The Beauty Myth
In the early 1990s, Wolf garnered international public notoriety as a spokesperson of third-wave feminism as a result of the tremendous success of her first book
The Beauty Myth, which became an international bestseller. In the book, she argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony.
Wolf posits the idea of an "iron-maiden," an intrinsically unattainable standard that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. Wolf criticized the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but claimed the beauty myth extended into all areas of human functioning. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf argues that women were under assault by the "beauty myth" in five areas: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Ultimately, Wolf argues for a relaxation of normative standards of beauty. In her introduction, Wolf positioned her argument against the concerns of second-wave feminists and offered the following analysis:
Wolf's book became an overnight bestseller, garnering intensely polarized responses not only from the public and mainstream media but among feminists themselves. Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that
The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since
The Female Eunuch, 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."
In contrast, 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". Her comments touched off a series of contentious debates between Wolf and Paglia in the pages of The New Republic.
Likewise, Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the claim that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers wrote that the actual number is closer to 100, a figure which others, such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, claimed to be much too low. In the same interview, Sommers stated that Wolf had retracted the figure.
In the mainstream press,
The New York Times published a harshly critical assessment of Wolf's work: Caryn James lambasted the book as a "sloppily researched polemic as dismissible as a hackneyed adventure film...Even by the standards of pop-cultural feminist studies, "The Beauty Myth" is a mess." After rejecting her thesis, the review leveled even harsher appraisal of her methodology and statistics, writing, "Ms. Wolf doesn't begin to prove her claims because her logic is so lame, her evidence so easily knocked down...Her statistics are shamefully secondhand and outdated." In a comparatively positive review, The Washington Post called the book "persuasive" and praised its "accumulated evidence."
Promiscuities
Promiscuities reports on and analyzes the shifting patterns of contemporary adolescent sexuality. Wolf claims that literature is rife with examples of male coming-of-age stories, covered autobiographically by D. H. Lawrence, Tobias Wolff, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway, and covered misogynistically by Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. Wolf insists, however, that female accounts of adolescent sexuality have been systematically suppressed. She adduces cross-cultural material to demonstrate that women have, across history, been celebrated as more carnal than men. Wolf also argues that women must reclaim the legitimacy of their own sexuality by shattering the polarization of women between virgin and whore.
Promiscuities received, in general, negative reviews. The New York Times published a stinging review that characterized Wolf as a "frustratingly inept messenger: a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer. She tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical aperçus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas". Two days earlier, however, a different
Times reviewer praised the book, writing, "Anyone--particularly anyone who, like Ms. Wolf, was born in the 1960s--will have a very hard time putting down 'Promiscuities'. Told through a series of confessions, her book is a searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire." In contrast, The Library Journal excoriated the work, writing, "Overgeneralization abounds as she attempts to apply the microcosmic events of this mostly white, middle-class, liberal milieu to a whole generation....There is a desperate defensiveness in the tone of this book which diminishes the force of her argument."
Misconceptions
Misconceptions examines the modern problems surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. Most of the book is told through the prism of Wolf's personal experience of her first pregnancy. She describes the "vacuous impassivity" of the ultrasound technician who gives her the first glimpse of her new baby. Wolf both laments and rages against the doctor who performed her C-section, and advocates a return to more personally attached practices akin to midwifery. Wolf's book was panned by the
New York Times, responding to the book "with a feeling of exhaustion and dissatisfaction at the pie-in-the-sky laundry list of complaints."
The End of America
In
A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Wolf takes a historical look at the rise of Fascism, outlining the 10 steps necessary for a Fascistic group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens:
- Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
- Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
- Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
- Set up an internal surveillance system.
- Harass citizens' groups.
- Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
- Target key individuals.
- Control the press.
- Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
- Suspend the rule of law.
The book details how this pattern was implemented in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and elsewhere, and analyzes its emergence and application in American political affairs since the September 11 attacks.
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 had its worldwide premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival on October 17, 2008. It has since been screened at Sheffield DocFest in the UK, as well as in limited release at New York City's IFC Center. The film became available online on October 21, 2008 at SnagFilms.com. End of America was favorably reviewed in the New York Times by Stephen Holden as well as in Variety Magazine.
Give Me Liberty
"Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries" was written as a sequel to
A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, for those who understand the threats now posed to America and want to know "What do we do?".
In the book, Ms. Wolf looks at times and places in history where citizens were faced with the closing of an open society and successfully fought back, and looks back at the ordinary people of the Founding Fathers of the United States' generation, the ones not named by history, all of whom had this "vision of liberty" and moved it forward by putting their lives on the line to make the vision real. She is an outspoken advocate for citizenship and wonders whether younger Americans have the skills and commitment to act as true citizens. She wrote in 2007:
She also examines the core principles of what America is supposed to give us, because of the manipulation that is moving Americans away from those principles, through the use of fake patriotism, fake democracy and hyped crisis. Ms. Wolf then goes about outlining a "battle plan" for ordinary people to follow in order to fight back, by overcoming the confusion and becoming organized activists to bring back the rule of law as set by the United States Constitution.
Other writings
Wolf's other books include
Fire with Fire on politics, female empowerment and women's sexual liberation. The New York Times assailed the work for its "dubious oversimplifications and highly debatable assertions," its "sloppy thinking and even sloppier prose," and its "disconcerting penchant for inflationary prose."
Time magazine dismissed the book as "flawed."
In 2005, Wolf published
The Tree House: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which chronicled her midlife crisis attempt to reclaim her creative and poetic vision and revalue her father's love, and her father's force as an artist and a teacher. "I had turned my face away from the grace of the imagination," she wrote. Germaine Greer, who had vociferously praised
The Beauty Myth, criticized the work as Oedipal, and as an acceptance of the patriarchy that Wolf had once opposed. Wolf said that she wanted to evolve from feminism and polemics, to get past the "us versus them approach." On August 9, 2009, she published an editorial where she compared Obama's Guantánamo Promise with the hard facts created by Bush-era policies.