Christina Hoff Sommers - Views on feminism
Sommers uses the terms "equity feminism" and "gender feminism" to differentiate what she sees as acceptable and non-acceptable forms of feminism. She describes equity feminism as the struggle based upon "Enlightenment principles of individual justice"[15] 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. She describes "gender feminism" as having "transcended the liberalism" of early feminists. 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."[16] A reviewer of Who Stole Feminism 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.[17][18]
Sommers wrote in The Atlantic, about her own book The War Against Boys, that misguided school curriculum, based on flawed research, is a likely cause 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."[19] 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 cry 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."[20] Her main thesis for the book deals with the inherent differences of boys and girls, and how we should not suppress them. Christina Hoff Sommers criticizes Carol Gilligan's claim that “young women suffer in a male dominated society," as well as William Pollack's contention that “young men are oppressed by cultural ideals of masculinity.”[21]
Sommers writes in Who Stole Feminism that an often-mentioned March of Dimes study which says that "domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects," does not, in fact, exist. This claim has been refuted by the scholar Nancy K.D. Lemon in the Chronicle of Higher Education, noting that the study "Battering During Pregnancy: Intervention Strategies," by Anne Stewart Helton and Frances Gobble Snodgrass funded by a grant by March of Dimes, appears in the September 1987 issue of the journal Birth.[22] Sommers writes that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as another popular urban legend. 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 writes that feminists assert, and the media report, 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.[17][18][23][24] A Reason magazine review stated that "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."[17]
Sommers is a longtime critic of Women's Studies departments, and of university curricula in general. In an interview with 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. So there is something askew here, something amiss."[25] According to The Nation, "Hoff Sommers carefully explains to the students that much of the fault for this unfortunate phenomenon [of "pathologizing maleness"] lies with women's studies departments. There, 'statistically challenged' feminists engage in bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda. As her preliminary analysis of women's studies textbooks has shown, these professors are peddling a skewed and incendiary message: 'Women are from Venus, men are from Hell'.[26] In a book review in the conservative magazine National Review, Mary Lefkowitz writes of Who Stole Feminism that "[Sommers] 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."[18]
Sommers has also written about Title IX and the shortage of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. She opposes recent efforts to apply Title IX to the sciences[27] because "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."[28] Title IX programs in the sciences could easily "stigmatize" women and cheapen their hard-earned achievements. Moreover, Sommers points to research that indicates that personal preferences, not sexist discrimination, plays a role in women's career choices.[29] 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. Sommers writes that "the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career" – not discrimination.[28]
