Naomi Wolf facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Naomi Wolf
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Wolf in 2012
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| Born | Naomi Rebekah Wolf 1962 (age 61–62) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Yale University (BA) New College, Oxford (DPhil) |
| Notable works | The Beauty Myth The End of America Misconceptions Fire with Fire Outrages |
| Spouse |
David Shipley
(m. 1993; div. 2005)Brian O'Shea
(m. 2018) |
| Children | 2 |
Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born 1962) is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.
After the 1991 publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth, Wolf became a prominent figure in the third wave of the feminist movement. Feminists including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised her work. Others, including Camille Paglia, criticized it. In the 1990s, she was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Wolf's later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and. Critics have challenged the quality and accuracy of her books' scholarship; her serious misreading of court records for Outrages (2019) led to its U.S. publication being canceled. Wolf's career in journalism has included topics such as the Occupy Wall Street movement in articles for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Since around 2014, Wolf has been described by journalists and media outlets as a conspiracy theorist. She has been criticized for posting misinformation on topics such as the Western African Ebola virus epidemic and Edward Snowden.
Wolf has objected to COVID-19 lockdowns and criticized COVID-19 vaccines. In June 2021, her Twitter account was suspended for posting anti-vaccine misinformation.
Contents
Early life and education
Naomi Rebekah Wolf was born in 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, 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.
Political consultant
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.
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.
Works
The Beauty Myth (1991)
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 such areas as labor, religion, violence, and hunger. Finally, Wolf advocates for a relaxation of conventional beauty norms.
Accuracy
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, with Wolf citing numbers that average out to 8 times the number in the source she was citing.
Fire with Fire (1993)
In Fire with Fire (1993), Wolf wrote about politics and female empowerment. She wished to persuade women to reject "victim feminism" in favor of "power feminism". She argued for diminishing the issue of opposing men, avoiding divisive issues such as the rights of lesbians, and considering more universal issues like violence against women, pay disparities and harassment. Melissa Benn in the London Review of Books called the book Wolf's "call for a realpolitik in which 'sisterhood and capital' might be allies".
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times assailed Fire with Fire for its "dubious oversimplifications and highly debatable assertions" and its "disconcerting penchant for inflationary prose", but approved of Wolf's "efforts to articulate an accessible, pragmatic feminism, …helping to replace strident dogma with common sense." Feminist author Natasha Walter wrote in The Independent that the book "has its faults, but compared with The Beauty Myth it has energy and spirit, and generosity too." But Walter criticized it for having a "narrow agenda" where "you will look in vain for much discussion of older women, of black women, of women with low incomes, of mothers." Calling Wolf a "media star", Walter wrote: "She is particularly good, naturally, on the role of women in the media."
Misconceptions (2001)
The book Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood draws heavily on Wolf's experience of her first pregnancy. The book's second half is anecdotal, focusing on inequalities between parents with respect to child care. She outlines a "mothers' manifesto", including flexi-time for both parents, neighborhood toy banks, and a radical mothers' movement.
The Treehouse (2005)
Wolf's The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See is an account of her midlife crisis. She revalues her father's love, and his role as an artist and a teacher during a year living in a house in upstate New York.
In a promotional interview with The Herald (Glasgow), Wolf related her experience of a vision of Jesus: "just this figure who was the most perfected human being - full of light and full of love. …There was light coming out of him holographically, simply because he was unclouded."
The End of America (2007)
In The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Wolf takes a historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining 10 steps necessary for a fascist group or government to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state. The book details how this pattern was implemented in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and elsewhere, and analyzes its emergence and application of all 10 steps in American political affairs since the September 11 attacks. Alex Beam wrote in the International Herald Tribune (reprinted in The New York Times): "In the book, Wolf insists that she is not equating [George W.] Bush with Hitler, nor the United States with Nazi Germany, then proceeds to do just that."
Several years later in 2013, Mark Nuckols argued in The Atlantic that Wolf's supposed historical parallels between incidents from the era of the European dictators and modern America are based on a highly selective reading in which Wolf omits significant details and misuses her sources. In The Daily Beast, Michael C. Moynihan called the book "an astoundingly lazy piece of writing."
The End of America was adapted for the screen as a documentary by filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, best known for The Devil Came on Horseback and The Trials of Darryl Hunt. It premiered in October 2008, and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by Stephen Holden and by Variety magazine. Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times saw aspects of it positively, but "what isn't plausible or reality-related is the conclusion itself. At the door of the Third Reich, Wolf's credibility collapses."
Interviewed by Alternet in 2010, Wolf compared some of President Barack Obama's actions to those of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler as typical of dictatorships.
