lernerj's Full Review: Naomi Wolf - Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the ...
When I first began to take Women’s Studies classes in college, I was immediately enamored with the new way of seeing that they provided me. At the time, Naomi Wolf’s now-classic book, The Beauty Myth, was all the rage, and I read it eagerly. She’s since come out with several much more controversial (but not in a good way) books that I never quite had the time to read. Recently, I finally picked one of them up, settling on Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood. Because I liked The Beauty Myth so much, I had high hopes for Misconceptions despite some of Wolf’s more bizarre activities in recent years. In the end, the book only partially satisfied me.
Misconceptions is jumpy, tackling several major issues at once. It is a reflection on Wolf’s own experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood. It is a report of how these things affected her friends. It is an account of interviews with other new mothers on their experiences of these life changes. It is journalistic muckraking on the medical establishment and its standard practices for dealing with pregnancy and birth. And it is a political statement about gender roles, marriage, and the work-family conflict.
Because Misconceptions combines so many topics and sources of information, I was often left frustrated with its fast pace. Since there are so many books out there on all of these topics, it seems to me that the major draw of the book was Wolf’s description of her own experiences with pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood in relation to the experiences of others and from a feminist perspective. And yet it seemed that she flew through her own experiences, often describing a whole month of pregnancy in only a page or two and then quickly returning to research data or interviews with other mothers.
Wolf’s accounts of her feelings throughout her pregnancy were perhaps so dissatisfying to me because, to my reading, they did not ring true. Now, I have never been pregnant, so I have no personal basis on which to gauge the reasonableness of a woman’s feelings during pregnancy. Nonetheless, as an academic with a specialty in work/family issues, I have read other pregnancy memoirs, and I have never felt the same sense of disbelief that I felt while reading Wolf’s account. The feelings she reports simply seem overblown, as though she tried to make them seem weightier and more original for the purpose of writing the book. I recognize that this is an uncharitable way to respond to a writer sharing her personal feelings about a very personal experience. But this is how I felt reading it, and it made the book a much less enjoyable and interesting read than it might otherwise have been. Perhaps if Wolf had elaborated more fully in the portions of the book about her pregnancy I might have been able to more fully empathize with her and understand the feelings she wrote about, but in its current form, this part of the book was just not compelling.
Wolf’s accounts of the lives of other mothers were also frustratingly brief. She might offer one quote, or, at most, a page describing a woman’s situation and her feelings about it. I always wanted to know more about the cases she was describing, particularly because the book’s introduction suggests that showing the patterns Wolf found among all the new mothers she talked to was a central concern of the book.
Misconceptions hits its stride, however, about halfway through the book in the chapter “Behind the Birthing Room.” In this chapter, Wolf clearly and carefully lays out the meat of her research: all the lies and misconceptions the medical establishment pushes us to believe about pregnancy and childbirth. Here, she demonstrates that things like routine episiotomies, high c-section rates, and the use of electronic fetal monitors are interventions aimed at the doctor’s convenience and the hospital’s profit rather than the health of mothers and babies. Wolf also compares the hospital birth experience to the experience at alternative birth centers run by traditional midwives, and the comparison is stark. If the rest of Misconceptions was as careful and detailed as this chapter, it would be an outstanding book.
To a personally disinterested reader, “Behind the Birthing Room” was an excellent and insightful read. I wondered as I read, though, how it might affect women who were pregnant or planning to give birth in the future. I could imagine such women feeling at the same time empowered by the knowledge they were gaining and powerless, fully expecting that they would have little choice but to be subjected to most or all of the interventions they now knew were unnecessary. As a result, women who are easily disheartened or already have a lot of anxiety about pregnancy and birth might do well not to read this book while they are pregnant.
The final third of Misconceptions focuses on marriage and the work/family conflict after the baby’s birth. In this part, Wolf returns to the jumpy style she used in the first part of the book, moving too quickly between her own experiences, her friends’ experiences, and her research. Further, the tone of this section of the book is strange; I’m not quite sure who Wolf thought she was targeting. If you are a feminist who agrees with Wolf’s basic worldview about equality between men and women, the importance of co-parenting, and the like, as I am and do, you won’t find anything very new or insightful in this section of the book. In fact, it is a bit alarming that Wolf felt these observations were so surprising that they should be included in a book subtitled “truth, lies, and the unexpected.” On the other hand, Wolf makes no attempt to try to convince readers of the feminist worldview on these issues, so if you do not already agree with her premises, this part of the book will not hold much interest for you, either.
In the end, I found Misconceptions a mediocre read. I’m glad to have read it, and the one detailed chapter on the validity of common medical interventions alone made it worth my time. On the other hand, the way Wolf jumped from point to point and example to example lessened the value of each part of what she presented. I’d recommend the book to feminists and to people open to critical views of the medical establishment. I’d also recommend the “Behind the Birthing Room” chapter to all pregnant women who feel they could handle it, because more knowledge about the right questions to ask is important even if you ultimately can’t control the setting you’ll give birth in. I wouldn’t, however, put Misconceptions at the top of anyone’s reading list.
Veteran culture warrior and author of the bestselling Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf debunks myths and defies expectations as she addresses the reality of co...More at HotBookSale
Veteran culture warrior and author of the bestselling Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf debunks myths and defies expectations as she addresses the reality of co...More at HotBookSale
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