Naomi Wolf - Childhood, Education and Personal Life

Childhood, Education and Personal Life

Wolf was born in San Francisco and is of Jewish descent. Her mother is Deborah Goleman, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community. Her father is the Romanian-born horror scholar Leonard Wolf. She attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. Wolf then attended Yale University where in 1984, she received her Bachelor of Arts in English literature. From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford.

In 2004, Wolf worked to report an incident of "sexual encroachment" by professor Harold Bloom she had experienced when she was a Yale undergraduate working on poetry with Bloom. Frustrated in her efforts to gain satisfaction that the university would take such an incident seriously, Wolf made her complaint public.

Wolf was married to former Clinton speechwriter David Shipley. They have two children, Rosa (b. 1995) and Joseph (b. 2000). Wolf and Shipley divorced in 2005.

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