Too Much to Bear [of Naomi Wolf that is]

When Naomi Wolf gave birth for the first time, nothing happened the way she thought it would. She arrived at the hospital at 3am and an angry nurse sent her into the toilet to stimulate her nipples - supposed to encourage stronger contractions. Within minutes, the nurse pronounced that her cervix had not dilated enough and the baby was in distress. She was rushed to a delivery room. Hooked up to a foetal monitor, she was forced to lie on her side. Drugs were dripped into her veins to increase dilation.

She was offered an epidural and, in pain, took it: her partner was not allowed to hold her, yet she was told that if she flinched while the six-inch needle was pushed into her spine, she would be paralysed for life. Everybody watched only the foetal monitor, not her. She could not feel her legs. She was told that if she didn't deliver in 24 hours, they would operate; she was terrified and her labour stopped. The surgeon cut her open; she retched as she felt a violent, numb tugging. A baby was lifted out; Wolf lay naked and freezing. She heard the surgeon say, "I need to get this small intestine back in." With her abdomen still split open, she was unable to hold her child. She saw the reflection of the closing-up operation in the glass doors opposite. She saw a group of people, up to their elbows in her body, "an open cauldron of blood".

This was no scandalous one-off; as Wolf was to discover, it was an "ordinary bad birth", suffered by millions of American women every year. But it had a revolutionary effect on this mother. Naomi Wolf, author of the best-selling feminist book The Beauty Myth, controversial adviser to Al Gore, white wedding dress-wearer, the radical feminist who looks like a beauty queen, "the sunny, shiny face of feminism"; when she gave birth, things got ugly. "Pregnancy, birth and motherhood," she says, unequivocally, "have made me a more radical feminist than I have ever been."

We meet at Woodhull, a women's retreat in upstateNew York. Today, she looks like an ordinary weekending mother-of-two: her usuallyvoluminous hair is tied up, she wears black shorts, sandals and a maroon vest. Her voice is silky, but she is furious. "I feel absolutely staggered by what I discovered after giving birth," she says. "Birth today is like agribusiness. It's like a chicken plant: they go in, they go out."

The scandal of the medicalisation of birth is not new; from the 1960s, activists such as Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger have fought against the interventionist tide that sees birth as an illness, rather than part of a woman's "wellness cycle". But it is a scandal that has reached extraordinary proportions: in the United States, caesareans vary from 50 per cent for healthy, middle-class women in their 30s and 40s in private hospitals, to between 1 and 15 per cent for those in public hospitals.

But it is not only birth that has shocked and radicalised Wolf, it is pregnancy and motherhood, too. She claims that throughout her pregnancy she faced "the medical establishment's sheer contempt for women's right to know", and was given misinformation, conflicting information or little information. Men would comment on how big she'd got.

She, meanwhile, was mourning the loss of the independent, free-spirited young woman she had been, and realising, as so many women do, that "true revolution" would come about only when society had restructured itself "radically to support babies and new parents". In other words, the world was a liberated place for young women - until they had children, when all of that changed.

After birth, she suffered a crippling depression, which she tried to escape by walking, compulsively, around the streets at night. She noticed, very soon, that the expectations of her generation were not going to be fulfilled: high hopes of combining work and home, both partners working flexibly and sharing the child care. She was acutely aware of a "radical social demotion" and a sense of "statelessness", made stark by the lack of value she felt was attached to the work of parenting. And all around she saw the egalitarian relationships of her peers collapsing into stereotypical gender roles, difficulties and rows. As she says, her politics had rebalanced around her belly.

WOLF is now 38, author of four books, mother of two children. Much of what we know about her life we know from her books. She was raised by liberal parents in San Francisco, and had anorexia at school. As she wrote in The Beauty Myth (1990), "My choices grew smaller and smaller. Beef bouillon or hot water with lemon? The bouillon had 20 calories - I'd take the water. The lemon had four; I could live without it. Just." Her doctor said he could feel her spine through her stomach.

The book was a massive bestseller around the world, "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch", according to Germaine Greer. Wolf was accused of being derivative because many of the ideas had been rehearsed; but the accessibility of this powerful polemic undoubtedly brought to a new, younger generation feminist ideas about how "images of female beauty [are used] as a political weapon against women's advancement".

Her books have always reflected her life; her second work, 1993's Fire With Fire, took on the subject of female power just as she was realising that she had some herself. It looked at why women became alienated from feminism in the '80s, criticised its tendency to glorify victimhood and poked gentle fun at the right-on excesses of some kinds of American campus feminism. Her alternative was a glossy, can-do brand of "power feminism", of pay rises, achievements and kicking ass.

