A short life of the author
Susan Faludi (born 18 April 1959) is an American journalist and non-fiction writer whose work addresses the most contested questions of American gender politics with a combination of rigorous reporting, intellectual ambition, and moral seriousness that has made her one of the most important feminist writers of the last thirty years. Her first book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a cultural phenomenon — the book that named and documented the systematic effort to roll back the gains of the women’s movement. Her subsequent books have expanded her range far beyond conventional feminism, addressing masculinity, post-9/11 culture, and the meaning of gender identity itself.
Life and Career
Faludi was born in Queens, New York, the daughter of Steven Faludi, a Hungarian-born photographer, and Marilyn Lanning. She attended Harvard University, where she wrote for the Harvard Crimson, and began her journalism career at the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Wall Street Journal, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991 for a story about the human costs of a leveraged buyout of Safeway stores.
She published Backlash the same year, and the coincidence of the Pulitzer and the bestseller established her as a major public intellectual.
Backlash (1991)
Backlash is a meticulously documented investigation of the cultural, political, and media forces that worked, during the 1980s, to undermine the achievements of the women’s movement. Faludi argues that the backlash was not a conspiracy but a cultural reflex — a series of interconnected phenomena (the “man shortage” scare, the “infertility epidemic,” the demonisation of working mothers, the rise of anti-feminist fashion and media) that collectively conveyed the message that feminism had made women miserable and that women’s true happiness lay in returning to traditional roles.
The book’s strength is its reporting. Faludi traces the origins of widely circulated “facts” about women — the claim that single women over forty had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married, for instance — to their sources, and demonstrates that they were statistically baseless, products of sloppy research amplified by a media eager for stories that confirmed traditional gender narratives.
Backlash sold millions of copies, was translated into many languages, and became required reading in women’s studies courses. It was also attacked by conservatives and by some feminists who felt that Faludi overestimated the coherence and intentionality of the backlash she described.
Stiffed (1999)
Faludi’s second book turned to American men — specifically, to the crisis of American masculinity in the post-industrial, post-Cold War era. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man argues that the promises made to American men after World War II — that hard work, loyalty, and self-sacrifice would be rewarded with economic security, social respect, and meaningful participation in public life — had been broken. Faludi spent years interviewing men in various communities — shipyard workers, Promise Keepers, Citadel cadets, porn actors, football fans — and produced a portrait of male dislocation and rage that was sympathetic without being sentimental.
The book was praised for its ambition and its reporting but criticised for its occasionally schematic analysis. It remains one of the most serious attempts to understand American masculinity from a feminist perspective.
The Terror Dream (2007)
The Terror Dream examines American culture after 9/11 — specifically, the revival of frontier mythology, the cult of the male rescuer, the silencing of dissent, and the gendered narratives (tough men protecting vulnerable women) that dominated post-attack discourse. The book is Faludi’s most polemical and was less well received than her earlier work.
In the Darkroom (2016)
Faludi’s most personal and most formally ambitious book is a memoir about her father, Steven Faludi, who at age seventy-six underwent gender reassignment surgery in Hungary and began living as Stefánie. The book is simultaneously a family memoir, an investigation of Hungarian Jewish identity (Steven/Stefánie had survived the Holocaust), a meditation on the nature of identity itself, and a reporter’s investigation into the meaning of gender transition. It won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In the Darkroom is Faludi’s most complex work — a book in which the investigative reporter and the daughter are in constant tension, and in which the questions about identity that she has pursued throughout her career become urgently, painfully personal.
Collecting Faludi
Backlash (1991, Crown) in first edition with dust jacket brings $30–$60. Stiffed (1999, William Morrow) brings $15–$30. In the Darkroom (2016, Metropolitan) brings $15–$25. Signed copies are available at events and bring modest premiums. Backlash is the key title for collectors.