Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong

God bless Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.

And now she has written a book about it, The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See.

It’s delicious, isn’t it. Democrats are holding their heads in horror insisting that Samuel Alito completely blotted his copybook twenty years ago with a rather enthusiastically conservative job application. But it’s perfectly OK for liberal Naomi Wolf to confess the error of her ways. Yes, all those years wearing the “same straight-leg black jeans and black boots that every other young Marxist” was wearing and all those books railing against the patriarchy: that was then. Hey, anyone can make a mistake!

So Naomi determined that she wanted her poet father to teach her

formally, what he had taught his students for the decades during which he gave a famous class in poetry and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

I realised that when I had gone astray it was because I had deliberately ignored, or insisted on forgetting, as daughters do who are trying to forge their own identity in the world, one of those 12 lessons about literature — lessons that are really, or equally, about life.

Instead, Naomi now wondered:

What had I lost? Was it peace? Was it the need to get closer to a sense of God? Was it the longing to quit work in the public dog pit — where one must strive, compete, and produce the way men have traditionally produced — and to do more of the traditionally “female” work of planting seeds and watching children? ... I wanted to listen to a child, not a meeting. I wanted peace, not war. God, not Mammon. Family, not itineraries. Poetry, not polemic.

Well, good. I mean, what’s not to like? And a gentler, kinder Naomi Wolf can still indulge in the occasional rant against evil Republican neo-cons and corrupt Republican lawmakers and lying Republican presidents without it harming in the least her new role as a wise old crone.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to buy the book.