Posted on 09/08/2001 8:07:26 AM PDT by Orual
There are limits, even for a feminist babe. Naomi Wolf, with her lustrous dark hair, clear blue eyes and perfect white teeth, is more than happy to pose for the cameras, smiling and wearing more than a hint of make-up. But she doesn’t do coy.
"No, I can’t do that," she says firmly as our photographer asks her to pose with the sort of head-tilt that could, if one wasn’t careful, spill over into coquettish territory. "It’s a little coy."
Wolf can’t be too careful. The US writer who brought us the best-seller The Beauty Myth has been pilloried for everything from being too beautiful to write such a text to using her risque-free sex life for her autobiographical book on teenage relationships, Promiscuities. The fact that she advocated masturbation classes in schools took a bit of a pounding too. As did her controversial advice to Al Gore during the presidential election campaign that he ought to behave like an Alpha rather than a Beta male.
So, just four days away from the publication of her fourth book, Misconceptions, about the myths surrounding pregnancy and motherhood, Wolf is bracing herself for the onslaught.
"Can I smoke?" she asks politely, before lighting up. "She doesn’t normally, it’s the stress," confides her publicist.
"In America, it’s generally not allowed," explains Wolf, dressed neatly in a smart black trouser suit and purple blouse. "Well I don’t do it - peer pressure."
Far from immune to criticism, Wolf nevertheless feels that it comes with the territory. "It’s really helpful to go back and read feminist writers from the last 150 years. Mary Wollstonecraft infuriated people, Betty Frieden infuriated people, Germaine Greer infuriated people. Everyone who has made a difference, who I’ve admired, has gotten all sorts of abuse. It’s not an easy ride. But I believe in what I’m doing. And while the attacks are visible, what you don’t see is the incredible support I get from my readers."
She takes great pride, she says, in the very thing she is most criticised for - her populist approach. She loves it when ordinary people, from the immigration officer at Heathrow airport the other day to the women who checked in her bags, tell her they’ve read her work.
"For a long time, feminist argument was very elitist and was couched in intellectual language" says the 38-year-old mother of two. "Women often say that I have given them the tools to make sense of their lives and to make them stronger. I am proud that I write in an accessible and readable style."
Misconceptions is hardly a startlingly exposé. The medical profession’s tendency to treat birth as an illness, which detracts from a woman’s experience of it, has been well documented, as has the "radical social demotion" women experience on entering motherhood. But with episiotomies practically obligatory and the rate of caesarean sections in Britain almost doubling, to 20 per cent, in the last 10 years, perhaps it is timely and with Wolf’s name on it, is sure to sell. Even her staunchest critics credit her for bringing a new generation of women into the fold. Her first book, The Beauty Myth, which she wrote, oddly enough, in Nicolsons, the same café that JK Rowling was to write her first Harry Potter novel, was an enormous success.
"It is curious," Wolf smiles, "until you realise that it was the only one in Edinburgh that would let you sit for hours and hours."
Fresh out of Oxford University, the Californian moved to Edinburgh for three years to be with a young "aspiring Scottish revolutionary" with whom she had fallen in love. It was there she drew on her own adolescent experiences of anorexia for her analysis of the exacting standards of beauty that hamper women’s lives. She describes Scotland, where she became involved in the Rape Crisis Centre, meeting women from bleak council estates and backgrounds radically different from her own, as a place that "taught me a lot. I realised how isolated women are". The resulting book - hailed as "the most important feminist publication since the Female Eunuch" by its author, Germaine Greer - catapulted Wolf onto the world stage. It was published in no less than 14 countries.
She went from strength to strength, working in the US as an advisor to Dick Morris in Bill Clinton’s administration, before publishing her second book, Fire With Fire, condemning the tendency for feminists to dwell on victimhood and urging women to seize power. In the early stages of the Clinton presidency, where he had largely been elected on a female vote, Wolf was the darling of the women’s movement.
She got married, to David Shipley, a speechwriter for Clinton and now deputy national editor of the New York Times. But, on finding herself pregnant, Wolf, who spent her childhood in the most social revolutionary district in San Francisco, her student days on scholarships to Yale and Oxford, and her twenties as a best-selling writer and feminist icon, was suddenly faced with a frightening reality - her progress had ground to a halt.
Her dream - a contented pregnancy, fulfilling birth and happy ever after with her partner taking an equal role in bringing up babies - didn’t happen the way she’d expected it. Pregnancy was scary, the birth was horrific and, despite a supportive husband, she found herself at home alone with a demanding baby.
"All around me, it seemed, the baby’s birth was cleaving couple after couple - once equals in roles and expectations - along the lines of the old traditional gender roles. The baby’s arrival acted as a crack, then a fissure, then an earthquake, that wrenched open the shiny patina of egalitarianism in the marriages of virtually every couple I knew," she says, in one of the key passages in Misconceptions.
I wonder about the naiveté of her dream, where childcare was shared equally. If she had wanted to share child-rearing with a partner, why marry a clearly ambitious man whose work means long hours away from home?
"Like many women of my generation, I chose someone who shares my values working in an environment where that dream is not realised," she explains.
"I didn’t expect the choices to be so stark. My dad - an academic - was more of a hands-on carer than my mom was. So I was imprinted with an unusual sense of the flexibility there could be in the workplace - he took the summers off. I was not experientially prepared for how rigid it could be."
Wolf, raised at the centre of social experimentation - in Haight-Ashbury in the 1970s - was brought up to expect to be able to "have it all".
