Naomi Wolf is a bestselling American writer. She is known for her advocacy of feminism and progressive politics.
Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962 and studied at Yale and New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
She became famous because of her first book The Beauty Myth (1990), which became an international bestseller. In the book, she attacked the exploitation of women by the fashion and beauty industries. Wolf argued that women deserve "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's later books are Fire with Fire (1993) on politics and female empowerment, Promiscuities (1997) on adolescence and female sexuality, and Misconceptions (2001) on childbirth. In her latest work Daddies (2005) she resolves submissive sexual desires with mistrust of male-power.
During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to help bolster his image. According to a report in Time Magazine, Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look" and developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office". Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism.
Wolf was also involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters. Wolf is married to a former Clinton speechwriter, David Shipley .
In 2004, Wolf became involved in scandal by accusing renowned Yale professor Harold Bloom of sexual harassment (allegedly he put his hand on her inner thigh one day) in 1983 when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate at Yale.
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