Background
Wendy Kaminer was born on December 28, 1949.
Northampton, Massachusetts, United States
Smith College
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Boston University Law School
American Civil Liberties Union
Washington, United States
Atlantic Monthly (logotype)
Guggenheim fellowship
(Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain, and Politics of U...)
Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain, and Politics of Unpaid Work From 1830 To The Present, by Wendy Kaminer; Hardcover book published by Anchor Press/Doubleday Books, 1984
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385184239/?tag=2022091-20
1984
("If a Nobel Prize were awarded for clarity and sanity in ...)
"If a Nobel Prize were awarded for clarity and sanity in a world gone mad, Wendy Kaminer would be on her way to Stockholm." -- Newsday Anyone who's ever wondered why talking about addiction has become so fashionable, shuddered on hearing an "adult child" compare his upbringing with the Holocaust, or felt that admitting one's powerlessness is a frightening prospect for a participatory democracy will be delighted by this bracingly outspoken and intelligent work of social criticism. Whether she is infiltrating twelve-step meetings and codependency workshops or evaluating the claims of gurus from Shirley MacLaine to M. Scott Peck, Wendy Kaminer deftly diagnoses a national movement (and multi-million-dollar industry) with a strong tendency toward authoritarianism, a cult of victimhood, and a nasty streak of covert religiosity. Controversial, original, and brilliantly reasoned, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional changes the way we think about self-help -- and helps us to think for ourselves. "Explores...the ominous effect of all this institutionalized whining on our culture and politics...an incisive and provocative argument." -- Washington Post "Extremely witty...Ms. Kaminer has a real gift for honing her anger to an epigrammatic edge....We can make good use of [her] skepticism." -- The New York Times Book Review
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679745858/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(A very interesting book on crime and how it is perceived ...)
A very interesting book on crime and how it is perceived in our culture. Some of the chapters are: Guilty Victims, Voyeurism and Vengeance, The Right Victims and Victims Rights, The Death Penalty - How it's perceived and how it's applied, The Prosecutor's Perspective
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B6P9A72/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer'...)
True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer's best writings from publications including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Mirabella, and The Atlantic - thoughtful, acerbic, and prescient essays that have helped us understand ourselves. Though her topics range from popular culture to politics and law, and her thinking has evolved over the years, her concerns have remained constant. This is no accidental collection but a cohesive set of reflections on fundamental themes - self-reliance, justice, sex, and civil liberty. First and foremost, Wendy Kaminer is concerned with feminism, a diverse and conflictual movement that includes among its adherents women who oppose pornography and women who consume it, women who want to integrate the military and women who'd like to dismantle it. A longtime proponent of equality feminism, Kaminer has been surveying the feminist landscape for over a decade, mapping its contradictory ideologies. She was also a critic of popular celebrations of victimhood long before criticism of victimism became fashionable, and Kaminer turns from questions of personal responsibility raised by the feminist movement to questions of accountability in the criminal courts. A onetime practicing attorney, her early writing on our confusion about crime, punishment, and retribution and the balancing of social injustice with the demands of criminal justice seems practically clairvoyant today. She examines the equation of the personal and the political, in the courts, the feminist movement, and the culture at large and finds a tendency to trivialize the political and inflate the personal to sometimes ridiculous proportions. And, of course, she trains her eye on thepersonal development tradition, the subject of her celebrated I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, offering trenchant analyses of self-help literature, popular therapeutic culture, and politics.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201327937/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, social critic Wendy ...)
In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, social critic Wendy Kaminer illuminates the various ways in which society has come to value emotion over reason, faith over fact, and argues that declarations of intense belief have largely taken the place of rational discourse. In a world in which "How do you feel," seems to be a more frequently asked question than "What do you know," Kaminer's examination of the rise of spiritualism, the mushrooming junk science, and the habitual merging of political and evangelical speech, blazes with relevance and incisive wit. Probing the amusing and ominous implications of rampant credulity in our age, Kaminer raises important questions, and provides a thoughtful and eloquent perspective on the perils of present-day irrationalism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679758860/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(A lawyer, social critic, and columnist at The American Pr...)
A lawyer, social critic, and columnist at The American Prospect, Wendy Kaminer has said that she likes to think words have power but knows they don't cast spells. She argues with her readers and expects them to argue back. Her taste for liberty, her legal training, wit, and innate contrarianism help her elude the usual political labels and inform her writings on censorship, feminism, pop psychology, religion, criminal justice, and a range of rights and liberties at issue in the culture wars. In this new collection, Kaminer has her sights set on the fate of civil liberties in America. Opening with a powerful overview of liberty's tenuous hold on this "land of the free," Kaminer offers incisive, original investigations of political freedom in our frightened, post-September 11 world and reviews perennial threats to sexual and religious liberty, free speech, privacy, and the right to be free from unwarranted, unprincipled prosecutions.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807044113/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(The contributors to this important new collection offer a...)