"My mum was a feminist, my dad was a feminist, everyone I knew were feminists. I thought that patriarchy was crumbling. When I was six, women could be store assistants and teachers and by the time I was 15, women were running for office, starting businesses, arguing for abortion rights.
"The feminist revolution was happening and one of the tenets of that is that men and women would change family life and share responsibilities."
Nothing she had experienced, she said, prepared her for the harsh reality of life after babies.
"You can be intellectually prepared, but then there’s the end of the second week - you’ve just had a baby, you’ve just had a caesarean section, you’re plunging into a clinical depression, your hormones are crashing, and that’s the day your husband has to go back to work. The door closes and you’re alone with this tiny, helpless being you’re entirely responsible for."
So, outraged, she wrote a book about it. It is a call-to-arms, to women and men, to demand more. Pregnancy, birth and motherhood - she is now a mother of two, Rosie, six, and Joey, 18 months - has turned Wolf from a feminist into "a more radical feminist than I have ever been," she says.
"You can’t feel fulfilled as a human being if you’re looking after a child all day, and you can’t feel fulfilled if you’re working all day and not enjoying a family life. You can’t. Those are inadequate choices, whether you’re a man or a woman. It’s time for a social revolution."
Unrepentant about the autobiographical content in her books, she says that she also researches her subjects, in order to "broaden out to the social, the political, the material. I find it sexist and insulting in the extreme that women’s lived experiences are considered trivial and men’s lived experiences are considered data.
"Some of the most respected male writers of the 20th century, such as Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, are far more autobiographical than I have ever been and far more revelatory than I have ever been."
Wolf expects to be a media target - but gets angry when she feels the criticism levelled against her is irresponsible.
She is "bitterly disappointed" at the furore caused by a report in Time magazine two years ago that Wolf was being paid $15,000 a month to advise presidential-hopeful Al Gore on how to "escape his Beta-male caste" and adopt a more reassuring wardrobe to "appeal to women".
His adviser on women’s issues, she was "heartbroken" when he failed to make president. "The press did not serve women well," she says, the anger rising in her throat.
"Content to focus on what colour the candidates ties were, they ignored the very real and profound threat to women’s rights in America."
That threat, she says, is George Bush, "the most anti-choice politician in America." Our own leader, she feels, is not far behind when it comes to women’s rights.
"Tony Blair got his first victory by showcasing women MPs and his second after he realised be could get by on a cosmetic level," she says. It has left "British women voters feeling cynical, feeling as if they don’t count. There is no lobby".
But Wolf, who steadfastly refuses to believe her dream is out of reach, will do her best to stir one up. With a kind of optimism that is infectious, she talks of past battles, from the abolition of child labour, to the 40-hour week, to pensions, as examples of previously undreamed of social change. "Capitalism hasn’t ground to a halt because of decent working hours and the end of child labour," she argues. "I can easily imagine a world where it would be possible to be a parent and worker without incredible stress."
And, in a final coup de grace, Wolf cites Scottish devolution as a particular inspiration.
"People often ask me how can you be so optimistic about social change? But I lived in a country where people were filled with frustration because they didn’t feel represented and that changed. And that’s very inspiring."
Misconceptions by Naomi Wolf, Chatto & Windus, £12.99, is published Monday.
His adviser on women’s issues, she was "heartbroken" when he failed to make president. "The press did not serve women well," she says, the anger rising in her throat.
"Content to focus on what colour the candidates ties were, they ignored the very real and profound threat to women’s rights in America."
That threat, she says, is George Bush, "the most anti-choice politician in America." Our own leader, she feels, is not far behind when it comes to women’s rights.
Bitterly disappointed that people think that Algore was an idiot for following her advise. IMHO, she was one of the factors that propelled GW to the White House.
"Wolf, raised at the centre of social experimentation - in Haight-Ashbury in the 1970s - was brought up to expect to be able to "have it all".
"My mum was a feminist, my dad was a feminist, everyone I knew were feminists. I thought that patriarchy was crumbling. When I was six, women could be store assistants and teachers and by the time I was 15, women were running for office, starting businesses, arguing for abortion rights. "
Follow this logic: Great writers and thinkers have been criticized. I write and I am criticized. Therefore, I am a great writer and thinker, who'll have a tremendous impact on society. Sorry, Naomi, the only impact you have is a dead cat bounce.
"Far from immune to criticism, Wolf nevertheless feels that it comes with the territory. "It’s really helpful to go back and read feminist writers from the last 150 years. Mary Wollstonecraft infuriated people, Betty Frieden infuriated people, Germaine Greer infuriated people. Everyone who has made a difference, who I’ve admired, has gotten all sorts of abuse. It’s not an easy ride. But I believe in what I’m doing. And while the attacks are visible, what you don’t see is the incredible support I get from my readers.""
I thought it clever of the author to slyly tuck this one editorial comment in the middle of the interview.
Hmmm- I'm not especially ambitious, but my job does keep me away from home for long hours- and is what allows my wife to stay home to care for our baby. Thus we do share the responsibilitis of raising her equally. It's just that half of the equation is making a living. My wife tells people that she is a liberated woman- because I make enough for us to live on, she is liberated to stay home with our baby.
Well tough toenails. Nothing Wolf writes is worth hog slop anyway, so I suggest she stays home with the kids and carpool to a good nursery school. (To get them away from her influence)
Oh how far the feminist 'mystique' has brought women, denying their own nature to serve the priestesses of infanticide.
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