Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi discusses gender stereotypes after 9/11

Journalist and author Susan Faludi discussed the underlying American social problems revealed and affected by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in a lecture titled “9/11 at the 10-Year Mark: A Decade of Fear and Fantasy” held on Tuesday night in McCosh 50.

In her examination of the nation’s response to the events, she said the national consciousness took up once again some of its oldest gender stereotypes, predicting that more women would return to the home.

“Women were ... said to be responding to 9/11 by returning to domesticity,” she said, adding that the media predicted an analogous change in societal expectations for men.

“The new post-9/11 American man was declared a red-meat eater,” she added. “A Washington Post article announced that, thanks to 9/11, ‘We are heading into a time when the real men bring home the bacon and the women cook it up.’ ”

Faludi said that this response was not unique, nor were the 9/11 attacks the sole attacks on American soil. She alluded to King Philip’s War in the 1670s — a conflict between the English colonists of New England and the Native Americans — which mirrored 9/11 in its cultural tensions generated by attacks by non-whites upon whites. During this conflict, she said, the traditional gender roles developed.

“These conflicts reduced early American settlers to a state of perpetual insecurity,” she said. Faludi added that the country responded to their constant fear by covering it up through “the creation of cultural myth,” a desperately needed invincibility.

A large part of that myth hinged on gender stereotypes, she said, because men had to be depicted as capable of defending their country. However, Faludi explained, “Men can’t be shown to be great and capable unless women are weak and in need of male saviors.”

The events of 9/11 marked a return to this “general myth of natural character,” because they destroyed the country’s assumption of its own invincibility. Therefore, she said, America responded by “using a trumped-up domestic drama to paper over our vulnerability.”

“If we can show women to be weak, we can make the nation strong,” she explained.

Faludi said that gender stereotypes can be viewed as a “reflexive kick” when the country’s knee was hit by the hammer of 9/11. As a result, they serve as reflections of a number of underlying socioeconomic problems that persist in the country, both before and after the events of 9/11.

“The current crisis we are in is the crisis we were in before 9/11,” she said. “The 9/11 formula for national security leaves us vulnerable to the threats we face.”

Susan Faludi graduated from Harvard in 1981 and went on to write for many publications including The New York Times, the Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991.