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'''Christina Marie Hoff Sommers''' (née '''Hoff'''; born 1950) is an American author |
'''Christina Marie Hoff Sommers''' (née '''Hoff'''; born 1950) is an American author and former philosophy professor known for her critique of ] in contemporary American culture. She is described as an ] and by extension a ]-] and ] feminist by the ].<ref name="stan1"/> Her work includes the books '']'' (1994) and ''The War Against Boys'' (2000). Her writing has been featured in a number of outlets across the political spectrum which include the conservative ], the liberal ], ], ] and ]. She hosts the video blog Factual Feminist. | ||
Sommers |
Sommers defined the term "]" as one who believes the main political role of feminism is to ensure the right against coercive interference is not infringed. She contrasts that with what she calls "victim"<ref name="speech"/> or her original term<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.ca/books?id=-RCMAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA693 |page=693 |title=Handbook of Construtionist Research |chapter=35: Feminism and Constructionism (in Part VI: Continuing Challenges) |first=Barbara L. |last=Marshal |editor1-first=James A. |editor1-last=Holstein |editor2-first=Jaber F. |editor2-last=Gubrium |quote=Christina Hoff Sommers (1994) coined the term ''gender feminism'' in opposition to ''equity feminism''.}}</ref> "gender feminism",<ref name="speech">{{cite web |author=Christina Hoff Sommers |access-date=16 November 2014 |website=AEI.org |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20090117085529/http://aei.org/docLib/20090108_ContemporaryFeminism.pdf |archive-date=17 January 2009 |url=http://aei.org/docLib/20090108_ContemporaryFeminism.pdf |title=What's Wrong and What's Right with Contemporary Feminism? |quote=The dominant philosophy of today’s women’s movement is not equity feminism--but “victim feminism.”}} Hamilton College speech, 19 November 2008.</ref> arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different".<ref name="speech"/> ] have called her works and positions ]. | ||
A number of feminist scholars - including ],<ref name="MartinoKehler2009">{{cite book|editor1=Wayne Martino|editor2=Michael D. Kehler|editor3=Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower|author=Michael Kimmel|chapter=Hostile High School Hallways|title=The Problem with Boys' Education: Beyond the Backlash|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=jI-NAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA187|date=3 August 2009|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-135-46664-0|pages=187–}}</ref>, ]<ref name="Burns2006">{{cite book|editor=Lynda Burns|author=Alison M Jaggar|chapter=Whose Politics? Who's Correct?|title=Feminist Alliances|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=CdfgMEV3f6oC&pg=PA20|date=January 2006|publisher=Rodopi|isbn=90-420-1728-7|pages=20–}}</ref> and ]<ref name="Moi">http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501655?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents</ref> - question Sommers' self-identification as a feminist, and have characterized her primarily as an ]. | |||
==Early life and career== | ==Early life and career== |
Revision as of 15:49, 25 February 2016
Christina Hoff Sommers | |
---|---|
Born | Christina Marie Hoff 1950 (age 74–75) Petaluma, California, U.S. |
Occupation | Author, university professor, scholar at The American Enterprise Institute |
Alma mater | NYU (BA), Brandeis (PhD) |
Notable works | Who Stole Feminism?, The War Against Boys,Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life |
Spouse | Frederic Tamler Sommers (widowed) |
Website | |
www |
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (née Hoff; born 1950) is an American author and former philosophy professor known for her critique of third-wave feminism in contemporary American culture. She is described as an equity feminist and by extension a classical-liberal and libertarian feminist by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). Her writing has been featured in a number of outlets across the political spectrum which include the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the liberal Huffington Post, TIME, The Atlantic and Slate. She hosts the video blog Factual Feminist.
Sommers defined the term "equity feminist" as one who believes the main political role of feminism is to ensure the right against coercive interference is not infringed. She contrasts that with what she calls "victim" or her original term "gender feminism", arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different". Some feminist scholars have called her works and positions anti-feminist.
Early life and career
Hoff was born in Petaluma, California, to Delores and Ken Hoff. Sommers earned a BA at New York University in 1971, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a PhD in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979.
A former philosophy professor at Clark University, Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She has appeared on numerous television programs including Nightline, 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, and has lectured and taken part in debates on more than 100 college campuses and served on the national advisory board of the Independent Women's Forum. She has written articles for Time, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times. At the AEI she currently makes the weekly "Factual Feminist" video blog.
Ideas and views
Sommers describes "equity feminism" as the struggle based upon "Enlightenment principles of individual justice" for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the early feminists, as in the first wave of the women's movement. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal. She characterizes "gender feminism" as having "transcended the liberalism" of early feminists so that instead of focusing on rights for all, gender feminists view society through the "sex/gender prism" and focus on recruiting women to join the "struggle against patriarchy". Reason reviewed Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and characterized gender feminism as the action of accenting the differences of genders in order to create what Sommers believes is privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or the advancement of personal agendas.
Sommers is a longtime critic of Women's Studies departments, and of university curricula in general. In an interview with freelance journalist Scott London, Sommers said, "The perspective now, from my point of view, is that the better things get for women, the angrier the women's studies professors seem to be, the more depressed Gloria Steinem seems to get." While some feminist scholars have called her works and positions anti-feminist, Sommers rejects such claims.
