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Naomi Wolf (born 1962) is a bestselling American writer. She is known for her advocacy of feminism and progressive politics and became the youngest literary star of what was later described as the third-wave of the feminist movement, which also included Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962 where she studied at Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. It was at this time when, at the age of 15 , Wolf became a feminist when she was fitted for her diaphragm at a local Planned Parenthood. She later studied at Yale (B.A. 1984) and New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. Her father is author Leonard Wolf.
She became famous because of her first book The Beauty Myth (1991), which became an international bestseller. In the book, she attacked the exploitation of women by the fashion and beauty industries. Wolf argued that women deserve "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically."
Wolf's later books are Fire with Fire (1993) on politics and female empowerment, Promiscuities (1997) on adolescence and female sexuality, and Misconceptions (2001) on childbirth.
Wolf was also involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters. Wolf was married to the former Clinton speechwriter David Shipley, but the two divorced in 2005.
During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, "Wolf * paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look." The Duffy article did not mention "earth tones." The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office".
In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that "* was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role...I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions."
In 2004, incensed over what she perceived as a lack of responsiveness from her alma mater's administration, Wolf accused renowned Yale professor Harold Bloom of sexual "encroachment" in 1983 when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate at Yale.
In 2005, Wolf published The Tree House: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which chronicled her mid-life crisis attempt to reclaim her creative and poetic vision and revalue her father's love, and her father's force as an artist and a teacher. "I had," she wrote, "turned my face away from the grace of the imagination." While the book received positive reviews, it was criticized by some feminists, such as Germaine Greer, as Oedipal, and as an acceptance of the patriarchy that she had once opposed. Wolf said that she wanted to evolve from feminism and polemics, to get past the "us versus them approach."
According to a 2006 interview in Sunday Herald Naomi Wolf, to the astonishment of many, claimed to have had a dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ. The experienced prompted her to re-explore her spirituality and was hailed by the UK's Sunday Herald, Salon.com, and the LA Times with headlines like NAOMI WOLF has found Jesus!.
Naomi's brother, Aaron Wolf, is an expert on international water politics.
External links
- Critical Resources: Naomi Wolf
- "The Silent Treatment" - Wolf on the Bloom incident.
1962 births | Living people | American Rhodes scholars | Feminist writers
"Naomi Wolf"