Choosing to delay family, Naomi Wolf devoted much of her life to exposing the harmful, mythic ideals women around the world are expected to conform to.
Now, as a mother of two, she is devoted to exposing the harmful, mythic ideals expectant women try to conform to, as they bring another life into this world.
If the women who swapped their Vogue subscriptions for Ms. after reading Wolf’s 1991 best-selling “Beauty Myth” are any indication, those considering children will certainly ditch “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” — the pregnancy bible that is the intellectual equivalent of an epidural, she opines — for her newest exposé, “Misconceptions.”
The Jewish author credited with raising the consciousness of post-bra burning, mascara-reliant middle-class whites conceived of this book while carrying her first child, Rosa, now 6. (Her son, Joey, is 20 months.) Chronicling nine months and beyond of “sugar-coated niceties” that left her and fellow moms-to-be prefacing their narratives with “I wish someone had told me…,” she argues that expectant women are routinely placated by sentimentalized misinformation about pregnancy and parenting.
These fallacies, the San Francisco native contends, cater to sexist societal norms and the corporate-style interests of the obstetric establishment, instead of the well-being and safety of babies and their mothers.
Wolf will discuss “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood” at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael.
Wolf was scheduled to arrive on the West Coast in September; however, the terrorist attacks postponed her tour until now. But the delay was not simply born out of sensitivity to the victims; the author herself is a New Yorker. In a recent phone interview from her home, Wolf attempts to describe the physical atmosphere surrounding her apartment, a mere 10 blocks from ground zero: “It’s just full of…”
Devoid of the precise words to convey the Manhattan air, she takes a cautious pause to conclude her thought acutely: “…this acrid, disturbing smell.”
Even her phone service, still spotty almost two months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, goes dead during the interview, forcing her to a nearby pay phone. Because her husband, New York Times journalist David Shipley, needs to be on-hand, there has been little opportunity to escape the city.
Wolf, who grabbed her own headlines on the 2000 campaign trail while transforming Al Gore into an “alpha male,” is looking forward to returning to the Bay Area of her ’60s childhood. “It’s such a wonderful place to grow up as a Jewish kid, because you’re brought up around such idealism,” she says.
Referring to the Conservative shul of her adolescence, Congregation Beth Sholom, she fondly remembers the now-deceased Rabbi Saul White as an “inspiring community leader” to whom she is “grateful” for instilling her with the principles of tikkun olam at an early age.
In addition to repairing the world, Wolf says Judaism’s central themes — “for all the ways we have to reform them” — are important models for women’s strength and continuity.
“I never bought into the feminist critique that marriage or family was innately oppressive,” Wolf says, an ideology she rebuked in “Fire with Fire,” her 1993 treatise on women and power.
She nonetheless married “reasonably late,” noting she had “the luxury of waiting until I felt like a grownup,” ready for the responsibilities of a Jewish household.
“Shalom bayit, a harmonious family life, is where you begin. You’re responsible for social justice in your home, as well as outside.”
While Wolf seems to have always grasped the “outside” part, it took her by surprise that the egalitarian domesticity she envisioned wasn’t guaranteed by nearly two decades of gender politics and a supportive husband. (Who, by the way, “loves the book.”)
“I didn’t have power in this culture — we’re not living on hemp farms or raising llamas,” she says of staying at home, then outside the city, with her firstborn who cried, fed, spat, peed and then some throughout the day, while her husband worked downtown at the paper of record.
The Yale- and Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar found herself “staring out the kitchen window into the backyards of suburbs, living life much as I had read about it in [Betty Friedan’s] ‘The Feminine Mystique.'”
“The baby’s arrival acted as a crack, then a fissure, then an earthquake, that wrenched open the shiny patina of egalitarianism in the marriages of virtually every couple I knew,” she writes.
Wolf acknowledges her book is “full of angst.” After all, the nascent draft of “Misconceptions” stemmed from her journal entries, chock full of emotions: from screaming rage to the kind of gushing that made her “weep at long-distance phone commercials.”
But those are pregnancy’s biochemical symptoms, she says, and are well-documented.
What women are not prepared for is that “natural” may be a misnomer for such processes as gestation, labor, delivery, nursing and bonding.
It’s as if it all were something effortless, “as if the powerful attachment women have to their babies erases the agency they must show in carrying, birthing and caring for children,” she writes.
What’s more, Wolf says, “the forces behind the scenes” at maternity wards and throughout prenatal care are driven by profit motives. “They want to speed up birth like agro-business: Get ’em in, get ’em out.
“There’s a whole industry that has emerged to trick women like me…there’s even a trend toward fake ‘birthing rooms,’ where midwifes are like handmaids.”
Wolf points out that the frequency of cesarian sections, episiotomies and post-partum depression have ranked the United States 18th out of 21 industrialized nations in birthing care.
Therefore, Wolf, the co-founder of the Woodhill Institute for Ethical Leadership, an interdisciplinary professional training organization for young women, concludes “Misconceptions” with a plan of action: “A Mother’s Manifesto” demands an overhaul of current U.S. reproductive care.
Citing the progressiveness of social democracies like England and Canada, Wolf is urging for “a big push of motherhood-feminism to create a mother’s lobby — so we really get family policies,” such as flextime leave and subsidized midwifery.
“We need to play hardball,” adds Wolf, perhaps in alpha male terms.