Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is a 1991 nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi, which argues for the existence of a media driven "backlash" against the feminist advances of the 1970s. Faludi argues that this backlash posits the women's liberation movement as the source of many of the problems alleged to be plaguing women in the late 1980s. She also argues that many of these problems are illusory, constructed by the media without reliable evidence. According to Faludi, the backlash is also a historical trend, generally recurring when it appears that women have made substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women Susan C. Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is an American feminist, 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". Faludi was born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York in 1959 and grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. Her mother was a homemaker and journalist and is a long-time New York University student. Her father is a photographer who had emigrated from Hungary, a survivor of the Holocaust. Susan graduated from Harvard University in 1981, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson, and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, 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. She lives with fellow author Russ Rymer. Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In her 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. 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 9/11 reinvigorated in America a climate that is hostile to women. Women are viewed as weak and best suited to playing support roles for the men who protect them from attack. The book was called a "tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned work that gives feminism a bad name" by the New York Times principal book reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Sarah Churchwell in the Guardian says, "Ultimately Faludi is guilty of her own exaggerations and mythmaking, strong-arming her argument into submission." 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."[8] 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." 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, 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."[13] 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". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Faludi

• published: 02 Apr 2014
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