Journalist Susan Faludi was born in Queens, New York in 1959 to a Jewish family. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, Faludi started writing for many of America’s most prestigious newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She particularly focuses her writing on feminism, crafting pieces in the 1980’s about the backlash against the movement.

Following September 11, Faludi wrote the book The Terror Dream. Staying with a feminist bent, Faludi argues that the post-9/11 world is unkind to women. Using examples from other times when the American home front wasn’t safe, Faludi says that men in the world that we live in now feel the need to protect women from danger. Faludi said the connection between 9/11 and gender relations was a new phenomenon in gender politics—the, as she called it, “gender quake”--a new wave of gender identities spurred after 9/11.

Faludi said how on the morning of 9/11, as she sat on her couch watching the news, a journalist called her and almost gleefully reported that the terrorist attacks had made feminism irrelevant in most people’s minds. In the media and arguably in American life the “plate tectonics,” as she called them, of gender identity and relations between men and women began to shift.

Faludi says many reliable publications such as The New York Times and Newsweek reported women were less inclined to be satisfied as single and independent people following 9/11. She said a “baby boom” was predicted to occur because each woman’s “biological clock” began to tick faster after the tragedy.

Common gender identities for women illustrated by the media began to change as well. For example, the fashion world peddled “Crisis Couture,”—50's inspired outfits, Victorian-style dresses—anything which did not imply domination. Similarly, she says TV stations began airing programs set in the 50's.

Men’s roles began changing as well, she says. Again according to the media, women started wanting to date strong men, like firemen and police officers, and other societal examples of good protectors. Women now looked for “trophy mates” or men they believed could protect them from an outside threat.

Again this trend in returning to pre-60's feminism gender norms for men showed up in popular culture. For example, she says in the years following 9/11, more than 100 acts of tortures were portrayed on television and now the perpetrator is the hero rather than the villain. The fashion industry also took note—Armani, for example, marketed camouflage.

This new-wave masculinity translated into politics as well. Faludi says Newsweek called President Bush a “fighting machine who has dropped fifteen pounds.” The media even went so far as to call Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “a babe magnet” because, she says, “he was so manly.”

The book was largely panned by critics in the New York Times, saying that it gave feminism a bad name. Susan Faludi is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.