Susan Charlotte Faludi (; born April 18, 1959) is an American feminism,
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 Stefánie Faludi, who was a photographer.
Stefánie Faludi, who was Jewish and a survivor of
The Holocaust, had emigrated from Hungary. In 2004 she came out to Susan as a transgender woman and died in 2015.
Susan Faludi has dual US & Hungarian citizenship.
Her maternal grandfather was also Jewish.
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.
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, , which was released in late 1991.
In 2008–2009, Faludi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,[Susan Faludi's Radcliffe Webpage: ] and during the 2013–2014 academic year, she was the Tallman Scholar in the Gender and Women's Studies Program at Bowdoin College.
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.
Books
Backlash
Susan Faludi's 1991 book
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.
The book has become a classic feminist text, warning women of every generation that the gains of feminism should not be taken for granted.
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. 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."[Molly Fischer, " The Real Backlash Never Ended" The New Yorker, July 21, 2022] Backlash has also been translated into several foreign languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, Finnish, Korean, and Italian.
Stiffed
In Faludi's 1999 book
, 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.
The Terror Dream
In
The Terror Dream, Faludi analyzes the aftermath of 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.
Kirkus Reviews averred 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."
In contrast, 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.[ Review of ] Kakutani's 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."
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.
Writing in
The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called Faludi's book a "rich, arresting and ultimately generous investigation of her father."
[Michelle Goldberg, " Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom," The New York Times, June 16, 2016.] 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."
[Rachel Cooke, " In the Darkroom Review - An Elegant Masterpiece," The Guardian, June 19, 2016] In the Darkroom won the 2016
Kirkus Prize for nonfiction
and was a finalist for the 2017
Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
[ In the Darkroom, 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography] The book has been translated into multiple foreign languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Polish,
Portuguese, Hungarian, Turkish, Dutch, and Chinese.
[ Selected Foreign Language Editions of In the Darkroom]
Faludi and feminism
Faludi has rejected the claim advanced by critics that there is a "rigid, monolithic feminist 'orthodoxy,'"
noting in response that she has disagreed with
Gloria Steinem about pornography and
Naomi Wolf about abortion.
Like Gloria Steinem,[ Mother Jones. "Gloria Steinem" ][Conniff, Ruth (June 1993). "Susan Faludi – feminist author – Interview", The Progressive.] She has also characterized "academic feminism's love affair with deconstructionism" as "toothless", and warned that it "distracts from constructive engagement with the problems of the public world".
Personal life
Faludi is married to fellow author
Russ Rymer.
Selected works
Books
Essays and reporting
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Faludi, Susan, " All the News That's Fit to Feel," The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2024.
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Faludi, Susan,“ Hag of Misery,” The New York Review of Books, November 02, 2023.
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Faludi, Susan, " Feminism Made a Faustian Bargain With Celebrity Culture. Now It’s Paying the Price." The New York Times, June 20, 2022.
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Faludi, Susan,“ Trump’s Thoroughly Modern Masculinity,” The New York Times, October 29, 2020.
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Faludi, Susan,“ ’Believe all women’ is a Right-Wing Trap,” The New York Times, May 18, 2020.
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Faludi, Susan, (October 2010) "American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide" Harper's: 29–42.
Interviews and Profiles
See also
External links
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Interview with Phillip Adams on April 14, 2008
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Video - Susan Faludi at Politics and Prose, " In the Darkroom"
