In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

Hungary is now on the brink of becoming a neo-fascist state.

The system of heroism depends on women to be weak so men can be strong.

Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.

What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.

It's fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

The demand that women return to femininity is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.

The central argument of the backlash -- that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

The heart of the backlash argument: women are better off 'protected' than equal.

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.

Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

Gender is really varied and complicated and sort of infinitely individualistic.

The point of feminism ... is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated -- and enormously effective -- efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles.

The 'feminine' woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.