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Christina Hoff Sommers

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Christina Hoff Sommers (born 1950 in Akron, Ohio) is an American author who researches culture, adolescents, and morality in American society. Her best-known books are Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. A former philosophy professor in Ethics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She speaks on college campuses through the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's campus lecture program.

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 critic of what she considers politically correct trends within feminism, her views have been called antifeminist by her critics.

Summary

Christina Hoff Sommers questions the direction that feminism has taken and the integrity of some of the research it has produced. Hoff Sommers claims that flawed reports have commanded large research grants and have been instrumental in setting misguided legislation and education policy. For example, she points out in Who Stole Feminism that the often quoted March of Dimes study which says that 'domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects,' does not exist. Another often quoted statistic she has debunked is the claim that violence against women peaks during the Super Bowl. Yet, research reports on domestic violence were used in setting the scope of such things as the Violence Against Women Act, which allocates $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for fighting domestic violence. In The War Against Boys and articles, Hoff Sommers faults misguided school curriculum, based on flawed research, for many problems in education including the falling reading scores of lower-school boys.

Hoff Sommers applies Paulo Freire's principle of transition to supremacy movements in successful political struggles to the mainstream feminist movement. She encapsulates this transition using the two terms "equity feminism" and "gender feminism." Hoff Sommers describes equity feminism as the struggle for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the first wave of the women's movement; while describing "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. (This thesis is echoed by Tammy Bruce, former president of NOW, in her book The New Thought Police.)

Hoff Sommers does not hold out much hope that current leaders will provide enlightened guidance. After attending the Heilbrun conference she writes of them:

The women at the Heilbrun conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. Many of the women on the "Anger" panel were tenured professors at prestigious universities. All had fine and expensive educations. Yet, listening to them one would never guess that they live in a country whose women are legally as free as the men and whose institutions of higher learning now have more female than male students.[1]

Hoff Sommers suggests that feminist leaders are not only placing their political goals above academic honesty, but they are also indoctrinating impressionable university students not with grounded science, but rather with disingenuous, emotionally-charged pseudo information. An example of this may be found in Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire, where Wolf tells women to bring out their mean girl traits (see Rachel Simmons, Odd Girl Out), to trade acts of vengeance against men (“cross targeting”), and to engage in vicious gossip for the cause (“tell men's secrets,” she writes).

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?

Criticism

Some[2][3] have called Hoff Sommers an antifeminist.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) say about Who Stole Feminism? that they "[perceive] 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" [4].

A critical review of her work in Z Magazine attacked her for what the author considered hypocrisy. It points out that she claims that feminists suppress dissent and yet attacked The New York Times for having Nina Auerbach review her book. It also points out numerous perceived factual errors and distortions in her work.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ Bhattacharya, Chandrima S. (March 1995). "American Association of University Women Memorandum". AAUW Media Relations. Retrieved 2007-09-02.
  2. ^ McElroy, Wendy (1999-11-12). "Prostitution: Reconsidering Research". SpinTech. (magazine). Retrieved 2006-10-19.
  3. ^ LaFramboise, LaFramboise (1996). The Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality. Toronto, Canada: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-025690-3. Retrieved 2006-10-19. Over the past few years, a growing number of women have written books critical of mainstream feminism. Among them [...] Christina Hoff Sommers.
  4. ^ Hoff Sommers, Christina (1994). Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 22. ISBN 0-671-79424-8 (hb), ISBN 0-684-80156-6 (pb), LCC HQ1154.S613 1994.
  5. ^ ibid. p. 21
  6. ^ Jennifer Pozner: Female Anti-Feminism for Fame and Profit.
  7. ^ Flood, Michael (2004-07-07). "Backlash: Angry men's movements". In Stacey Elin Rossi, ed. (ed.). The Battle and Backlash Rage On. N.p.: XLibris. p. 273. ISBN 1-4134-5934-X. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); |editor= has generic name (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ Wilson, John (December 2005). The Myth Of Political Correctness. N.p.: Duke University Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0822317135. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ "Queer and Loathing". Z Magazine. December 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

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.
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