Susan Faludi

Susan Charlotte Faludi (; born April 18, 1959) is an American journalist and feminist author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway, a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance." She was awarded the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Early life and education Susan Faludi was born in 1959 in Queens, New York, and grew up in Yorktown Heights. She was born to Marilyn Lanning, a homemaker and journalist, and Stefánie Faludi, a photographer. Stefánie Faludi was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who had emigrated from Hungary. In 2004 she came out to Susan as a transgender woman, and died in 2015. Her maternal grandfather was also Jewish. She graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature.

Career Faludi became a professional journalist, writing for The New York Times, the Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

During the 1980s, Faludi wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, she wrote her first book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, about this manufactured media resistance to feminism, which was released in late 1991.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report in The Wall Street Journal on the leveraged buyout of Safeway.

In 2008–2009, Faludi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler.

In 1996, Faludi was awarded honoris causa membership in Omicron Delta Kappa at SUNY Plattsburgh. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University.

Books Backlash Susan Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argues that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism, Faludi asserted that many who argue that women should stay home to look after children are hypocrites, since they have wives who are working mothers or, as women, are themselves working mothers. This work won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1991. The book has become a classic feminist text.

In 2014, a public book club by Matter and MSNBC was started, where writers including Jill Abramson, Katha Pollitt, Lena Dunham, and Roxane Gay, reread chapters of the book and examined their contemporary relevance. In September 2015, Bustle included Backlash among its list of "25 Bestsellers from the last 25 years you simply must make time to read." Reflecting on the legacy of the book in The New Yorker in July 2022, Molly Fischer called Backlash "an era-defining phenomenon" that "presented a damningly methodical assessment of women’s status in Reagan-era America."

The Terror Dream In The Terror Dream (2007), Faludi analyzes the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the context of American history going back to insecurity on the historical American frontier. Faludi argues that the 9/11 attacks reinvigorated a climate in America that is hostile to women, where women are viewed as weak and best suited to playing support roles for the men who protect them from attacks.

Kirkus Reviews called the book a "rich, incisive analysis of the surreality of American life in the wake of 9/11" and "brilliant, illuminating and essential." Reviewing the book for Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan praised Faludi for her "characteristic restraint and depth of research" and for her "rigorous insistence on truth."

The book was disparaged as a "tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned work that gives feminism a bad name" by New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Another New York Times critic, John Leonard, wrote: "In The Terror Dream a skeptical Faludi reads everything, second-guesses everybody, [and] watches too much talking-head TV." Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Churchwell called the book "a persuasive analysis of post-9/11 sexism" but also said: "Ultimately Faludi is guilty of her own exaggerations and mythmaking, strong-arming her argument into submission."

In the Darkroom In the Darkroom, published in 2016 by Henry Holt and Company, is about "modern transsexuality," inspired by Faludi's father coming out as a transgender woman. Writing in The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called it a "rich, arresting and ultimately generous investigation of her father." In the Darkroom won the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction

Faludi has criticized the obscurantism prevalent in academic feminist theory: "There's this sort of narrowing specialization and use of coded, elitist language [...] which is to my mind impenetrable and not particularly useful." She has also characterized "academic feminism's love affair with deconstructionism" as "toothless", and warned that it "distract from constructive engagement with the problems of the public world."

Personal life Faludi is married to author Russ Rymer.

Selected works

Books

Articles