Christina Hoff Sommers

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use American English Template:Infobox writer Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born September 28, 1950)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.<ref name="AEI">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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.<ref name="Baehr 2021"/> Sommers has contrasted equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Sommers 2008">Template:Cite web Hamilton College speech, 19 November 2008.</ref> Several writers have described Sommers' positions as anti-feminist.<ref name="Vint 2010" /><ref name="Projansky 2001" /><ref name="Anderson 2014" />

Early life and education

Sommers was born in 1950 to Kenneth and Dolores Hoff,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and was raised in Southern California.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Her parents named her after the English poet Christina Rossetti.<ref name=Rossetti/> She has said that her mother was Jewish, but that she was not raised religious.<ref name=Rossetti>Template:Cite tweet</ref> 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.<ref name="CAO">"Christina Hoff Sommers." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Biography in Context. Web. February 29, 2016.</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Career

Ideas and views

Template:AnchorSommers has called herself an equity feminist,<ref name="Scatamburlo 1998">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Nussbaum 1999">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Gring-Pemble 2000">Template:Cite journal</ref> equality feminist,<ref name="McKenna 2015">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Meloy 2010">Template:Cite book</ref> and liberal feminist.<ref name="Loptson 2006">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:R The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal.<ref name="Baehr 2021">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref>

Several authors have described Sommers' positions as antifeminist.<ref name="Vint 2010">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Projansky 2001">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Anderson 2014">Template:Cite book</ref> 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".<ref name="Jaggar 2006">Template:Cite book</ref> Sommers has denied that she is anti-feminist.<ref>Sommers, Christina "I am not anti-feminist", Twitter. Retrieved July 7, 2024.</ref>

Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated by man-hating feminists with an interest in portraying women as victims.<ref name="Schultz 2000">Template:Cite book</ref> 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".<ref name="Houppert 2002">Template:Cite web</ref>

Sommers has denied the existence of the gender pay gap.<ref name="Amend 2018">Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Explain

Early work

From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.<ref>University of Massachusetts Boston, "The Spectator - Vol. 02, No. 02 - October 20, 1978" (1978). 1978-1979, Spectator. 11.</ref> 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.<ref name="CAO"/> 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."<ref>Nicholas Dixon, Book Review, Teaching Philosophy 13 No. 1 (March 1990): 47.</ref>

Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general.<ref name="Friedman 1990">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Digby 1992">Template:Cite news</ref> 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.Template:R 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."<ref name="Sommers 1998">Sommers, Christina. "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?". Public Affairs Quarterly2.3 (1988): 97–120.</ref>Template:Third-party inline 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."<ref>Christina Sommers, "The Feminist Revelation," Social Philosophy and Policy, 8, 1 (Autumn 1990): 141-58.</ref><ref>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).</ref><ref name="Dwyer 1996">Template:Cite journal</ref> These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations of feminist literature, and faulty arguments",Template:R would form the basis for Sommers' 1994 book Who Stole Feminism?.<ref name="Dwyer 1996"/>

Later work

Sommers has written articles for Time,<ref name="Stewart 2016">Template:Cite journal</ref> The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.<ref name="Atlantic Monthly 2000">Template:Cite magazine</ref> She hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist on YouTube.<ref name="Noyes 2018">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Sommers created a video "course" for the conservative website PragerU.<ref>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.</ref>

Sommers has also appeared on Red Ice's white nationalist podcast Radio 3Fourteen.<ref name="Amend 2018" /> Sommers later said that she did not know about the podcast prior to her appearance.<ref name="Amend 2018" />

Who Stole Feminism?

Template:Main In Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers outlines her distinction between gender feminism,Template:Efn 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.<ref>Kinahan, Anne-Marie. (2001). "Women Who Run from the Wolves: Feminist Critique as Post-Feminism", Canadian Review of American Studies 32:2. p. 33.</ref> Sommers describes herself as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become".<ref name="Young 1994">Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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.<ref>Who Stole Feminism?, p. 23.</ref> 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.<ref name="Starr 1994">Tama Starr, "Reactionary Feminism", Review of Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Reason magazine, October 1994.</ref><ref name="Lefkowitz 1994">Mary Lefkowitz, "Review of Christina Hoff Sommers Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women", National Review, July 11, 1994.</ref>

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<ref name="Sommers 1995">Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name="Flanders 1994">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web originally printed in SpinTech magazine, reprinted at WendyMcElroy.com on 12 November 1999.</ref>

The War Against Boys

Template:Third-party 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."<ref name="Publishers Weekly 2000">"The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2000: 59.</ref> 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,"<ref name="Bell-Russel 2000">Bell-Russel, D. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men. Library Journal, 125(11), 102.</ref> 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)<ref name="Bell-Russel 2000"/> 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."<ref name="CAO"/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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"<ref>Richard Lowry, "The Male Eunuch," National Review, July 3, 2000</ref> and for identifying "a problem in urgent need of redress."<ref>Finn, Chester E.,, Jr. (2000, 09). Puppy-dogs' tails. Commentary, 110, 68-71.</ref> 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."<ref name="Bernstein 2000">Richard Bernstein, Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims, nytimes.com, July 31, 2000.</ref> 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'."<ref>Pullman, Journal of School Choice 2004, 337-339.</ref> 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."<ref name="Publishers Weekly 2000"/> 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."<ref>Carroll, Mary. "The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men." Booklist 1 May 2000: 1587.</ref>

