists making "bad, bad America" remarks, and for once in my life I was pleased for a very short while that Bush was talking tough. Of course, afterwards he completely screwed up and lied to us and I reverted to my usual stance on him and his party. But when Faludi wrote about several women who made these apologist type of remarks and the virulence that was heaped on them, I couldn't help saying to myself, "So what? They deserved it!" She does have a point that it wasn't fair if the men who said similar things weren't criticized in the same way.
But the most interesting part of the book was the last few chapters where she pointed out something I never thought of before: that America does have a history of "terrorism" on "our own soil." She refers to the colonists and later the frontier people who were attacked by the Native Americans. At that time, it seems, the American response was to try and cast men as the heroes defending their families from the "savages," just as men were cast as the exclusive heroes of 9/11. Women were cast as the victims even though men were killed too, and some of the women who were taken captive were quite capable of defending themselves.
Apparently, the true stories of some of these captives who killed their captors (and sometimes innocent children) when making their escapes were covered up and replaced by sweet tales of helpless, terrified victims who were rescued by big strong all-American white men. In fact, some of the captives were so well treated by their captors that they married men of the tribes and were heartbroken when they were "rescued" and forcibly returned to white society. From the alteration of these tales to create a false image of American men staunchly defending their women and children (when in fact they often were the victims of these attacks themselves) comes the John Wayne image, particularly as depicted in "The Searchers."
I found the book quite interesting, but I have to admit I didn't experience that push to return to the hearth, since I was already there. I also saw nothing in the media that seemed to be especially aimed at women. It seemed to me that men and women alike were quoted in the aftermath of 9/11 as wanting to spend more time with their families.
So while this was a fascinating book I felt the author's stance was a little off base. However it goes into a chapter of our history that I knew nothing about before reading the book, except that I knew that women sometimes found they had more rights in tribal life than they did in American society, and sometimes resisted being "rescued" from their captors, whom they had grown to love. It's worth reading, even if I don't fully agree with Ms. Faludi.
