Finally, if Faludi is long on criticism for America’s response to September 11, she completely fails when it comes to proposing alternatives. She concludes, for example, that

faced with a replay of our formative experience, we have the opportunity to resolve the old story in a new way that honors the country and its citizens…. September 11 offers us, even now, the chance to revisit that past and reverse that long denial, to imagine a national identity grounded not on virile illusion but on the talents and vitality of all of us equally, men and women both.

 

Toward the end of Terror Dream, Faludi wonders what might have happened if America hadn’t, in the wake of September 11, “retreated into… fictions,” and had instead taken the attack “as an occasion to ‘confront the truth.’” We might ask Faludi the same question. For while her newest book is undeniably a feat of rhetoric and research, it is also a stubborn refusal to engage with the vital realities of our times. If anything, it is a determined attempt to reject the notion that the post-9/11 world is different, after all. Herein lies perhaps the biggest clue to the mystery of Faludi’s strange insistence on portraying American history as one big rerun at precisely the moment when the chasm between “before” and “after” never loomed so enormous: By claiming that it is all and has always been about gender inequality, Faludi can shore up her own relevance at a time when many are convinced of feminism’s utter marginality.

This is truly a shame. For while September 11 may not have “pushed feminism off the map,” there is no doubt that it has challenged it, along with many other ideologies and worldviews, to prove its relevancy through a reexamination of its core principles. In the case of feminism, those principles once included—and can include again—a belief in moral absolutes as protectors of women’s freedom and security; a dedication to liberal democracy as the best means of ensuring women’s rights; a commitment to effecting practical improvement in the here-and-now world in which real women live; and, finally, a willingness to cross ideological and political lines for the sake of the greater good. When these are its driving forces, there is no end to what feminism can accomplish. As feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out in a May 2007 article in The Weekly Standard, in 1997 the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) combined forces with Mavis and Jay Leno to create a national awareness campaign aimed at fighting the mistreatment of women in the Muslim world. The FMF, in collaboration with various human rights groups, also played a vital role in convincing the United States to deny formal recognition to the Taliban, and persuaded the oil company UNOCAL not to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, all in protest of the Taliban’s abuses of Afghani women. These are excellent examples, Sommers concludes, of “what can be achieved when a women’s group seriously seeks to address the mistreatment of women outside the United States.”

By failing to rise to the occasion and breathe new life into feminism’s animating principles, Faludi has done feminism, and women the world over, a great disservice. For much of the world needs feminism now more than ever, particularly those women in Muslim countries whose oppression is far greater—indeed, far more real—than anything Americans could ever dream of.
 

Marla Braverman is associate editor of Azure.