In a review of The War Against Boys for The New York Times, child psychiatrist Robert Coles wrote that Sommers "speaks of our children, yet hasn't sought them out; instead she attends those who have, in fact, worked with boys and girls—and in so doing is quick to look askance at Carol Gilligan's ideas about girls, [William] Pollack's about boys." Much of the book, according to Coles, "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."<ref name="CAO"/><ref>Robert Coles, Boys to Men, Two views of what it's like to be young and male in the United States today, The New York Times, June 25, 2000.</ref> Reviewing the book for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that Sommers "sets the research bar considerably higher for the people she is attacking than she does for herself," using an "odd, ambushing style of refutation, in which she demands that data be provided to her and questions answered, and then, when the flummoxed person on the other end of the line stammers helplessly, triumphantly reports that she got 'em." Lemann faulted Sommers for accusing Gilligan of using anecdotal argument when her own book "rests on an anecdotal base" and for making numerous assertions that were not supported by the footnotes in her book.<ref name="Lemann 2000">Nicholas Lemann, "The Battle Over Boys," The New Yorker Vol 76 Issue 18 (July 10, 2000), 79.</ref>

Writing in The Washington Post, E. Anthony Rotundo stated that "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, according to Rotundo, "is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic."<ref name="Rotundo 2000">Template:Cite news</ref>

In the updated and revised edition published in 2013, Sommers responded to her critics by changing the subtitle of the book from How misguided feminism harms our young men to How misguided policies harm our young men, and provided new and updated statistics that position her earlier work, in her view, as prophetic.<ref name="Sommers 2013">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Third-party inline When asked by Maclean's whether her work is still controversial, Sommers responded:

Advocacy

Sommers has served on the board of the Women's Freedom Network,Template:R<ref name="Boles 2004">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Rapping 1996">Template:Cite journal</ref> a group formed as an alternative to "extremist, ideological feminism" as well as to "antifeminist traditionalism" but described by historian Debra L. Schultz as comprising mostly "conservative ideologues in the political correctness debates".Template:R In the 1990s, she was a member of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative political advocacy group.Template:R She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Third-party inline She has served on the national advisory board of the Independent Women's Forum<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and the Center of the American Experiment.<ref>"Christina Hoff Sommers." The Writers Directory. Detroit: St. James Press, 2015. Biography in Context. Web. Accessed March 3, 2016.</ref>

Sommers has defended the Gamergate harassment campaign, saying that its members were "just defending a hobby they love." This advocacy in favor of Gamergate earned her praise from members of the men's rights movement, inspiring fan art and the nickname "Based Mom", which Sommers embraced.<ref name="Amend 2018" /> During Gamergate, Sommers appeared at several events with far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.<ref name="Amend 2018" /> In 2019, Sommers endorsed Andrew Yang's campaign during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.<ref>Template:Cite tweet</ref>

Awards

The Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of its twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards<ref name="NWPC 2013">2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards (EMMAs) Winners, National Women's Political Caucus Template:Webarchive</ref> for her The New York Times article "The Boys at the Back."<ref>Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Boys at the Back", nytimes.com, February 2, 2013.</ref> In their description of the winners, NWPC states, "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?"<ref name="NWPC 2013"/>

Personal life

Sommers married Fred Sommers, the Harry A. Wolfson Chair in Philosophy at Brandeis University, in 1981.<ref name="CAO"/><ref name="Kester-Shelton 1996">Template:Cite book</ref> He died in 2014.<ref>Andreas Teuber, Fred Sommers — A Tribute Template:Webarchive, October 23, 2014.</ref> Through Fred, her stepson is Tamler Sommers; who is a philosopher and podcast host.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="CAO"/><ref name="Atlantic Monthly 2000"/><ref>Template:Cite AV media</ref>

See also

• Individualist feminism

Selected works

Books

• (1984). (ed.). Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Co-edited with Robert J. Fogelin for the 2nd and 3rd editions, and with Fred Sommers for the 4th and subsequent editions. Template:ISBN
• (1986) (ed.). Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Co-edited with Robert J. Fogelin. Template:ISBN
• (1994). Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster. Template:ISBN
• (2000 and 2013). The War Against Boys. New York: Simon & Schuster. Template:ISBN and Template:ISBN
• (2005). (with Sally Satel, M.D.). One Nation Under Therapy. New York: St. Martin's Press. Template:ISBN
• (2009). The Science on Women in Science. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press. Template:ISBN
• (2013). Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press. Template:ISBN

Articles

• (1988). "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?". Public Affairs Quarterly. 2: 97–120.
• (1990). "The Feminist Revelation". Social Philosophy and Policy. 8(1): 152–157.
• (1990). "Do These feminists Like Women?". Journal of Social Philosophy. 21(2) (Fall): 66–74.

External links

• Template:Twitter
• Is the future of feminism conservative? – a discussion of Sommers in the Harvard Law Record
• Appearances Template:Webarchive on C-SPAN
• Contributions to Time
• Contributions to The Atlantic
• Contributions to The New York Times
• The Factual Feminist on YouTube