[In the following review, Wheelwright compares The War against Women with Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women.]

To university students across North America, Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room was the feminist bible for the 1970s. French's portrait of a housewife who trades a claustrophobic marriage for graduate school was confirmation that our mothers were suffering from a similar malaise. The mad/angry wife, the tortured female intellectual stuck with “shit and string beans” and the parade of selfish males became symbols of what women were fighting against. The personal had, with a vengeance, become political.

Since its publication in 1977, French's novel has sold more than a million copies, and her reputation as a feminist scholar rests largely on this success. Ironically, in the same week that French hits the hustings to promote her latest non-fiction offering, The War against Women, it is overshadowed by Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. While both address the campaign waged to discredit feminism in the past decade, nothing could better illustrate the generation gap that divides them.

Faludi, whose book is already a bestseller in North America, last month received the media's ultimate accolade when she and Gloria Steinem shared the cover of Time magazine, “sound[ing] the call to arms”. Yet Faludi has jettisoned conspiracy theories in order to examine how conservative politicians, academics and the media worked to peddle an anti-feminist backlash in the 1980s. She tracks down the pundits responsible for such media-created myths as the “infertility epidemic”, the “man shortage” and working women's “great emotional depression”. The evidence for these crises, she discovered, was “distorted, faulty or plain inaccurate”.

In unravelling the media “feedback loop” that perpetuated these manufactured problems, Faludi unmasks glib punditry and exposes an agenda to send working women back home. Since statistics became “prescriptions for expected female behaviour”, she employs the US Census Bureau and other accredited sources to counter the new backlash orthodoxy. The Yale/Harvard study that claimed single women aged 35 had only a 5 per cent chance of marrying was, for example, based on an untried method for predicting behaviour and was contradicted by several statistical surveys. Yet the story circulated round the globe.

Faludi, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, is at her best in interviews, where she demonstrates a sharp eye for detail and a talent for coaxing subjects into divulging their contradictions. New Right “pro-family” campaigners such as Barbara Lahaye and Connie Marshner, who built high-powered political careers while advocating women's return to domesticity, sent their kids to crèches and relied on their husbands to keep house. And anti-feminist guru Michael Levin, who believes men are innately superior at maths, is married to a mathematical philosopher with whom he shares a strict child-minding rota. The man who claims women are genetically programmed for housework waved Faludi goodbye from his home, wearing an apron.

While she expertly documents a reaction against feminism, Faludi provides few explanations for it beyond the perception that such social change spelled men's “own masculine doom”. The tantalising insight that a “New Traditional Woman” like Marshner offers in rationalising her high-profile career as “exceptional” also goes no deeper.

In opposition to this neo-conservatism, Faludi suggests the existence of an almost monolithic feminist movement, rather than diverse and often warring factions. Equally, differences are overlooked when British examples of the backlash are grafted onto a largely American text. An analysis of Margaret Thatcher's impact is noticeably absent.

But Faludi's work deserves the attention it has received, and the tremendous breadth of her research soars far beyond the simplistic answers offered elsewhere in the media. In comparison, Marilyn French's The War against Women seems nothing more than a return to comforting and dangerously distorted paeans to an antiquated feminism.

Drawing on history and anthropology, French argues that “after millennia of male war against them, women are fighting back on every front.” But the focus is on injustice and, to illustrate her point, she embarks on a global survey that strips away complex differences. Without a coherent thesis or solid research, she falls back on clichés; that women hold the moral high ground as victims, and that their oppression is universal.

“Men imbued with patriarchal values are mustering all their forces to defeat this challenge,” she warns, as conspiracy theories abound. Women still have virtually no voice in politics, but face a concerted campaign of control through violence which is supported by the state, the church and the military, worldwide.

In demonstrating this cabal's existence, French ignores contemporary feminist debates that show how complicated and mediated cultural exchange between western and third-world women has become. Her main source on female genital mutilation in Africa, for example, is the controversial research by Fran Hosken, who, French claims, aroused the hostility of “traditional Africans and Muslims by heroically insisting on pursuing her investigations and publishing her findings”. Yet French ignores the dialogue African women have had with western feminists on this issue, and the differing views on how and why such practices continue.

Elsewhere, French—who relies heavily on the New York Times clippings file—makes broad generalisations without providing supporting evidence. She claims, among other things, that the Catholic Church drummed Geraldine Ferraro out of the vice-presidential race in 1988 and “present-day Muslims” (the country isn't specified) use female police to regulate women's behaviour. While both of these statements might be true, we are given nothing other than French's word for them.

Along the way, the reader is constantly reminded of women's moral superiority, which forces French to make ludicrous alliances with a host of anti-feminists. The havoc that Nancy Reagan wreaked is over-looked as French defends the First Lady against press criticism of her White House excesses. Nancy was clearly “hated for her influence on her husband”. And the problem that Thatcher presented for feminists is again sidestepped in favour of excusing her for rolling back women's rights, because “only male leaders dare to eliminate laws constricting women”.

Many of those university students who once clutched French's novel have moved on from the raw outrage of the 1970s to produce a more sophisticated understanding of women's oppression, mitigated by a host of factors. French's global overview, however, contributes little to current feminist debates, while insisting that women resume the posture of victim. Faludi offers more hope and, despite the limits of her analysis, her greatest accomplishment may be in forcing the media to put feminism back on the agenda. For those of us who believe that it never went away, it seems about time.