Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. - book reviews

FIRE WITH FIRE

The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century

Naomi Wolf

Random House, $21, 353 pp. I was apprehensive about reviewing Naomi Wolf's new feminist treatise. After all, Ms. Wolf not only went to Yale but she became a Rhodes scholar. Besides, I'm not at all versed in feminist literature and have shied away from describing myself as a feminist because I am not adamantly prochoice. The unquestioning acceptance of abortion tights as the cornerstone of the women's tights movement seemed to count me out.

As it turns out, I am exactly the alienated audience for whom Wolf wrote her book. Among other things--many other things--Wolf argues that creating the perception that one's feminist cachet rests on the abortion issue has been the movement's undoing. As she puts it, "While a strong majority of U.S. women passionately endorse the goals of feminism, a large plurality avoids identifying with the movement itself. This estrangement impedes women from attaining the equality that they desire."

Just a few years ago in her best-selling The Beauty Myth, Wolf, who was a tender twenty-six years old at the time, argued that the major impediment to equality for women was society's obsession with female beauty. Now older and wiser at age thirty, she points the finger of blame not just at external forces but at women themselves who have failed to seize the kind of power that is rightly theirs. Why? Because the feminist movement has lost touch with its constituency, in large part by casting women as victims as well as requiring a uniformity of opinion rather than by focusing on getting more of what's right for women.

Wolf was inspired to write Fire with Fire after the Clarence Thomas hearings. She adorably refers to the reaction among women to Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment against the Supreme Court nominee Thomas as a "genderquake," which blew the lid off years of stifled anger and resentment. Outrage over the hearings led women to raise $6.2-million in campaign funds and elect an unprecedented twenty-five women to national political office. In this case, Wolf theorizes, timing was everything. The kind of debasement Anita Hill talked about was nothing new for women. "Rather, it was that male power eroded as the distribution of power into some women's hands reached critical mass," Wolf contends.

I do appreciate what Wolf has to say, especially her mission to create a brand of feminism that embraces all women. But there is still much work to be done toward creating an equal powerbase for women, and unfortunately Wolf becomes bogged down in statistical description when trying to make her arguments. After slogging through 353 pages, I'm not sure her material merits a book-length treatment. The same points are made over and over again, as if Wolf couldn't resist the need to drive home her theories with yet one more example. The breezy writing style, rife with generalizations and catch-phrases (the terms "gender apartheid" and the tremulous "genderquake" come to mind) reads like an extended magazine article. In fact, several excerpts from Fire with Fire appeared in Glamour magazine. Wolf even employs a favorite editorial device of women's magazines: the bulleted how-to piece, providing tips on how to implement her strategies. In a section titled "Psychological Strategies" for choosing the status of powerbroker over victim, she makes the following gratuitous recommendations: "Avoid generalizations about men that are totalizing: that is, that do not admit exceptions." And, "Visualize having the power we seek; then imagine the very worst thing that will happen if we attain it. Does it destroy us? Or do we survive and have a good time?" [Emphasis mine.] And here is my personal favorite: "Remember and take possession of the girlhood will to power and fantasies of grandeur." She must be referring to my childhood dream of becoming Miss America.

Wolf's own tendency toward sweeping generalizations does little to strengthen her credibility. Although the book jacket tells me Wolf was schooled in New Haven and Oxford and lectures frequently on women's issues, what informs her theories or what kind of solid research her conclusions are based on remains a mystery. Take Wolf's assertion about rape: "The judicial system unofficially maintains a spectrum of female guilt that determines whose hurt matters and whose hurt does not. The rape of a prostitute is fairly meaningless; the rape of a divorced working mother who drinks is slightly more serious; the rape of a churchgoing housewife, more serious still; and the rape of a nun may even matter," This might be true, but upon what verifiable evidence is such a charge based? A study of actual cases? A cursory reading of newspaper accounts? At the very least, such unsubstantiated generalizations are aggravating. At worst, they may be seriously misleading. Rape, as women have long known, is a notoriously hard crime to prove in any adversarial court proceeding.

At times, Wolf lapses into anecdotal, first-person accounts to illustrate a point. These actually come as a welcome relief from the polemics, helping her writing to become what she might describe as "reader friendly." And I especially welcomed Wolf's willingness to talk about her decidedly unclear views on abortion, since that is the cause of my own estrangement from feminism. "My friends will tell you that I am sometimes spacy beyond belief," she writes, providing an amusing list to back up that claim. Yet, Wolf says, not once has she neglected to use birth control. "It feels as if some dark part of my brain is saying... This is a matter of life and death." She hastens to add she would never judge anyone else's decision to have an abortion. Yet, "For me, the other side of having reproductive rights is taking reproductive responsibility."

In the end, Wolf's philosophy comes down to this: For women to enjoy true equality they must usurp the economic stranglehold of men. Certainly this is true, at least in one sense. However, I can't help but think that the very audience who needs this message the most, the poor and disenfranchised, is least likely to benefit from Wolf s brand of feminism with a smiling but still elitist face.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group