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Susan Faludi

American feminist author and journalist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Susan Faludi
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Susan Charlotte Faludi (/fəˈluːdi/; born April 18, 1959) is an American feminist,[1][2] journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.[3][4]

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Early life and education

Susan Faludi was born in 1959 in Queens, New York, and grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. She was born to Marilyn (Lanning), a homemaker and journalist, and Steven Faludi, who was a photographer.[5][6] Steven Faludi (born István Friedman), who was Jewish and a survivor of the Holocaust, had emigrated from Hungary. (He eventually came out as a transgender woman, and died in 2015).[5] Susan Faludi has dual US & Hungarian citizenship.[7] Her maternal grandfather was also Jewish.[5]

Faludi attended Harvard University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as Managing Editor of The Harvard Crimson. She graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude.

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Career

Faludi became a professional journalist, writing for The New York Times, 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, which was released in late 1991.

In 2008–2009, Faludi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,[8] and during the 2013–2014 academic year, she was the Tallman Scholar in the Gender and Women's Studies Program at Bowdoin College.[9] Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1996, Faludi was awarded honoris causa membership in Omicron Delta Kappa at SUNY Plattsburgh. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Stockholm University in Sweden.[10]

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Books

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Backlash

Susan Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argued that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism, especially due to the spread of negative stereotypes against career-minded women. Faludi asserted that many who argue "a woman's place is in the home, looking after the kids" are hypocrites, since they have wives who are working mothers or, as women, they are themselves working mothers. This work won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1991.[11] The book has become a classic feminist text, warning women of every generation that the gains of feminism should not be taken for granted.[12]

In 2014, high-profile women such as journalists Jill Abramson and Katha Pollitt, actress/writer Lena Dunham, and feminist novelist Roxane Gay, among many others, reread each of the chapters of the book and examined their contemporary relevance.[citation needed] In September 2015, Bustle.com included Backlash among its list of "25 Bestsellers from the last 25 years you simply must make time to read."[13] 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."[14] Backlash has also been translated into several foreign languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, Finnish, Korean, and Italian.[15]

Stiffed

In Faludi's 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Faludi analyzes the state of the American man. Faludi argues that while many of those in power are men, most individual men have little power. American men have been brought up to be strong, support their families and work hard. But many men who followed this now find themselves underpaid or unemployed, disillusioned and abandoned by their wives. Changes in American society have affected both men and women, Faludi concludes, and it is wrong to blame individual men for class differences, or for plain differences in individual luck and ability, that they did not cause and from which men and women suffer alike.[16]

The Terror Dream

In The Terror Dream, Faludi analyzes the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in light of prior American experience going back to insecurity on the historical American frontier such as in Metacom's Rebellion. 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 attack.[17][18]

The book was disparaged as a "tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned work that gives feminism a bad name" by The New York Times principal book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.[19] Her fellow New York Times critic, John Leonard, wrote: "In The Terror Dream a skeptical Faludi reads everything, second-guesses everybody, watches too much talking-head TV and emerges from the archives and the pulp id like an exorcist and a Penthesilea."[20] Sarah Churchwell, in The Guardian said, "Ultimately Faludi is guilty of her own exaggerations and mythmaking, strong-arming her argument into submission."[21]

On the other hand, Kirkus Reviews claimed that the book was a "rich, incisive analysis of the surreality of American life in the wake of 9/11" and that it was "brilliant, illuminating and essential."[22] 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".[23]

In the Darkroom

Faludi's most recent book is In the Darkroom, published in 2016 by Henry Holt & Co. It is about the "fluidity and binaries" of "modern transsexuality", inspired by Faludi's father coming out as a transgender woman.[24] Writing in The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called Faludi's book a "rich, arresting and ultimately generous investigation of her father."[25] Writing in The Guardian, Rachel Cooke described the book as "an elegant masterpiece" and "a searching investigation of identity barely disguised as a sometimes funny and sometimes very painful family saga."[26] In the Darkroom won the 2016 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction[27] and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.[28] The book has been translated into multiple foreign languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Polish,[29] Portuguese, Hungarian, Turkish, Dutch, and Chinese.[30]

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Faludi and feminism

Faludi has rejected the claim advanced by critics that there is a "rigid, monolithic feminist 'orthodoxy,'"[31] noting in response that she has disagreed with Gloria Steinem about pornography and Naomi Wolf about abortion.

Like Gloria Steinem,[32][33] Faludi has criticized the obscurantism prevalent in academic feminist theorizing, saying, "There's this sort of narrowing specialization and use of coded, elitist language of deconstruction or New Historicism or whatever they're calling it these days, which is to my mind impenetrable and not particularly useful."[34] She has also characterized "academic feminism's love affair with deconstructionism" as "toothless", and warned that it "distract[s] from constructive engagement with the problems of the public world".[31]

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Personal life

Faludi is married to fellow author Russ Rymer.[35]

Bibliography

Books

  • Faludi, Susan (1991). Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown.
  • Faludi, Susan (1999). Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow.
  • Faludi, Susan (2007). The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
  • Faludi, Susan (2016). In the Darkroom. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Essays and reporting

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Interviews and Profiles

See also

References

External links

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