Her mother was a homemaker and journalist. Her father was a photographer who had emigrated from Hungary. She graduated from Harvard University in 1981, and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Throughout the eighties she wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, Faludi began to write Backlash, which was released in late 1991.Susan C. Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of two well-known books: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1992; ISBN 0-385-42507-4 ) and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999).

Backlash argued that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism, especially due to the spread of negative stereotypes against career-minded women. Faludi attempted to show that many who argue that "a women's place is at the home, looking after the kids" are hypocrites, since they (or their wives) are exactly like the women they are criticising. This work won her the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1992.

In Stiffed Faludi analyzes the American man. She argues that while many of those in power are men, most men have little power. American men have been brought up to be strong, support their families and work hard, she says. According to her, many men who followed this now find themselves underpaid or unemployed, disillusioned and abandoned by their wives. Changes in American society have affected both men and women, she concludes, and it is wrong to blame individual men for problems they did not cause and from which they suffer as much as women.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buy-out of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee thought showed the "human costs of high finance".