The lovely @CruelSecretary twittered Is Angelina Jolie the Next Feminist Icon? :: Media and Technology :: AlterNet to me this morning. Let's say that I stopped taking seriously not just Naomi Wolff but Virginia Richmond as well after I read this part:

A quarter of American households are headed by single parents, often portrayed as sad, poverty-stricken and pathetic, and Jolie turned that it into a "fairly radical, vision... that made the relationship seem tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture." She re-framed single motherhood "from a state of lack or insufficiency to a glamorous, unfettered lifestyle choice."

Why I was a bit ticked-off about this? Well, before there was Angelina Jolie the "children collector" and proto-feminist icon, I reckoned we had Josephine Baker more than three generations ago.

Yet I don't think it's in the realm of possibility for a black woman to be the symbol of empowered single-motherhood. Heck, it's rare to have a black woman held up as the standard of feminism, not even if she were "a pornographic feminist fantasy".

And then, as I was writing this, I totally reckoned I had forgotten Mia Farrow. That neither Richmond nor Wolff point at Ms. Farrow's importance as a cultural icon of her time is well, totally lame.

It also proves that many a pop-feminist tends to have a shaky relationship to historical facts.