Susan Faludi
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]
Susan Faludi
April 18, 1959
Journalist
- Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism
(1991) - Kirkus Prize
(2016)
Biographical information[edit]
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 (then known as Steven Faludi, and born István Friedman), who was a photographer.[5][6] Stefánie Faludi had emigrated from Hungary, was Jewish, and a survivor of the Holocaust; she eventually came out as a transgender woman and died in 2015.[5] Susan Faludi has dual US-Hungarian citizenship.[7] Faludi's maternal grandfather was also Jewish.[5] Susan graduated from Harvard University with an AB summa cum laude in 1981, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as Managing Editor of The Harvard Crimson, and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Throughout the eighties she wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, Faludi wrote Backlash, 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] She is married to fellow author Russ Rymer.[10] Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1996, she 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.[11]
Faludi and feminism[edit]
Faludi has rejected the claim advanced by critics that there is a "rigid, monolithic feminist 'orthodoxy,'"[32] noting in response that she has disagreed with Gloria Steinem about pornography and Naomi Wolf about abortion.
Like Gloria Steinem,[33][34] 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."[35] 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".[32]