The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. 
In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

Health, Fitness & Dieting

WOLF, Naomi

Psychology & Counseling

Harper-perennial

One of our bestselling and most respected cultural critics, Naomi Wolf, acclaimed author of The Beauty Myth and The End of America, brings us an astonishing work of cutting-edge science and cultural history that radically reframes how we understand the vagina—and, consequently, how we understand women.
A “New Biography,” Vagina is at once serious, provocative, and immensely entertaining—a radical and endlessly fascinating exploration of the gateway to female consciousness from a remarkable writer and thinker at the forefront of the new feminism.

Vagina: A New Biography

Self-Help

Ecco

Vagina: Revised and Updated

The Beauty Myth

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Every year, millions of women have their lives turned inside out by the experience of pregnancy. A contemporary woman finds herself caught in an absurd paradox: while in the grip of one of the most primal, lonely, sensual and, in some ways, psychologically debilitating and physically dangerous experience, she is overwhelmed by invasive, trivialising and infantilising cultural messages about what is happening to her - and who really owns the experience. Wolf takes a critical look at the powerful vested interests in the pregnancy business and at the social message coming at women: an amalgam of sentimentality, psychologically dangerous half-truths and conflicting ideologies. She discusses with devastating honesty her own two pregnancies and those of other women, from the physical and emotional effects of having your body taken over, through the elation and the fear, to the choice of delivery method (where mother-friendly childbirth is often in conflict with hospital-friendly practice) and the effects of post-partum depression. "Despite thirty years of fierce feminist writing about the myths of motherhood, "Misconceptions" reminds us that pregnancy and birth are still swaddled in layers of illusion, that our society remains criminally hypocritical toward mothers and babies and that the transformation from woman to mother remains one of the most complex odysseys we ever take. Naomi Wolf goes much deeper here than she ever has before. She strips bare the mind of the pregnant woman and new mother with dazzling courage. She dares to explore the paradox of being a good mother while remaining an independent human being." - Erica Jong.

Misconceptions : Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood

Women's Health

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random

In this dynamic new book Naomi Wolf explores and celebrates the phenomenon of female sexuality - empirically, imaginatively, anatomically and personally. By following a group of four contemporary girls - including her younger self - as they come of age in the seventies, Wolf shows how our culture tries to shape and confine women's desire. Embarking on a voyage of discovery, she illustrates how flawed and prescribed are the notions of what women want, and how these change through the ages - from Taoist techniques for giving women pleasure, to Victorian repression, and the so-called liberated ninties. Drawing on scholary texts, secret diaries, real life and fantasy, she demonstrates that female sexuality is wilder, more demanding and more powerful than our culture dares to accept.

Promiscuities

Philosophy

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Most women embrace equality, but reject "feminism." In clear and brilliant prose, the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth shows how this rift came about, and how to close it. A practical and inspiring road map for personal and political equality in our time.

Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century: New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century

Vintage

A NOTE FROM MARGO BALDWIN, President and Publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing 
“Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a vitally important book to publish right now, not just because of its literary scholarship, which is superb, but because it speaks so clearly to the present societal moment. It’s a moment that is incredibly dangerous, a potential turning point when marginalized people and groups are targeted, silenced and often jailed. It’s a time when information counter to the official narrative is censored and erased from the public sphere, when books and articles and even scientific research are banned and labeled as “fake news” or “dangerous misinformation.” Outrages shows what happens when a society, in this case Victorian England, becomes obsessed with contagion and impurity and criminalizes “immoral” acts and “dangerous” ideas. . . . Read it and weep, not just for those who suffered in a distant Victorian time but for those who suffer still from the draconian laws that era produced and which are still in effect all over the world today.”

Outrages

Little, Brown Book Group, London

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Virago

Explores the phenomenon of the violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement.

Beauty, Grooming, & Style

Anchor

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Books by WOLF, Naomi