According to The Nation, Hoff Sommers explains to her students that 'statistically challenged' feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda". These professors, she claims, are peddling a skewed and incendiary message: 'Women are from Venus, men are from Hell'.
Sommers has written about Title IX and the shortage of women in STEM fields. She opposes recent efforts to apply Title IX to the sciences because, she says, "Science is not a sport. In science, men and women play on the same teams. ... There are many brilliant women in the top ranks of every field of science and technology, and no one doubts their ability to compete on equal terms." Title IX programs in the sciences could stigmatize women and cheapen their hard-earned achievements. She adds that personal preferences, not sexist discrimination, plays a role in women's career choices. Not only do women favor fields like biology, psychology, and veterinary medicine over physics and mathematics, but they also seek out more family-friendly careers. She has written that "the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career."
Who Stole Feminism
Main article: Who Stole Feminism?In Who Stole Feminism, Sommers outlines her distinction between "gender feminism", which she regards as being the dominant contemporary approach to feminism, and "equity feminism", which she presents as more akin to first-wave feminism. She uses the work to argue that contemporary feminism is too radical and disconnected from the lives of typical American women, presenting her equity feminism alternative as a better match for their needs. In criticizing contemporary feminism, Sommers writes that an often-mentioned March of Dimes study which says that "domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects", does not exist, and that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban legend, arguing that such statements about domestic violence helped shape the Violence Against Women Act, which initially allocated $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for ending domestic violence against women. Similarly, she argues that feminists assert that approximately 150,000 women die each year from anorexia, an apparent distortion of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 females have some degree of anorexia.
Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Hudson Institute, writing in The Wall Street Journal, praised the book for its "lack of a political agenda. ... Ms. Sommers simply lines up her facts and shoots one bullseye after another." In contrast, Laura Flanders of the leftist Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), panned Sommers's book as being "filled with the same kind of errors, unsubstantiated charges and citations of 'advocacy research' that she claims to find in the work of the feminists she takes to task ..." Sommers responded to FAIR's criticisms in a letter to the editor of FAIR's monthly magazine, EXTRA!.
The War Against Boys
Sommers wrote in The Atlantic, about her own book, The War Against Boys, that misguided school curriculum is a likely cause for many problems in education, including falling reading scores of lower-school boys. Sommers writes that there is an achievement gap between boys and girls in school, and that girls in some areas are achieving more than boys. She writes, "Growing evidence that the scales are tipped not against girls but against boys is beginning to inspire a quiet revisionism. Some educators will admit that boys are on the wrong side of the gender gap."
Writing in The Washington Post in 2000, author E. Anthony Rotundo stated: "In the end, Sommers ... does not show that there is a 'war against boys.' All she can show is that feminists are attacking her 'boys-will-be-boys' concept of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion ... Sommers's title, then, is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic."
However, Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University, has compared Sommers' book with the separate but complementary work of psychologist William Pollack, author of Real Boys' Voices and Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and with the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan. Richard Bernstein, a New York Times columnist, praised the book, writing, "The burden of thoughtful, provocative book is that it is American boys who are in trouble, not girls. Ms. Sommers...makes these arguments persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them." The New York Times included The War Against Boys as one of their nonfiction Notable Books of the Year in 2000.
Awards
The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of its twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards for her New York Times article, "The Boys at the Back". In their description of the winners, NWPC states, "Author Christina Sommers asks whether we should allow girls to reap the advantages of a new knowledge based service economy and take the mantle from boys, or should we acknowledge the roots of feminism and strive for equal education for all?"
Selected works
- 1986, Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics. ISBN 0-15-577110-8.
- 1994, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women ISBN 978-0-684-80156-8.
- 2000, The War Against Boys. ISBN 0-684-84956-9.
- 2003 (with Frederic Sommers), Vice & Virtue in Everyday life. ISBN 978-0-534-60534-6.
- 2006 (with Sally Satel, M.D.), One Nation Under Therapy. ISBN 978-0-312-30444-7.
- 2009 The Science on Women in Science. ISBN 978-0-8447-4281-6.
- 2013 Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today (Values and Capitalism). ISBN 978-0-844-77262-2.
References
- http://www.californiabirthindex.org/birth/christina_marie_hoff_born_1950_4146990
- ^ "Liberal Feminism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Christina Hoff Sommers. "What's Wrong and What's Right with Contemporary Feminism?" (PDF). AEI.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 17, 2009. Retrieved November 16, 2014.
The dominant philosophy of today's women's movement is not equity feminism--but "victim feminism."
Hamilton College speech, 19 November 2008. - Marshal, Barbara L. "35: Feminism and Constructionism (in Part VI: Continuing Challenges)". In Holstein, James A.; Gubrium, Jaber F. (eds.). Handbook of Construtionist Research. p. 693.
Christina Hoff Sommers (1994) coined the term gender feminism in opposition to equity feminism.
