"Did 9/11 Kill Feminism?"

Or as Hot Air dubs it, “World Trade Center attacked; women, minorities hardest hit”; in the L.A. Times, Meghan Daum writes:

Because I seem to be one of an ever-dwindling handful of women under 50 who still call themselves feminists (and, therefore, am allowed to make fun of feminists with impunity), let me say this: Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of 9/11 isn’t just burning her bras but smoking them.

Not that Susan Faludi, the prize-winning journalist and author of the just-published book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” hasn’t shoe-horned plenty of compelling evidence around this slightly whacked-out notion.

In a succinct 354 pages (shockingly brief for the normally prolix Faludi), she argues that in the months and years following the 9/11 attacks, the rhetoric surrounding various notions of national security (some of it appropriate, much of it overly simplistic and reactive) enabled the media to more or less announce that the whole nation was returning to traditional values and gender roles.

I guess the Air Force Academy didn’t get the message in time.

Related: “The Real Gender Gap“.