In the early 1990s, women were feeling pressure like never before, specifically, pressure to do what was loosely termed (mostly by male journalists) as "have it all". In fact, a book called Having It All was published during the same year that The Beauty Myth hit the shelves; penned by super-executive Nicola Horlick, the book was semi-autobiographical and advised Horlick's legions of fans how they could have a high-flying career and a family as well, simultaneously being a high-achiever doing at both. Of course, nobody ever wrote a book telling men how they too could "have it all" because men were generally never expected to juggle work, family and home in quite the same way. This gulf in gender expectation is one of the key tenets of Naomi Wolf's 1991 book, and was really the foundation of the third-wave feminism movement. Third-wave feminists hoped to bring less rigidity to feminism, embracing individuality, and the right of each woman to interpret feminism in whichever way they themselves found to be the most empowering.
Wolf contends that as women have attained greater social power and prominence, they are also held to absurd and unrealistic standards of beauty thanks in considerable part to media portrayals and the fact that whatever they might achieve, the greatest attribute a woman can have is still to be considered gorgeous. This means that women actually become more fixated on their appearance, and by how they should look, and it also means that they change their normal behavior in order to achieve a basically unachievable ideal. The passion in her writing stemmed from her own battle with an eating disorder, a subject upon which she seemed academically fixated. In the book she claims that one hundred and fifty thousand women die every year in America as a result of anorexia; the figure in reality was actually far nearer three hundred people annually, but Wolf's statistics were heavily skewed because of both her own experiences and her tendency to use apocryphal stories about "friends of friends" as research, rather than conducting an actual medical investigation to assist in the writing of the book.
Despite these controversial exaggerations, the book was an overnight sensation, catapulting Wolf onto every television show and speaking circuit on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an incredibly polarizing book and the reaction to it threw up some very surprising responses; for example, who knew that feminists actually looked down on women who took trouble with their appearance? Very few people realized this, until it became one of the more repetitive talking points that the book provoked. Many women did not like the book at all; they felt patronized and pigeon-holed, even stereotyped, by the author, but Wolf's work won widespread acclaim critically. Germaine Greer, outspoken feminist and author, stated that it was the most important feminist work since The Female Eunuch (which, it should be noted, she had authored herself). Gloria Steinem, considered the spiritual leader of modern feminism, found it smart and insightful, if a little angry, and believed that it should be read by all women, regardless of their political views (Wolf made little effort to appeal to readers who did not share her liberal views, which was another factor that made the book seem somewhat polarizing.)
Wolf had never published anything more than an academic paper until The Beauty Myth, but its publication put her immediately at the forefront of the women's movement. She became a successful and somewhat controversial journalist and is a frequent contributor to heavily left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian where she writes on subjects including abortion rights and terrorism. Subsequent books have not fared quite so well among critics as her freshman tome; the most frequent criticism leveled at her is that she is writing from the perspective of a woman who sees conspiracy theories around every corner and who believes that the world is constructed to prevent women from succeeding. Whilst this may be true, her sophomore work, The End of America, certainly exhibited a strong thread of paranoia snaking through it.
In her later career, Wolf has been criticized for manipulating women rather than advancing them, particularly by her participation in Al Gore's unsuccessful presidential bid in 2000. For a monthly salary of fifteen thousand dollars, Wolf's task was to devise female-friendly soundbites to enable him to win the election and also to give fashion advice to Gore about the most perceived trustworthy collar and tie combinations. She has extended her political involvement to active participation in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, but her reasoning for this has also gained criticism; like her written work, critics observe that she has a continual and stubborn disregard for historical fact when it does not fit her narrative, a claim that comes full circle from the statistical flaws in The Beauty Myth.
