Feminist author Susan Faludi will deliver the annual Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation Lecture on Thursday, March 26, at 8 p.m. in Bailey Hall at Cornell.

Faludi has worked on the staffs of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Wall Street Journal, has freelanced for The New Yorker, Mother Jones and MS., and is best known as author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Winner of the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Backlash reveals patterns in society's response to the women's movement and challenges the notion of feminism as a source of women's problems. A Time magazine cover story (March 9, 1992) recognized Backlash as "one of those landmark books that shapes the opinions of America's opinion shapers ... [it] has set off firecrackers across the political battlefield."

"In addition to being a savvy investigative reporter, Susan Faludi is a perceptive social critic," says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the S. J. Weiss Presidential Fellow and professor of human development and the author of the widely acclaimed book The Body Project. "I regard Backlash as one of the most important analyses of the situation of American women at the end of the 20th century. From my vantage point as a social and cultural historian, I predict that Backlash will be an important text for historians of the future seeking to understand the texture of antifeminisim in the Reagan years. I'd rank the book with Friedan's Feminine Mystique."

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Faludi is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. She is currently completing a second book that explores the psychological underpinnings of the male resistance to feminism.

The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation established an endowment to fund the Olin Lecture Series at Cornell in 1986. Previous Olin lecturers have included Noam Chomsky, Isabel Allende, Stephen Jay Gould, Lani Guinier, Douglas Hofstadter, Kurt Vonnegut and Jane Goodall.

Admission to the lecture is open to the public, by ticket only. Tickets are free and will be available in mid-March at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office, the Graduate School (150 Caldwell Hall) and at the door.