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Christina Hoff Sommers

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Christina Hoff Sommers (born 1950 in Petaluma, California) is an American author who researches culture, adolescents, and morality in American society. Her most widely discussed books are Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. Sommers has described how the feminist movement has been appropriated by "a cadre of party-line bureaucrats promoting an agenda of victimism and victimology-based revolution, with serious implications for the wider world." Critics of Sommers have refer to her as an antifeminist.

Sommers earned her B.A. at New York University where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1971. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Brandeis University in 1979. A former philosophy professor in Ethics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sommers is a resident scholar at several conservative institutions, including the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She speaks on college campuses through the socially conservative Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's campus lecture program, and is also one of the founding members of the conservative Independent Women's Forum.

Author Barbara Marshall has stated that Sommers explicitly identifies herself as a "libertarian." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes Sommers' equity feminist views as classical liberal or libertarian and socially conservative. Sommers has criticized how "conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses." In an article for the text book, Moral Soundings, Sommers makes the case for moral conservation and traditional values.

Views on feminism

Sommers uses the terms "equity feminism" and "gender feminism" to differentiate what she sees as acceptable and non-acceptable forms of feminisnm. She describes equity feminism as the struggle for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the early feminists, i.e., first wave of the women's movement. She describes "gender feminism" as the action of accenting the differences of genders for the purposes of creating privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or advancing personal agendas.

Sommers questions the direction that feminism has taken. She writes that flawed reports have commanded large research grants and influenced misguided legislation and education policy. In Who Stole Feminism she writes that the often quoted March of Dimes study which says that 'domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects,' does not exist. She writes that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she says is a widely held belief. Sommers also writes that these statements about domestic violence were used in shaping the Violence Against Women Act, which allocates $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for ending domestic violence.

Sommers alleges that feminists assert and the media reports that that approximately 150,000 women die each year of anorexia, a distortion of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 females have some degree of anorexia. However, Sommers does not point to specific case where feminists have cited this figure.

Sommers writes in The Atlantic about her own book The War Against Boys that misguided school curriculum, based on flawed research, for many problems in education including the 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."

A National Review review of "Who Stole Feminism" stated "She provides clear guidelines on how to distinguish indoctrination from education. That alone is a major service to all of us who are struggling to distinguish fact from fiction in today's troubled academic world." A Reason Magazine review stated "So the answer to the question in the book's title is, nobody stole feminism. The liberals gave it away. Their abdication of principles and cowardly fear of reprisals so ably chronicled by Sommers sealed the deal."

Writing for the New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote of The War Against Boys, "Observations like that lift Ms. Sommers's book from polemic to entreaty. There is a crying in the wilderness quality to her book, a sense that certain simple truths have been lost sight of in the smoky quarrelsomeness of American life. One may agree with Ms. Sommers or one may disagree, but it is hard not to credit her with a moral urgency that comes both from the head and from the heart."

Criticisms

Sommers harshly criticizes women's organizations like the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in her book Who Stole Feminism in conservative publications like The National Review, and in public forums. She writes of the AAUW:

"The American Association of University Women (AAUW) issued two reports in the early Nineties that were harmfully wrong. AAUW researchers claimed to show how “our gender biased” classrooms were damaging the self-esteem of the nation’s girls and holding them back academically. That was simply not true... If the AAUW were serious about improving the climate on campus, it could start by looking for ways to reason with the V-Day enthusiasts to discourage their antics. But that is not about to happen any time soon. Campuses need effective policies against genuine harassment. They do not need the divisive gender politics of the AAUW spin sisters. The AAUW’s statistically challenged, chronically mistaken, and relentlessly male-averse “studies” should not be taken seriously."

