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Yet, while its resonance with the political moment was clear, “Backlash” was foremost a work of media criticism: across advertising, movies, TV, and news, Faludi catalogued the gaps between the stories being spun and the realities of women’s lives. The publication of “Backlash” coincided with the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and outrage over Anita Hill’s testimony and her treatment helped propel Faludi’s book onto the best-seller list. After a brief window in which corporate and media interests had sought to commercialize feminism (the period of the “You’ve come a long way, baby” Virginia Slims ad), they’d turned instead to demonizing single working women, extolling stay-at-home motherhood, and inventing trends like the “new traditionalism.” Whether offered up by screenwriters, journalists, politicians, or dubiously credentialled experts, backlash attitudes often took the form of an insidious twofold message: first, that feminism had already changed everything, and, second, that feminism itself was the reason that women were now “miserable.” If a woman in the eighties struggled to balance work and family, for example, that was because feminism had given her the foolhardy confidence to think that she could “have it all.” Her difficulties were cast as a sign that the movement had gone too far-not that it still had far to go. The gains made by second-wave feminists in the nineteen-seventies, she wrote, had inspired a vicious reaction from the protectors of the status quo. Faludi (who has also written for The New Yorker) presented a damningly methodical assessment of women’s status in Reagan-era America.

Published in 1991, “Backlash” had quickly become an era-defining phenomenon. “There is practically a whole book about how that statistic is not true!” The book in question didn’t even need to be named: it was “ Backlash,” by Susan Faludi.

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“It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of forty,” a man tells Meg Ryan’s character, Annie, in the 1993 movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” He’s parroting a statistic that was, at the time, a favored object of media hand-wringing-the dramatic results of a 1986 study on marriage patterns that had exploded onto magazine covers, TV-news specials, and movie screens.