Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born September 28, 1950) is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Sommers' positions and writing have been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or libertarian feminist perspective holding that the main political role of feminism is to ensure that the right against coercive interference is not infringed. Sommers has contrasted equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism. Hamilton College speech, 19 November 2008. Several writers have described Sommers' positions as anti-feminist.
Early life and education Sommers was born in 1950 to Kenneth and Dolores Hoff, and was raised in Southern California. Her parents named her after the English poet Christina Rossetti. She has said that her mother was Jewish, but that she was not raised religious. She attended the University of Paris, earned a B.A. degree at New York University in 1971, and earned a Ph.D. degree in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979."Christina Hoff Sommers." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Biography in Context. Web. February 29, 2016.
Career Ideas and views Sommers has called herself an equity feminist, equality feminist, and liberal feminist. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal.
Several authors have described Sommers' positions as antifeminist. The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 that, in rejecting the theoretical distinction between sex as a set of physiological traits and gender as a set of social identities, "Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism," arguing that as the concept of gender is allegedly relied on by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid". Sommers has denied that she is anti-feminist.Sommers, Christina "I am not anti-feminist", Twitter. Retrieved July 7, 2024.
Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated by man-hating feminists with an interest in portraying women as victims. According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students that "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda".
Sommers has denied the existence of the gender pay gap.
Early work From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.University of Massachusetts Boston, "The Spectator - Vol. 02, No. 02 - October 20, 1978" (1978). 1978-1979, Spectator. 11. In 1980, she became an assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to associate professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. During the mid-1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the subject of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (1984) and Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics (1986). Reviewing Vice and Virtue for Teaching Philosophy in 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the book was "extremely well edited" and "particularly strong on the motivation for studying virtue and ethics in the first place, and on theoretical discussions of virtue and vice in general."Nicholas Dixon, Book Review, Teaching Philosophy 13 No. 1 (March 1990): 47.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general. According to philosopher Marilyn Friedman, Sommers blamed feminists for contributing to rising divorce rates and the breakdown of the traditional family, and rejected feminist critiques of traditional forms of marriage, family, and femininity. In a 1988 Public Affairs Quarterly article titled "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials of academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the tactics used by academic feminists have all been employed at one time or another to further other forms of academic imperialism."Sommers, Christina. "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?". Public Affairs Quarterly2.3 (1988): 97–120. In articles titled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early 1990s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and cultural change—such as the abolition of the nuclear family—and thus revealed their contempt for the actual wishes of the "average woman."Christina Sommers, "The Feminist Revelation," Social Philosophy and Policy, 8, 1 (Autumn 1990): 141-58.Christina Sommers, "Philosophers against the Family," in Virtue and Vice in Everyday Life, edited by Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace). These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations of feminist literature, and faulty arguments", would form the basis for Sommers' 1994 book Who Stole Feminism?.
Later work Sommers has written articles for Time, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist on YouTube. Sommers created a video "course" for the conservative website PragerU.Tritten, Travis J. (August 12, 2015) "Viral video about Civil War's cause puts West Point close to right-wing group", Stars and Stripes. Retrieved April 17, 2019.
Sommers has also appeared on Red Ice's white nationalist podcast Radio 3Fourteen. Sommers later said that she did not know about the podcast prior to her appearance.
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.Kinahan, Anne-Marie. (2001). "Women Who Run from the Wolves: Feminist Critique as Post-Feminism", Canadian Review of American Studies 32:2. p. 33. Sommers describes herself as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become". 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.Who Stole Feminism?, p. 23. 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.Tama Starr, "Reactionary Feminism", Review of Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Reason magazine, October 1994.
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. She argues 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. originally printed in SpinTech magazine, reprinted at WendyMcElroy.com on 12 November 1999.
The War Against Boys
In 2000, Sommers published The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. In the book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new and equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed.""The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2000: 59. Criticizing programs that had been set up in the 1980s to encourage girls and young women, largely in response to studies that had suggested that girls "suffered through neglect in the classroom and the indifference of male-dominated society,"Bell-Russel, D. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men. Library Journal, 125(11), 102. Sommers argued in The War Against Boys that such programs were based on flawed research. She asserted that reality was quite the opposite: boys were a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing, and they were less likely to go to college.
She blamed Carol Gilligan as well as organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) for creating a situation in which "boys are resented, both as the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls." According to Sommers, "a review of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the weak side of an education gender gap."
The book received mixed reviews. In conservative publications such as the National Review and Commentary, The War Against Boys was praised for its "stinging indictment of an anti-male movement that has had a pervasive influence on the nation's schools"Richard Lowry, "The Male Eunuch," National Review, July 3, 2000 and for identifying "a problem in urgent need of redress."Finn, Chester E., Jr. (2000, 09). Puppy-dogs' tails. Commentary, 110, 68-71. Writing in The New York Times, opinion columnist Richard Bernstein called it a "thoughtful, provocative book" and suggested that Sommers had made her arguments "persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them."Richard Bernstein, Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims, nytimes.com, July 31, 2000. Joy Summers, in The Journal of School Choice, said that "Sommers' book and her public voice are in themselves a small antidote to the junk science girding our typically commonsense-free, utterly ideological national debate on 'women's issues'."Pullman, Journal of School Choice 2004, 337-339. Publishers Weekly suggested that Sommers' conclusions were "compelling" and "deserve an unbiased hearing," while also noting that Sommers "descends into pettiness when she indulges in mudslinging at her opponents." Similarly, a review in Booklist suggested that while Sommers "argues cogently that boys are having major problems in school," the book was unlikely to convince all readers "that these problems are caused by the American Association of University Women, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and William S. Pollack," all of whom were strongly criticized in the book. Ultimately, the review suggested, "Sommers is as much of a crisismonger as those she critiques."Carroll, Mary. "The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men." Booklist 1 May 2000: 1587.