- http://blogs.fad.unam.mx/asignatura/adriana_raggi/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women.pdf
- "Texas A&M website biography". Retrieved November 16, 2014.
has a doctor of philosophy degree in philosophy from Brandeis University.
- "Advisors". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Archived from the original on February 1, 2012. Retrieved December 2, 2009.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - Schreiber, Ronnee (2008). Righting Feminism. Oxford University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-19-533181-3.
- Christina Hoff Sommers profile, time.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- Christina Hoff Sommers profile, huffingtonpost.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- Christina Hoff Sommers profile, theatlantic.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- Christina Hoff Sommers profile, slate.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- Christina Hoff Sommers profile, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- "Factual Feminist". AEI.
- "Factual Feminist". YouTube.
- Who Stole Feminism?, p. 22.
- Who Stole Feminism?, p. 23.
- Tama Starr, "Reactionary Feminism", Review of Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Reason magazine, October 1994.
- Mary Lefkowitz, "Review of Christina Hoff Sommers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women", National Review, July 11, 1994.
- "The Future of Feminism: An Interview with Christina Hoff Sommers". scottlondon.com.
- Projansky, Sarah (August 1, 2001). "2: The Postfeminist Context: Popular Redefinitions of Feminism, 1980-Present". Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. NYU Press. pp. 71–. ISBN 9780814766903. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
antifeminist (self-defined) feminists such as Shahrazad Ali, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Wendy Kaminer, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Naomi Wolf
- Vint, Sherryl (March 1, 2010). "6: Joanna Russ's The Two of Them in an Age of Third-wave Feminism". In Mendlesohn, Farah (ed.). on Joanna Russ. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 142–. ISBN 9780819569684. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
some third-wave concerns can be translated into a distinctly antifeminist agenda such as that put forward by Roiphe or by Hoff Sommers
- Anderson, Kristin J. (September 23, 2014). "4: The End of Men and the Boy Crisis". Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era. Oxford University Press. pp. 74–. ISBN 9780199328178. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
Anti-feminist boy-crisis trailblazer Christina Hoff Sommers
- Christina H. Sommers (November 26, 2014). "My Misplaced Pages profile now calls me an "opponent" of feminism. Not so. Strong proponent of equality feminism--always" (Tweet). Archived from the original on December 22, 2014. Retrieved November 30, 2014 – via Twitter.
- Houppert, Karen (November 7, 2002). "Wanted: a Few Good Girls". The Nation. Archived from the original on February 1, 2012. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - "AAUW Celebrates 38th Anniversary of Title IX With Calls for Grater Enforcement", American Association of University Women, June 2010
- ^ Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Case against Title-Nining the Sciences", September 2008.
- Christina Hoff Sommers, "Is Science Saturated with Sexism?", February 2011.
- Kinahan, Anne-Marie. (2001). "Women Who Run from the Wolves: Feminist Critique as Post-Feminism", Canadian Review of American Studies 32:2. p. 33.
- Christina Hoff Sommers (May 1, 1995). Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. Simon and Schuster. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-0-684-80156-8.
- ^ Flanders, Laura (Autumn 1994). "The 'Stolen Feminism' Hoax: Anti-Feminist Attack Based on Error-Filled Anecdotes". fair.org. Archived from the original on February 5, 2005.
September/October 1994
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"The 'Stolen Feminism' Hoax". September 1, 1994. Archived from the original on February 21, 2013.Sep 01 1994
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) - McElroy, Wendy. "Prostitution: Reconsidering Research". originally printed in SpinTech magazine, reprinted at WendyMcElroy.com on 12 November 1999.
- Kirkpatrick, Melanie (July 1, 1994). Wall Street Journal.
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(help) - Christina Hoff Sommers (March 15, 1995). "Reply to FAIR". Debunker.com. Archived from the original on March 5, 2001.
Christina Hoff Sommers' reply to charges disseminated by the left wing media watchdog group FAIR
{{cite web}}
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suggested) (help) letter to Mr. Jim Naureckas, Editor, EXTRA!, FAIR Editorial Office - "The War Against Boys", theatlantic.com; accessed August 30, 2015.
- Rotundo, E. Anthony (July 2, 2000). "Review of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men". Washingtonpost.com.
- Robert Coles, Boys to Men, Two views of what it's like to be young and male in the United States today, New York Times, June 25, 2000.
- Richard Bernstein, Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims, nytimes.com, July 31, 2000.
- "Holiday Books 2000: Nonfiction" (December 3, 2000) The New York Times; retrieved November 30, 2014.
- ^ 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards (EMMAs) Winners, National Women's Political Caucus
- Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Boys at the Back", nytimes.com, February 2, 2013.
External links
- Christina Hoff Sommers on Twitter
- MediaTransparency entry on Christina Hoff Sommers.
- Is the future of feminism conservative? – a discussion of Sommers in the Harvard Law Record
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- 1950 births
- Living people
- 21st-century American writers
- 21st-century philosophers
- 21st-century women writers
- American classical liberals
- American Enterprise Institute
- American ethicists
- American women writers
- Brandeis University alumni
- Clark University faculty
- Female critics of feminism
- Individualist feminists
- New York University alumni
- People from Petaluma, California
- Philosophy teachers
- Writers from California