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Christina Hoff Sommers (/ˈsʌmərz/; born 1950) is an American author and former philosophy professor known for her critique of late 20th century feminism, and her writings about feminism in contemporary American culture. Her most widely discussed books are Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

She coined the term "equity feminist" to denote her approach, which she contrasts with what she describes as victim or gender feminism. She criticises much of contemporary feminist thought as containing "irrational hostility to men" and possessing an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different". Her approach has been positively received and Steven Pinker states that "Christina Hoff Sommers draws a useful distinction between two schools of thought", referring to equity feminism as "part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism and launched the second wave" versus gender feminism as "opposed to the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism, postmodernism, social constructionism, and radical science". It has also been criticized, and she is considerd anti-feminist by many feminist scholars.

Career

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 in Ethics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. She is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Sommers 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 multiple articles for Time , Huffington Post , The Atlantic , Slate, and The New York Times .

Ideas and views

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically-liberal. Sommers coined the terms "equity feminism" and "gender feminism." She 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. 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 magazine 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." 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 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 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. Sommers 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. Sommers writes that "the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career."

Sommers has written that "conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses."

She has recently developed a form a feminism she refers to as Freedom Feminism, claiming to have "developed this moderate alternative by studying the history of the women's movement" to address the problem of declining numbers of women and men willing to call themselves feminist.. Sommers describes this form of feminism as standing for "the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes--and the freedom of women to employ their equal status to pursue happiness in their own distinctive ways" and identifies three pillars that distinguish it from other forms of feminism: (1) Differences in outcomes are not "automatically be taken as proof of discrimination", and it will "allow that there could be innocent explanations for disparities" such as differences in preferences and choices between sexes. (2) It would combat "male-averse educational and social policies that have helped create a dysfunctional culture of fatherlessness", while also supporting initiatives for "initiatives to assist poverty-stricken single mothers". (3) Focus on uniting progressive and conservative women in addressing inequality in the developing world where women have much larger inequality issues. The intent is to give moderate and conservative women a voice within modern feminism on par with progressive voices to unite for common interests.

Who Stole Feminism

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 exist. Sommers writes that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban legend, and that such statements about domestic violence helped shape the Violence Against Women Act, which allocates $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for ending domestic violence. Sommers writes 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, 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." An article circulated by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watch group, 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 for The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote of the book: "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. It is hard not to credit her with a moral urgency that comes both from the head and from the heart."

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."

Anthony Rotundo of the Washington Post, in reviewing Sommers' The War Against Boys, 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."

Awards

The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), a U.S. organization co-founded by feminist Gloria Steinem with a mission statement "dedicated to increasing women’s participation in the political process and creating a true women’s political power base to achieve equality for all women", awarded Sommers with a 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Award for her New York Times article, "The Boys at the Back". The NWPC summarizes the article as, "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?"

Books by Sommers

• 1986, Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics. ISBN 0-15-577110-8.
• 1995, 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

1. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, Simon and Schuster, 1994, ISBN 0-671-79424-8 (hb), ISBN 0-684-80156-6 (pb), LCC HQ1154.S613 1994
2. ^ Christina Hoff Sommers, "What's Wrong and What's Right with Contemporary Feminism?" Hamilton College speech, Nov. 19, 2008. Accessed 2014-11-16.
3. "Wimmin are from Mars, women are from Venus", (June 19, 1997)
4. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,p. 341, 2002.
5. Kimmel, Michael. (2000). "A war against boys?", Tikkun 15:6, pp57-60.
6. Douglas, Susan J (2010). "girls gone ANTI-FEMINIST", In These Times, 34:3. pp 16-19.
7. "Texas A&M website biography". Retrieved November 16, 2014. has a doctor of philosophy degree in philosophy from Brandeis University.
8. Lukianoff, Greg (February 9, 2005). "FIRE Letter to University of Colorado at Boulder Interim Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano, February 9, 2005". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Archived from the original on February 16, 2005. Retrieved December 2, 2009. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
9. "Advisors". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Archived from the original on February 1, 2012. Retrieved December 2, 2009. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
10. Schreiber, Ronnee (2008). Righting Feminism. Oxford University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-19-533181-3.
11. Time, Articles from Contributor: Christina Hoff Sommers
12. Huffington Post, Articles from Contributor: "Christina Hoff Sommers
13. The Atlantic, Articles from Contributor: Christina Hoff Sommers
14. Slate, Articles from Contributor: Christina Hoff Sommers
15. The New York Times, Articles from Contributor:Christina Hoff Sommers
16. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
17. Who Stole Feminism? page 22.
18. Who Stole Feminism? page 23.
19. Tama Starr, Reactionary Feminism, Review of Christina Hoff Sommers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Reason Magazine, October 1994.
20. Mary Lefkowitz, Review of Christina Hoff Sommers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, National Review, July 11, 1994.
21. Interview with Christina Hoff Sommers
22. 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}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
23. "AAUW Celebrates 38th Anniversary of Title IX With Calls for Grater Enforcement", American Association of University Women, June 2010
24. ^ Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Case against Title-Nining the Sciences", September 2008.
25. Christina Hoff Sommers, "Is Science Saturated with Sexism?" (http://www.aei.org/article/103172) February 2011
26. Christina Hoff Sommers, For more balance on campuses, Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2002.
27. Christina Hoff Sommers, "How to Get More Women (and Men) to Call Themselves Feminists", The Atlantic, 2013
28. ^ Laura Flanders, The "Stolen Feminism" Hoax Anti-Feminist Attack Based on Error-Filled Anecdotes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, September/October 1994.
29. Wendy McElroy, Prostitution: Reconsidering Research, originally printed in SpinTech magazine, reprinted at WendyMcElroy.com, November 12, 1999.
30. Melanie Kirkpatrick (July 1, 1994). Wall Street Journal. {{cite news}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
31. Christina Hoff Sommers, letter to Mr. Jim Naureckas, Editor, EXTRA!, FAIR Editorial Office, March 15, 1995
32. The Atlantic "The War Against Boys"
33. ^ Richard Bernstein, Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims, New York Times, July 31, 2000.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards (EMMAs) Winners, National Women's Political Caucus
37. Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Boys at the Back" New York Times, Feb. 2, 2013

External links

• Christina Hoff Sommers page at the American Enterprise Institute.
• 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

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• 1950 births
• Living people
• 21st-century American writers
• 21st-century philosophers
• 21st-century women writers
• American Enterprise Institute
• American ethicists
• Brandeis University alumni
• Clark University faculty
• Critics of feminism
• Critics of postmodernism
• Individualist feminists
• Jewish American writers
• Jewish educators
• Jewish philosophers
• New York University alumni
• People from Petaluma, California
• Philosophy teachers