Naomi Wolf: sleep is a feminist issue

Naomi Wolf: sleep is a feminist issue
Sleep, say US feminists, is the next big issue for women to address — doing less and enjoying more duvet time is the way to go

Just as Virginia Woolf noted in A Room of One’s Own that one can’t “think well, write well, love well” if one has not “dined well”, so it would seem that women in particular can’t function well if they haven’t slept well. Two of America’s leading feminist super-achievers are on a crusade to get us all to have a lie in, or at least to take a nap.

Arianna Huffington, the powerhouse publisher of The Huffington Post, and Cindi Leive, the equally indomitable publisher of Glamour, have joined forces to identify women’s sleep deprivation as “the next feminist issue”. They cite studies that indicate that women are more sleep-deprived than men, including one that says American women are getting 90 minutes less than the seven to eight hours recommended for someone to be well and perform well.

The pair make a persuasive case that female exhaustion is undermining women’s creativity, judgment, and relationships. What does it profit us to win the whole world only to experience it cranky and irrational from fatigue?

But much as I admire Huffington and Leive, their advocacy for their sleep campaign reveals part of why we are driving ourselves to exhaustion. The pair argue, rightly, that: “The problem is that women often feel that they still don’t ‘belong’ in the boys-club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces. So they often attempt to compensate by working harder and longer than the next guy. Hard work helps women to fit in and gain a measure of security. And because it works, they begin to do more and more of it until they can’t stop. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: the workaholism leads to lack of sleep, which in turn leads to never being able to do your best. In fact, many women do this on purpose, fuelled by the mistaken idea that getting enough sleep means you must be lazy or less than passionate about your work and your life.”
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If we sleep more, they argue, women will become more powerful. “After all, we’ve already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business and the media — just imagine what we can do when we’re fully awake.”

This is true, and important. But I think we need to add another set of reasons to persuade women to drop it all for a bit and take a nap. For 20 years, the powerhouse feminists of the West have been superheroines: Huffington and Leive rightly cite examples ranging from Madonna and her musculature to the ladies of Congress, but then argue that if we just slept more we could do more.


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(I for one wish some Feminist would sleep all day long. Even if we heard them snoring it would be better than the incessant lies and nagging they do. NOW Get some sleep!)