Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Susan Faludi to Speak at Phillips Academy

'Backlash' author to discuss "Why Gender is at the Center of Everything" on Feb. 18

January 30, 2009 — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Susan Faludi will give a presentation titled “Why Gender Is at the Center of Everything” at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, February 18, in Kemper Auditorium on the Phillips Academy campus. The event is the latest installment of PA’s Brace Center for Gender Studies’ Women and Politics Project, an ongoing series that aims to educate, bring diverse speakers to Andover and initiate campus-wide discussion. The talk is free and open to the public.

“Susan Faludi’s path-breaking book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women changed the way we look at the Reagan revolution and the gender politics of the seventies and eighties,” said Kathleen Dalton, Brace Center co-director and PA instructor of history and social science. “We are delighted to have one of America’s foremost authors and cultural critics speak here as part of the Brace Center’s Women and Politics Project.”

Backlash won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991 for general nonfiction. Faludi’s other books, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, question and analyze gender in today’s society. According to John Leonard of the New York Times Book Review, Faludi is “a relentless reporter, an unapologetic feminist and a brilliant scourge…feminism is her compass and her lens, her furnace and her fire.”

Faludi’s visit is sponsored by the Elizabeth Rogers Fund.