She married in 1990 David Shipley, an "egalitarian, nurturing man" who used to work for Bill Clinton and is now deputy national editor of The New York Times. As she wrote in Promiscuities, she wore a white wedding dress, and said it was a way of women taking on "for a few rare moments a lost sexual regalness". All of this caused controversy, and consternation - even if she thought these things, was it politic to say so?

But the biggest bomb was, undoubtedly, an article about abortion, "Our bodies, our souls", published in the New Republic in 1995. A pro-choice campaigner, Wolf wrote: "Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions ... We stand in jeopardy of losing what can only be called our souls." Wolf claims she was trying to show that, even though abortion must be a "legal right", individual women (herself included) may still have moral or emotional difficulties with it. And that, at its best, feminism must always be "faithful to the truth".

Now she is enlarging her fight to encompass another truth: that it's not just women's bodies that are under attack, it's women's lives. "I think there is lip service paid about how important motherhood is, but the actual labour of mothering is seen as next to cleaning restaurants. It's underpaid, undervalued, disrespected. Just look at a playground. What do playgrounds say to women? They say, 'You know what, just f--- you! You haven't anywhere to change dirty diapers - f--- you. Deal with it. You and your babies don't count enough for us to put in the plumbing. Are you going to sit for hours under the boiling sun? OK! Because you don't count. This work doesn't count.'"

In her latest book, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, released in Australia yesterday, Wolf lays out a "mothers' manifesto" - ranging from flexitime for mothers and fathers to turning playgrounds into "true community centres" and founding neighbourhood "toy banks". There needs to be a radical mothers' movement, she says. "Politicians feel very comfortable using mothers and children rhetorically and strategically, without actually having to answer to representatives of mothers sitting at the table."

So why don't they have a political voice? "Well, the first answer is that we're exhausted!" she laughs. "But second, the most powerful interests are stacked against us. For instance, when motherhood is cast as your private problem, and the work-family conflict is seen as your lifestyle issue, and if you can't balance it, there's something wrong with you as superwoman - then that's very handy for the business lobby, which is hand-in-glove with [Western] governments."

In a brilliant section in the book, Wolf shows how "Machine Mom" - the "ideal of the superfunctional mother-worker, who is able to work at top capacity up to the due date, takes one to three months off to deliver, nurture and bond, finds top-notch child care, and returns to work" - is nothing more than a product of the market. "Who are the beneficiaries of Machine Mom?" she asks. "Not women, not kids."

The third reason for mothers' lack of a political voice is ideological: "If motherhood is defined as that which gives and gives and never says, 'Help me with this', then you're a bad mom for saying, 'Yo, salary!'

"I think women should have it all, and so should men," she says. But the phrase shouldn't mean what it has come to mean. "'Having it all', as it is defined now, means working full-time and having a family - someone's going to pay the price somewhere. I think we need to evolve as a society in which men and women have balanced lives as workers, partners and parents, and a real community life. This is the big no-brainer conclusion at the beginning of the 21st century: that if you give it all to the marketplace, people become cogs in the wheel and everyone suffers."

In the US, in particular, there is a shocking level of institutionalised discrimination against mothers who want to work; the only maternity leave is unpaid, just 12 weeks - "and even that was a 12-year struggle. Bush snr said that if you had this, capitalism would collapse. It was one of the first things Clinton introduced in 1992." As examples of good policy, she points to China, where both parents get six months and can choose how to allocate it, and Canada - more than 90 per cent of pay for more than a year.

Much of Wolf's analysis is a criticism of the market's role in medicine; the corrosive effect of a free-market economy on something as fundamental and necessary as health care. It has resonances with other recent books by feminists, such as Stiffed, by Susan Faludi, and No Logo, by Naomi Klein, which have looked back to the anti-consumerist roots of feminism with the view that an out-of-control market harms all ordinary people, and women the most. Has Wolf turned against the market? "Well, no, I believe in equipping women so that they're not disempowered in the market economy, and I do believe that social democracy is the best system," she says. "In this book I'm using Marxist tools to analyse social organisation: looking at who profits, whose incomes would be jeopardised by change. But that doesn't mean I'm a Marxist, because I'm not."