Sommer's criticisms prompted a response by the AAUW:

Unfortunately, Who Stole Feminism? is not about making positive societal change or changing behavior to create a more equitable society for women and girls. Rather, AAUW perceives the book to be an attack on scholars, women's organizations, and higher education. Contrary to what Sommers contends, there is nothing in any of our research about terms she uses--domination, subjugation, victimization, or oppression. Anyone who has read The AAUW Report will know that none of this is in our research. Ours is not a radical agenda despite Sommers' characterization of AAUW. We are about positive societal change. What does Sommers have to offer women and girls of America?Our research looks for solutions and is based on facts, not anecdotes or soundbites. The important thing to remember is that this debate is not about AAUW; it's about the children in this country. What is important is that our daughters and sons reach their full potential.

The Washington Post said of Sommer's arguments in The War Against Boys": "In the end, Sommers fails to prove either claim in the title of her book. She 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. The difference between attacking a concept and attacking millions of real children is both enormous and patently obvious. Sommers's title, then, is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... Sommers's book is a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic."

A New York Times review comparing Sommers' book with psychologist William S. Pollack's Real Boys' Voices stated: "Much of The War Against Boys comes across as Sommers's strongly felt war against those two prominent psychologists, who have spent years trying to learn how young men and women grow to adulthood in the United States. Pollack, we are informed, "is attributing pathology to normal boys, and his conclusions are expansive and alarming." The same charge is directed at Gilligan, at her well-known book In a Different Voice, and at her more recent effort to understand how boys as well as girls come to sometimes difficult terms with our country's social conventions and values.

Books and articles

  • Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994) ISBN 0-684-80156-6
  • The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (June 2001) ISBN 0-684-84957-7
  • Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life
  • Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics
  • One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance
  • A Book for Real Boys
  • Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

See also

References

  1. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Simon and Schuster, 1994, 22. ISBN 0-671-79424-8 (hb), ISBN 0-684-80156-6 (pb), LCC HQ1154.S613 1994
  2. ^ Tama Starr, Reactionary Feminism, Review of Christina Hoff Summers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Reason Magazine, October 1994.
  3. Michael Flood, Chapter 21(PDF) of The Battle and Backlash Rage On, XLibris, 2006 ISBN 1-4134-5934-X
  4. Jennifer Pozner, Female Anti-Feminism for Fame and Profit, excerpted from Uncovering the Right on Campus, Center for Campus Organizing (CCO), 1997.
  5. John Cloud, The Right's New Wing, Time Magazine, August 22, 2004. Relevant quote: Antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, darkly warned that Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues — a collection of sketches about women's sexual experiences that was performed on more than 600 campuses last year — has inspired "an army" of campus feminists whom she called "very elitist." Sommers told the audience, "You have been marginalized. You have to begin to demand some kind of representation."
  6. Texas A&M website biography " has a doctor of philosophy degree in philosophy from Brandeis University."
  7. Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's campus lecture program
  8. Barbara Marshall, Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics, Broadview Press, 2000 Footnote #7, 106 ISBN 1551110946, 9781551110943. " explicitly self-identifie as 'libertarian'."
  9. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  10. Christina Hoff Sommers, For more balance on campuses, Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2002.
  11. Dwight Furrow, Moral Soundings: Readings on the Crisis of Values in Contemporary Life, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 ISBN 0742533700, 9780742533707
  12. ^ Mary Lefkowitz, Review of Christina Hoff Summers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, National Review, July 11, 1994.
  13. Wendy McElroy, Prostitution: Reconsidering Research, originally printed in SpinTech magazine, reprinted at WendyMcElroy.com, November 12, 1999.
  14. The Atlantic "The War Against Boys"
  15. Richard Bernstein, Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims, New York Times, July 31, 2000.
  16. ^ Christina Hoff Sommers, Crying Wolf, National Review, February 21, 2006.
  17. "The Future of Feminism: An Interview with Christina Hoff Sommers
  18. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research A Speech by Christina Hoff Sommers
  19. American Association of University Women Memorandum March 1995
  20. Review of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by E. Anthony Rotundo in the Washington Post, July 2, 2000.
  21. 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.

Further reading

  • Sterling Harwood, "Introduction: A Statistical Portrait," in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2000), pp. 166-167.

External links

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