Naomi Wolf

Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born 1962) is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.

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.

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.

In the 1990s, she was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

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.

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.

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.

In a New York Times interview with Melinda Henneberger, Wolf said she had been appointed in January 1999 and denied having advised Gore on his wardrobe.

Wolf said she had mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that it "was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the president is in an initiatory role…I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions".

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.

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.

Wolf's later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography.

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 beheadings carried out by ISIS, 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.

Wolf ultimately returned to Oxford, completing her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature in 2015.

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 abortion and the Occupy Wall Street movement in articles for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.

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.

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.

Her thesis, supervised by Stefano Evangelista of Trinity College, formed the basis of her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.

The thesis (which the journal Times Higher Education called "error-strewn") was subject to significant corrections of its scholarship, prompting several articles in the UK higher education press.