The contributors to this important new collection offer a vision of contemporary feminism that runs counter to and goes beyond the dominant attitudes of the feminist orthodoxy. Basing their arguments on individual rights and personal responsibility, the contributors to Liberty for Women offer surprising views on a wide range of issues that confront modern women: self-defense, sexual freedom, reproduction, economic well-being, the promise of technology, and the place of traditional values, including the family. This new feminism, for example, asserts the right of gun ownership, champions the free market as the best hope for women's prosperity, defends abortion rights, and values traditions. It sees choice as the key for all women, from housewives to CEOs, from prostitutes to mothers. The contributors include Camille Paglia, Norma Jean Almodovar, Matthew Y. Biscan, Lois Copeland, Janis Cortese, Richard A. Epstein, Faith Gibson, Mimi Gladstein, Wendy McElroy, Martha C. Nussbaum, Ellen Frankel Paul, Rita J. Simon, Richard W. Stevens, Nadine Strossen, Alexander Tabarrok, Hugo Tuefel III, and Cathy Young. Liberty for Women is an eye-opening collection that is certain to challenge, annoy, and entertain. Published in association with The Independent Institute.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1566634342/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(When an organization committed to free speech succumbs to...)
When an organization committed to free speech succumbs to pressure to suppress internal criticism and disregard or "spin" the truth, it offers important lessons for other associations, corporations, and governments. Wendy Kaminer, a renowned advocate of civil liberties, calls on her experience as a dissident member of the American Civil Liberties Union national board to tell an inside story of dramatic ethical decline that has much to teach us about the land mines of groupthink. Note from the Author Ch. 2, The Problem with Partisanship, note 2. This book is not a comprehensive expose of ACLU controversies, (which would be too tedious for me to write or you to read,) and the Beacon Press archive only documents this book; but my colleagues and I have been in the process of making a comprehensive record available in another publicly accessible archive. From the Trade Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080704430X/?tag=2022091-20
Wendy Kaminer was born on December 28, 1949.
Kaminer was educated at the Smith College, graduating from it in 1971. She then received a law degree from the Boston University Law School.
Kaminer worked variously as a lawyer with New York Mayor’s Office and with New York Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. She served as a writing instructor with Tufts University, and as a public policy fellow at Radcliffe Public Policy Institute and at Radcliffe College. Kaminer was also a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition for several years.
She worked with Women Against Pornography in the 1970s. Kaminer held a position of a contributing editor of a magazine Atlantic Monthly from 1991. She served as a contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Prospect and the Mirabella.
Now Kaminer serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Secular Coalition for America.
She has written books on contemporary social issues. In her nonfiction works, Kaminer has tackled a variety of subjects, including the feminist movement, the selfhelp industry and the American criminal justice system.
Women Volunteering in America, Kaminer’s first book, outlines women’s volunteering efforts from 1860 through the 1980s. The nonfiction work contains interviews with female volunteers that cross various social and economic strata, as well as those of different ages. The book outlines the evolution in history of female volunteers from members of the social elite in the late 1800s to the modern career woman who volunteers.
Kaminer gained significant critical recognition with her next nonfiction work, Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality (1990), in which she explores issues such as abortion, pornography, divorce and child custody.
Kaminer’s next volume, the best-selling I’m Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (a parody of psychiatrist Thomas Harris’s 1969 title I'm OK, You’re OK), serves as “a stinging critique of the national infatuation with recovery and self-help—and the billion-dollar industry it has spawned,” according to People magazine.
Kaminer next turned her gaze to the American criminal justice system in It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture. She takes issue with the American public’s irrational viewpoint on crime: while they are outraged at the sheer volume of violent or unlawful acts, they are often sympathetic to individual criminals.
(In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, social critic Wendy ...)
2000(True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer'...)
1996(When an organization committed to free speech succumbs to...)
(The contributors to this important new collection offer a...)
2002(Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain, and Politics of U...)
1984(A lawyer, social critic, and columnist at The American Pr...)
2002("If a Nobel Prize were awarded for clarity and sanity in ...)
1992(A very interesting book on crime and how it is perceived ...)
1995Kaminer is a member of the Secular Coalition.
Kaminer married Woody Kaplan on November 17, 2001.