Wolf returned to her The End of America theme in a Globe and Mail article in 2014, considering how modern Western women, born in inclusive, egalitarian liberal democracies, are assuming positions of leadership in neofascist political movements.
Give Me Liberty (2008)
Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries was written as a sequel to The End of America. The book looks at times and places in history where citizens faced the closing of an open society and successfully fought back.
Feminist issues
Women in Islamic countries
Wolf has commented about the dress required of women living in Muslim countries. In 2008, she wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, "The West interprets veiling as repression of women... But when I traveled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women–only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance ... are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband."
Other views
Conspiracy theories
In the January 2013 issue of The Atlantic, law and business professor Mark Nuckols wrote: "In her various books, articles, and public speeches, Wolf has demonstrated recurring disregard for the historical record and consistently mutilated the truth with selective and ultimately deceptive use of her sources." He added: "[W]hen she distorts facts to advance her political agenda, she dishonors the victims of history and poisons present-day public discourse about issues of vital importance to a free society." Nuckols argued that Wolf "has for many years now been claiming that a fascist coup in America is imminent… [I]n The Guardian she alleged, with no substantiation, that the U.S. government and big American banks are conspiring to impose a 'totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent'."
In the same month, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote in National Review Online , "Over the last eight years, Naomi Wolf has written hysterically about coups ... and about little else besides. She has repeatedly insisted that the country is on the verge of martial law, and transmogrified every threat—both pronounced and overhyped—into a government-led plot to establish a dictatorship. She has made prediction after prediction that has simply not come to pass. Hers are not sober and sensible forecasts of runaway human nature, institutional atrophy, and constitutional decline, but psychedelic fever-dreams that are more typically suited to the InfoWars crowd."
Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman, "Perhaps it's not that Wolf is a feminist who's degenerated into conspiracism, but instead that she's a conspiracy theorist who happened to fall into feminism first. The Beauty Myth is a conspiracy theory of a sort, and sometimes conspiracies are real: the self-replicating power structure of patriarchy is one of them."
Occupy Wall Street
On October 18, 2011, Wolf was arrested and detained in New York during the Occupy Wall Street protests, having ignored a police warning not to remain on the street in front of a building. She spent about 30 minutes in a cell. She disputed the NYPD's interpretation of applicable laws: "I was taken into custody for disobeying an unlawful order. The issue is that I actually know New York City permit law…I didn't choose to get myself arrested. I chose to obey the law and that didn't protect me."
A month later, Wolf argued in The Guardian, citing leaked documents, that attacks on the Occupy movement were a coordinated plot orchestrated by federal law enforcement agencies. Those leaks, she alleged, showed that the FBI was privately treating OWS as a terrorist threat rather than a peaceful organization. The response to this article ranged from praise to criticism of Wolf for being overly speculative and creating a conspiracy theory. Wolf responded that there was ample evidence for her argument, and proceeded to review the information available to her at the time of the article, and what she alleged was new evidence since that time.
Imani Gandy of Balloon Juice wrote that "nothing substantiates Wolf's claims", that "Wolf's article has no factual basis whatsoever and is, therefore, a journalistic failure of the highest order" and that "it was incumbent upon [Wolf] to fully research her claims and to provide facts to back them up." Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist, and associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote on his blog: "The reason Wolf gets her facts wrong is that she's got her theory wrong."
In a December 2012 Guardian article, Wolf wrote about FBI documents released following an FOIA request from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that the FBI used counterterrorism agents and other resources to monitor the national Occupy movement extensively. The documents contained no references to agency personnel covertly infiltrating Occupy branches, but did indicate that the FBI gathered information from police departments and other law enforcement agencies relating to planned protests. Additionally, the blog Techdirt reported that the documents disclosed a plot by unnamed parties "to murder OWS leadership in Texas" but that "the FBI never bothered to inform the targets of the threats against their lives." Mother Jones claimed that none of the documents revealed efforts by federal law enforcement agencies to disband the Occupy camps, and that the documents did not provide much evidence that federal officials attempted to suppress protesters' free speech rights. Mother Jones said the truth was "a far cry from Wolf's contention."
Edward Snowden
In June 2013, New York magazine reported that Wolf, in a recent Facebook post, had expressed her "creeping concern" that NSA leaker Edward Snowden "is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be." She wondered whether he was planted by "the Police State".
Wolf responded on her website: "I do find a great deal of media/blog discussion about serious questions such as those I raised, questions that relate to querying some sources of news stories, and their potential relationship to intelligence agencies or to other agendas that may not coincide with the overt narrative, to be extraordinarily ill-informed and naive." Of Snowden, she wrote, "Why should it be seen as bizarre to wonder, if there are some potential red flags—the key term is 'wonder'—if a former NSA spy turned apparent whistleblower might possibly still be—working for the same people he was working for before?"
