Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Evelyn Green Davis Fellow

“There’s a cornucopia of scholars here, with the Radcliffe fellows and the larger Harvard community. It’s wonderful to be able to call somebody up and go down the street and have coffee with them, to tell them I’m paddling around in this pond that’s become an ocean, help!

“There’s so much at the Schlesinger Library. One of my problems is how to contain myself—I could spend a year just reading the diaries of some intriguing woman. I’m thankful to be staying on in Cambridge after my fellowship is over, so I can try to get the larger lay of the land and figure out how much I want to learn about specific people. So far I’ve resisted the urge to spend months looking at one person’s diary.”

Susan Faludi is the author of three books: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown, 1991), Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Morrow, 1999), and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post–9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 2007). Writer and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich said of Faludi’s most recent work, “This is a book that had to be written, and only Susan Faludi could do it so brilliantly and engrossingly.”

Faludi spent her year as a Radcliffe fellow conducting research for her fourth book, looking for answers to the question of why the women’s movement has had such trouble sustaining itself from one generation to the next.

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