The Wolf

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Naomi Wolf was born on November 12, 1962 in San Francisco, California, to a Jewish family. Her mother is Deborah Goleman Wolf, an anthropologist and the author of *The Lesbian Community*. Her father was Leonard Wolf, a Romanian-born scholar of gothic horror novels, faculty member at San Francisco State University, and Yiddish translator. Leonard Wolf died from Parkinson's disease on March 20, 2019. Wolf has a brother, Aaron, and a half-brother, Julius, from her father's earlier relationship; it remained a secret until Wolf was in her 30s. Wolf attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. She attended Yale University, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1984. From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, University of Oxford. Wolf's initial period at Oxford University was difficult, as she experienced 'raw sexism, overt snobbery and casual antisemitism'. Her writing became so personal and subjective that her tutor advised against submitting her doctoral thesis. Wolf told interviewer Rachel Cooke, writing for *The Observer*, in 2019: 'My subject didn't exist. I wanted to write feminist theory, and I kept being told by the dons there was no such thing.' Her writing at this time formed the basis of her first book, *The Beauty Myth*. Wolf ultimately returned to Oxford, completing her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature in 2015. Her thesis, supervised by Stefano Evangelista of Trinity College, formed the basis of her 2019 book *Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love*. The thesis (which the journal *Times Higher Education* called 'error-strewn') was subject to significant corrections of its scholarship, prompting several articles in the UK higher education press.

In Their Own Story

Wolf was involved in President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection bid, brainstorming with Clinton's team about ways to reach female voters. Hired by Dick Morris, she wanted Morris to promote Clinton as 'The Good Father' and a protector of 'the American house'. She met with him every few weeks for nearly a year, according to the book Morris wrote about the campaign, *Behind the Oval Office*. Wolf managed to 'persuade me to pursue school uniforms, tax breaks for adoption, simpler cross-racial adoption laws and more workplace flexibility.' The advice she gave was without payment, Morris said in November 1999, as Wolf was fearful the knowledge of her involvement in the campaign might have negative consequences for Clinton. During Al Gore's bid for the presidency in the 2000 election, Wolf was hired as a consultant. Her ideas and participation in the campaign generated considerable media coverage. According to a report by Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty in *Time*, Wolf was paid a salary of $15,000 (by November 1999, $5,000) per month 'in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women's vote to shirt-and-tie combinations.' Wolf's direct involvement in the *Time* article was unclear; she declined to be interviewed on the record. In a *New York Times* interview with Melinda Henneberger, Wolf said she had been appointed in January 1999 and denied having advised Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf said she had mentioned the term 'alpha male' only once in passing and that it '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'. Wolf told Katharine Viner of *The Guardian* in 2001: 'I believe his agenda for women was a really historic agenda. I was honored to bring the concerns of women to Gore's table. I'm sorry that he didn't win and the controversy was worth it for me.' She told Viner the men in Gore's campaign, at the equivalent level, were paid more than she was.

Reader's Guide

In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of third-wave feminism after the publication of her first book, *The Beauty Myth*, an international bestseller. *The New York Times* named it 'one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century'. She argues that 'beauty' as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective to maintain women's subjugation. Wolf proposes the concept of an 'iron maiden', an intrinsically unreachable norm that is then used to physically and mentally punish women for failing to achieve and adhere to it. She condemns the fashion and beauty industries for exploiting women, but also writes that the beauty myth pervades all aspects of human life. Wolf believes that women should have 'the freedom to do anything we choose with our faces and bodies without being penalized by an ideology that uses attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments about women's looks to psychologically and politically destroy us.' She claims that the 'beauty myth' has targeted women in five areas: labor, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Finally, Wolf advocates for a relaxation of conventional beauty norms. In her introduction, she scaffolds her work upon the achievements of second-wave feminists and offers the following analysis: 'The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us ... [D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty ... [P]ornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal ... More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.' Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the estimate that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers said she traced the source to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, which said it was misquoted; the figure refers to sufferers, not fatalities. Wolf's citation came from a book by Brumberg, who referred to an American Anorexia and Bulimia Association newsletter and misquoted the newsletter. Wolf acknowledged the error and changed it in future editions. Sommers gave an estimate for the number of fatalities in 1990 as 100–400. The annual anorexia casualties in the U.S. were estimated to be around 50 to 60 per year in the mid-1990s. In 1995, for an article in *The Independent on Sunday*, British journalist Joan Smith recalled asking Wolf to explain her unsourced assertion in *The Beauty Myth* that the UK 'has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 per cent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly'. Wolf replied, according to Smith, that she had calculated the statistics from patients with eating disorders at one clinic. Caspar Schoemaker of the Netherlands Trimbos Institute published a paper in the academic journal *Eating Disorders* demonstrating that of the 23 statistics cited by Wolf in *Beauty Myth*, 18 were incorrect. Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that *The Beauty Myth* was 'the most important feminist publication since *The Female Eunuch*' (Greer's own work), and Gloria Steinem wrote, '*The Beauty Myth* is a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it.' British novelist Fay Weldon called the book 'essential reading for the New Woman'. Betty Friedan wrote in *Allure* magazine that '*The Beauty Myth* and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist consciousness.' Camille Paglia, whose *Sexual Personae* was published the same year as *The Beauty Myth*, derided Wolf as unable to perform 'historical analysis' and called her education 'completely removed from reality'. These comments touched off a series of debates between Wolf and Paglia in the pages of *The New Republic*. Caryn James wrote in *The New York Times*: 'No other work has so forcefully confronted the anti-feminism that emerged during the conservative, yuppified 1980's, or so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the n'

Did You Know?

• Naomi Wolf was born on November 12, 1962 in San Francisco, California.
• Her father, Leonard Wolf, was a Romanian-born scholar of gothic horror novels and a Yiddish translator.
• Wolf's first book, *The Beauty Myth*, was named by *The New York Times* as 'one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century'.
• Wolf was paid a salary of $15,000 per month (reduced to $5,000 by November 1999) as a consultant for Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.
• In June 2021, Wolf's Twitter account was suspended for posting misinformation related to vaccination.