Word: wolfing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cambridge must improve its school system without spending any additional funds, Mayor Alice K. Wolf told approximately 50 concerned citizens at a town meeting last night at the Cambridge Public Library...
...Wolf, who also chairs the school committee, said she advocates "changes essentially within the structure" of school programs without "major infusions" into the school budget...
Those personal touches have been the focus of much hostility. A reviewer for London's Independent on Sunday accused Wolf of steamrollering her experiences "into a theory which takes no account of what has been happening in the rest of the Western world." A.S. Byatt, author of the best-selling novel Possession and a former University of London lecturer, agrees that images of beauty oppress women, but she is dubious about Wolf's notion of a conscious conspiracy. Instead, she says, the beauty business is pandering to dreams...
Pioneer feminist Betty Friedan dismisses the book as an "obsolete rehash" and criticizes Wolf for dwelling on superficialities rather than coming to grips with the modern-day political challenges that confront females. While Friedan agrees that women often go to extremes in their pursuit of good looks, enduring repeated face-lifts and possibly risking their health by having silicone injected into their breasts, she thinks Wolf's book distorts the relationship between feminism and beauty. Women, she says, do not have to choose between the two, but can delight in a frivolous enjoyment of fashion without becoming a slave...
Instead of surrendering to the myth, Wolf is calling, if vaguely, for nothing less than its overthrow. The first step, she says, is to recognize the underlying issues of domination and female competition. Then she exhorts women to refuse to suffer any longer for the sake of an ideal beauty in which adornment and style are a source of pain rather than pleasure. That is both an old challenge and a tall order...