Susan Faludi to discuss changing gender roles at the Assembly Series

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Susan Faludi will deliver the Assembly Series lecture, “Gender Roles: A Generation of Change,” at 11:00 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 13, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, which is also the keynote address of the 30th annual Mr. And Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Conference, will be followed by a panel discussion from 2-4 p.m. in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building.

Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi

Faludi is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male. In Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991, she challenged the notion that women feel miserable and conflicted because they now have too much equality with men, can’t take the pace and are desperately seeking a return to the familial nest.

In Stiffed, Faludi examines the masculinity crisis plaguing our culture at the end of the ’90s. According to Faludi, as much as the culture wants to proclaim that men are made miserable — or brutal or violent or irresponsible — by their inner nature and their hormones, even in the world they supposedly own and run, men are at the mercy of cultural forces that disfigure their lives and destroy their chance at happiness. As traditional masculinity continues to collapse, the once-valued male attributes of craft, loyalty, and social utility are no longer honored, much less rewarded.

Faludi has written for The New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Wall Street Journal. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 while at the Wall Street Journal for “The Reckoning”, an article on the human impact of the leveraged buyout of the Safeway supermarket chain. Faludi received a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard in 1981.

For more information, visit the Assembly Series web page (http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu) or call 935-5285.