Naomi Wolf talks about the “F” word and acknowledges that women today have an aversion to it. Feminism, she admits, has gotten a bad name.
But that doesn’t mean there is a pox on woman power. She believes women are poised to become the dominant force in the 21st Century.
“Women’s power is transforming the world as we know it,” the feminist author says. In years to come, “you’re going to see women’s issues changing the world in ways we can’t even envision.
“It’s happening now,” she says, although “women are slow to realize their own status as agents of change.”
Not Wolf. At 34, she has become a change-agent extraordinaire as a result of two ground-breaking books and her little-known role as a consultant on women’s and family issues to the 1996 Democratic presidential campaign.
Wolf argued in her 1993 book, “Fire With Fire,” that political equality is within women’s grasp if they choose to seize it. They did in 1996, she says, providing the margin of victory in the re-election of President Clinton.
Dick Morris, Clinton’s chief strategist until a sex scandal cost him his job, gives credit to Wolf for her campaign influence in his book, “Behind the Oval Office.”
On her advice, he urged the president to be more of a father figure and to stress family issues, such as the enforcement of child support payments, violence ratings for TV, improvements in education, school uniforms, tax breaks for adoption and more workplace flexibility.
Wolf often said during the 1996 campaign that the winning candidate would be the one who “understood the fatigue of the American woman.”
Three decades after feminism liberated women from the idea that their domain was the home, Wolf sees many working mothers–worn out from balancing job and family–choosing to stay home with their children.
Her explanation: “We haven’t gone nearly far enough in restructuring the workplace. And I say that as a working mother.” Wolf, who lives in Washington, is married and has a 2-year-old daughter.
She contends: “It’s abnormal for women to have to choose between being productive in the work force and raising a family.
“The most important task we have in the 21st Century is to have a totally integrated parent-work life. It’s so doable, if you look at what we’ve done in the last five years.”
In lectures around the country, Wolf exhorts women to become more involved in their own political and economic empowerment. She recently was a featured speaker at Southern Methodist University’s 32nd annual Women’s Symposium: Mapping the Future–In Search of Balance.
Born and raised in San Francisco and educated at Yale and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Wolf has been called a “third wave” feminist leader. Women’s suffrage marked the first wave, and the second is identified with the 1960s and the Equal Rights Amendment.
But the movement stalled in the 1980s. The number of women willing to call themselves feminists slipped as negative terms for them grew–terms such as “hairy-legged, man-hating, threats to the family, and femi-Nazi,” she says.
Wolf says 88 percent of women embrace the goal of full equality for women, but only 33 percent are willing to call themselves feminists. And only 18 percent of women under 30, she says, “are willing to use the `F’ word.”
The third wave began with the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, when a male-dominated panel heard Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment charges. Wolf calls it a “genderquake.”
A voter uprising resulted in more women officeholders, the first “pro-feminist” president and first lady, the Violence Against Women Act, the Family Leave Act, new spots for women in the military and other changes, she says.
While women are affecting policy, they still set their political goals too low, she says. “We are so acculturated to think of women with limits that we really don’t get it yet,” she says.
She believes that by 2000, the country may be ripe for a woman presidential candidate, partly as a result of the “good old boy network” exposed by the campaign finance scandals.
And just as the nation was psychologically hungry for a father figure in 1996, she suggests, it will be looking for a maternal figure.
“We’ve got to recognize that women are a diverse group, and there is a spectrum of beliefs,” she says. Women must come together behind broader goals to keep from being “marginalized” and losing the advantage of their 52 percent majority, she says.
Beyond politics, Wolf sees a continuing battleground for marketplace rights, with the advancement of women made more difficult by their learned reluctance to talk about money. Money is perceived as a “masculine, toxic, taboo” subject, she says.
“You learn you’re supposed to be a good girl in the workplace and hope Daddy will reward you,” she says. “Women don’t negotiate perks or moving expenses. They hardly turn in expense receipts.”
Wolf says she was raised to believe women should have the same opportunities afforded men and can’t remember when she wasn’t a feminist.
Her first book, “The Beauty Myth,” published in 1991, explored the cosmetics and fashion industries’ influence on women’s self-esteem. In June, Random House will publish her third book, “Promiscuities,” which looks at how teenage girls learn to be women in post-sexual revolution America.
“When you can’t get women to tune into feminist issues,” she says, “talk about their daughters.”
