The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi

In the months and years after the attacks on September 11, 2001, contrarian women were silenced, according to Faludi’s focused cultural critique.  She especially targets the mainstream media, for which she blames the creation and perpetuation of a ‘storyline’ – that it was time for men to be men and women to be helpless.  Major newspapers dropped many of the women who had been published on their op-ed pages, and talking head programs recruited only those women who supported the revenge and power approach.  As a result, the terror attacks that undermined much of our open society also set back the cause of feminism by eliminating or devaluing women’s public roles.   

Faludi collects some damning evidence that she sorts into four general areas:  reporting and commentary, first-hand experiences, gender roles in the post-September 11 world, and the treatment of those women who didn’t follow the popular path.  In addition to providing statistics on ‘feminist’ vs. ‘status quo’ pundits (my terms), she unsuccessfully searches for the stories about female cops, firefighters, EMTs, and office workers and the take-charge flight attendant on Flight 93.  She studies the suddenly-fashionable (and false) reporting about career women rushing into marriage and childbearing.  She asks why the widows of responders and victims were vilified when they began to move on with their lives, and when they demanded accountability. 

Faludi shifts from the September 11 narrative into a wider view of American history, analyzing the ‘strong man/weak woman’ storyline from King Philip’s War through the settlement of the American West.  Using a variety of ‘captivity narratives’, she shows how women’s stories were edited, plagiarized, or manipulated to cast doubt or project frailty on the women themselves, while holding the men – relatives or authorities – up as examples of strength and virtue.  The pinnacle of this genre is Alan Le May’s 1954 novel, The Searchers (the source of the Faludi’s title), and John Ford’s 1956 film edition, which is consistently listed as one of the greatest films ever made. 

While that shift is somewhat jarring, Faludi does assemble solid historical evidence to support her thesis.  Her detailed take on the Salem witch trials in light of the captivity narrative is especially interesting, and her dissection of the imagery in both the print and film versions of The Searcher is clearly stated.  But it is her highlighting of the current state of affairs that is most shocking.  The changes to our popular culture in the wake of September 11 were so subtle but so profound that Faludi herself seems surprised at their pernicious depth.  With all the long-term injuries that the handling of September 11 have inflicted on the United States, this is an essential addition to the analysis of current events.