Salon accused Wolf of making factual errors and misreadings.
Other assertions
In a series of Facebook posts in 2014, Wolf charged that the U.S. was dispatching military troops not to assist in treating the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, but to carry the disease back home to justify a military takeover of the U.S. She further said that the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, in which Scotland voted to remain in the U.K., was faked. Speaking about this at a demonstration in Glasgow on October 12, Wolf said, "I truly believe it was rigged."
Responding to such criticism, Wolf said, "All the people who are attacking me right now for 'conspiracy theories' have no idea what they are talking about ... people who assume the dominant narrative MUST BE TRUE and the dominant reasons MUST BE REAL are not experienced in how that world works." Wolf posted, "I stand by what I wrote."
COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wolf has frequently promoted COVID-19 misinformation, misinformation related to vaccination and 5G conspiracy theories.
After Joe Biden was elected U.S. president, Wolf tweeted on November 9, 2020: "If I'd known Biden was open to 'lockdowns' as he now states, which is something historically unprecedented in any pandemic, and a terrifying practice, one that won't ever end because elites love it, I would never have voted for him". In February 2021, Wolf said on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that government COVID-19 restrictions were turning the U.S. "into a totalitarian state before everyone's eyes", and went on to say, "I really hope we wake up quickly, because history also shows that it's a small window in which people can fight back before it is too dangerous to fight back."
In a March 2021 interview for Sky News Australia, Wolf claimed that lockdown policies are an "invention" of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. She also said that "Every human right in law is being violated", that Australians are being "lied to over and over", and that Australians are being psychologically tortured.
On April 19, 2021, Wolf alleged that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical advisor, "doesn't work for us", asserting he had loyalties to Israel that interfered with service to public health. Wolf pointed to $1 million she said Fauci had received from Israel. It was actually the Dan David Prize, a prestigious private award that Fauci received in 2021 for public service.
Wolf opposes COVID-19 vaccine passports, saying they represent "the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West."
Wolf has frequently shared conspiracy theories concerning the safety and efficacy of vaccines against COVID-19. In April 2021, she was instrumental in amplifying and spreading myths that the vaccines cause female infertility. Wolf's conspiratorial and anti-vaccine stance has been criticized as irresponsible, and she has also been the subject of ridicule.
Twitter suspended Wolf's account in June 2021, a decision the company said was permanent, according to the London Observer. At the end of July 2021, The Daily Beast reported that Wolf was a co-plaintiff in former president Donald Trump's social media lawsuit. According to Wolf, Twitter's suspension of her account led her to lose "over half of her business model, investors in her business, and other sources of income."
Wolf appeared on the May 23, 2022, episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, where she said: "There are military-age men pouring over the border from places like Afghanistan and Ukraine. And the easiest thing in the world to send them to God knows where, you know, and to arm them to assist the World Health Organization". She argued that the Second Amendment made it harder for government to subjugate the population, but that it was possible. Wolf said, "I really hope that it doesn't devolve into civil war, which is really what the next thing is in history when you have an occupying force, which is what the WHO will be, you know, by next week".
In an October 2022 interview with UK TV channel GB News, Wolf said that COVID-19 vaccines are part of an effort "to destroy British civil society". Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulatory agency, announced an investigation into GB News after receiving more than 400 complaints from members of the public and later found the channel in breach of broadcasting rules.
In January 2023, Wolf appeared with Steve Bannon in his War Room show on Robert J. Sigg's Real America's Voice television network. They advertised a book titled Pfizer Documents Analysis Report that supposedly contained "50 reports using primary source Pfizer documents released under a court order by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration". The authors were not mentioned, but summarized as a team of 3,500 medical experts by the name of "The War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project". According to Wolf and Bannon, the book rips "the veneer off the myth that mRNA injections are safe and effective.”
Personal life
Wolf's first marriage was in 1993 to journalist David Shipley, then an editor at The New York Times. The couple had two children, a son and daughter. Wolf and Shipley divorced in 2005.
On November 23, 2018, Wolf married Brian William O'Shea, a U.S. Army veteran, private detective, and owner of Striker Pierce Investigations. According to a November 2018 New York Times article, Wolf and O'Shea met in 2014 after people threatened Wolf on the internet after she reported on human rights violations in the Middle East, and her contacts recommended O'Shea.
Wolf is often confused with author Naomi Klein; this confusion is a major subject of Klein's 2023 book Doppelganger, which Wolf did not contribute to despite numerous attempts by Klein to contact her.
See also
In Spanish: Naomi Wolf para niños
