Naomi Vulf

Naomi R. Wolf is an American writer and political consultant. With the publication in 1991 of the book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, she gained recognition as one of the most prominent representatives of third-wave feminism. The book became a bestseller and was translated into many languages.

Naomi Wolf was born into a Jewish family. Her mother, Deborah Goleman Wolf, from a family of Russian origin, was a prominent anthropologist and the author of Lesbian Community. Her father was Leonard Wolf, a scholar of Gothic literature and a translator from Yiddish into English. She was the niece of psychologist Daniel Goleman and nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg.

After graduating from the Lowell High School, Naomi entered Yale University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature. In 1985-87, she studied at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. She was married to Bill Clinton’s speechwriter David Shipley, and in that marriage gave birth to a daughter, Rosa, and a son, Joseph, named in memory of her father’s parents. The marriage ended in divorce in 2005.

By the early 1990s, Naomi Wolf had earned a reputation as a leading representative of third-wave feminism. The central idea of The Beauty Myth is that standards of beauty are a socially constructed concept in which the patriarchal component plays a decisive role. She compares beauty standards to the medieval torture device known as the Iron Maiden, arguing that any woman who deviates from the prescribed stereotypes is immediately subjected to punishment, both physical and psychological. Physical perfection becomes an obsession for women, and failure to achieve it a source of suffering. But even upon attaining the ideal, a woman still loses, since she sacrifices her natural beauty, health, energy, sexuality, and sometimes even her life to the socially accepted standard of appearance. The author argues that in the modern world a woman is able to decide for herself how she wants to live and look, without regard for the dictates of the ruthless “beauty myth.”

The 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography was met with a strong response and provoked mixed reactions both within feminist circles and beyond, earning a reputation as a provocative text