She certainly isn't - there was a media frenzy 18 months ago when Time magazine revealed that Wolf had been paid $15,000 ($28,600) a month to advise the Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore (on women's issues). The magazine claimed that Wolf was telling Gore he should escape his "beta-male caste" and adopt a "reassuring wardrobe palette in order to heighten his attractiveness to women" by wearing "earth tones", greens and browns. The story was leapt upon by everyone from talk-show comedian Jay Leno to Vanity Fair magazine, which labelled Wolf "the Lady Macbeth of this drama" (the Clinton/Gore relationship). But why was Wolf the only one, among all Gore's advisers, who was picked on? "Oh, that's too easy," she says. "Any woman who is a visible feminist gets criticised. Gloria Steinem faced 10 times worse than I did. I take responsibility for the fact that I take strong positions and go after vested interests, so fair enough."

THIS tendency to take responsibility for what she provokes in others is an unusual trait and a powerful one, which has the effect of stalling her attackers. For example, the writer Camille Paglia once called Wolf "the Dan Quayle of feminism - a pretty airhead who has gotten any profile whatsoever because of her hair"; she called her "a Seventeen magazine level of thinker" and a killjoy; "Little Miss Pravda". And yet Wolf's answer to these bitchy attacks is mature and responsible. "Yes, she was very personal with her attacks on me, but I was very personal with my attacks on her." (Indeed she was. A scorching article she wrote in the New Republic labelled Paglia "the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly [a right-wing activist]" who "poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters", full of "howling intellectual dishonesty".)

Wolf can be terribly earnest - she says things like, "I feel blessed with my subject matter" and "I encountered an ethical challenge", and rather than ask if I'm Jewish, she wonders, "Do we share an ethnic heritage?" But she can also be sparky and funny; when asked if the penis was the enemy, she quipped, "Hey, lots of women go home at night after a hard day's work thinking of the penis as their friend."

In fact, she encompasses several contradictions. On the one hand, she is an outspoken, visible feminist and sophisticated political operator. On the other, she often says things that cause problems for feminists and glee for anti-feminists: such as when she writes that she felt it was "dangerous" to be a feminist when her baby was young, because all that mattered was not to "rock the fragile, all-important little boat of the new family"; or discusses her white wedding dress; or says that "male sexual attention is the sun in which I bloom ... The male body is ground and shelter to me, my lifelong destination"; or says she has trouble with the idea of abortion, as she wrote in "Our bodies, our souls". When I ask if she would have written such an article now, with President Bush threatening abortion rights, she says, "Yes, I would, because I believe it is true, and I believe you have to tell the truth as you see it without bowing to situational ethics. A feminism that is not based on women speaking their truth simply won't accomplish its goals - or if it tailors the truth to meet even the most laudable goals, it will not be worth getting there in the end."

Which all sounds very well, but how long do we have to wait? "Well, before, I wanted the world to change in, say, 30 years' time," she says, pushing back the hair from her face. "Since I had my daughter, I want the world to change before she is 21. Before she is 10. Tomorrow. Yesterday."

Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Chatto & Windus, $34.95).

Wolf considers her every ordinary human experience unique and therefore fascinating enough to devote a book to. In that respect, she's a perfect Boomer--and the perfect adviser to the ultimate Boomer politician, Algore. But it's interesting that her kinda/sorta second thoughts about abortion are still considered evidence that she has a brain.

"She was raised by liberal parents in San Francisco, and had anorexia at school. "

"She was raised in a dysfunctional family in a copro-vacuole of a city, and was mentally ill as an adolescent."

Okayyyyyy....I should pay attention to her why?

Wolf lays out a "mothers' manifesto" - ranging from flexitime for mothers and fathers to turning playgrounds into "true community centres" and founding neighbourhood "toy banks". There needs to be a radical mothers' movement, she says. "Politicians feel very comfortable using mothers and children rhetorically and strategically, without actually having to answer to representatives of mothers sitting at the table."

NEGHBORHOOD TOY BANKS?? Like I want somebody else's drooled-on toys in my baby's mouth??

As examples of good policy, she points to China, where both parents get six months and can choose how to allocate it, and Canada - more than 90 per cent of pay for more than a year.

I suppose it's easy to give six months pay when you only allow one child and butcher the rest....

Wolf is such a total narcissist. I've found that one of the best ways to make yourself unhappy is to think that somebody or anybody owes you something. Grudges make everyone unhappy.

Life is a messy business. It involves body fluids and byproducts. It can often involve killing (or at least growing) something else to eat and stay alive. There's a food chain here. There's blood and poop involved here. And then we die. Every single one of us.

Life is so unfair. The boomers should be able to live forever. Didn't The Stones say it best, "You Can't Always Get What You Want"? Too bad little Naomi.

Nice piece of (paid no doubt) democratic propaganda of the gorish kind. She supported a rapist, period. Are we to assume she'll write about it ten years from now, with anger of course. Always with anger.

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