Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Social Commentator
Honors Convocation
Tuesday, May 22, 2007, 11:10 a.m.
Susan Faludi has chronicled the changing roles of women and men in American society and how changing gender perception has a lasting impact on our society. As a journalist writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other publications in the 1980s, she first began writing articles exploring the growing antipathy to the feminist movement. Her first book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, an outgrowth of that reporting, argued that America was witnessing a backlash against feminism, fueled by the spread of negative stereotypes against career women, and challenged popularly-held perceptions of significant economic and social gains by women within sociey. Backlash was an international best-seller and won the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1992.
Her second book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, took a different tack and analyzed the forces that shape men's lives and attitudes. In her research for the book, she interviewed men at Promise Keepers rallies and Marine Corps recruiting stations as well as male porn stars and cadets at The Citadel. Her latest book project tackles the vicissitudes of the radical environmental movement, centering on the late Judi Bari, the Earth First! activist whose crusade to save the old-growth California redwoods was nearly cut short when a bomb exploded in her car and she was arrested as an "eco-terrorist."
Faludi won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991 for her coverage in The Wall Street Journal of the leveraged buy-out of Safeway Stores and its impact on employees.
Read the Press Release: Noted Author, Social Commentator Explores Cultural Reaction to 9/11 in Lawrence University Honors Convocation