CHRISTINA SOMMERS

REVIEW: Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers, Ph.D. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Price: US$ 23.00; CDN$ 29.50.

The book begins by giving examples of three myths concerning women's 'place' and status in American society, how they got started, and, even though they are patently false, how they have nevertheless been promoted and even amplified by a credulous media, a timid academic world and a craven government. To demonstrate their untruth, Dr. Sommers treats her readers to a delightful (albeit shocking) multi-page exposition of these myths which have been repeated time and again until they've become part of the 'accepted wisdom' of women's supposed inferior and oppressed status in American society. The myths, in order of treatment, are the incorrect statistics that (a) "in this country alone . . . about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year," (b) "domestic violence is now responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined," and (c) the infamous "Super Bowl Sunday" hoax of January 1993, during which gender feminists claimed that the incidence of domestic battery on Super Bowl Sunday rose by 40 percent. Dr. Sommers traces these myths to their sources, extensively referencing and footnoting the individuals involved, and discovers that they are all factually wrong. Unfortunately, as she notes ruefully, it's also the case that they are all widely accepted as true, and have even been reproduced in textbooks.

Dr. Sommers, herself an academic, is concerned with the gender feminists' incursions into the halls of higher education, and she does an excellent job of outlining to the reader just how far, and how fast, the gender feminist agenda has become entrenched in colleges and universities throughout the United States. About one-half of the book traces the rise of gender feminism and its impact on post-secondary educational curricula. Much of the changes in educational content which Dr. Sommers describes will strike the reader as an effort by the gender feminists to "dumb down" the traditional rigour and objectivity associated with higher education, all in the name of sensitivity to women's concerns and out of a desire to make the curricula less "phallocentric" (literally, "penis-oriented").

Dr. Sommers' descriptions of the work of the gender feminists is almost mind-boggling, as she patiently walks the reader through a maze of obscure terminology and confused ideas associated with the gender feminists. She takes great pains to show that the theories of these feminists are more properly belief systems rather than provable concepts, and notes that gender feminists try to secure "converts" to their view that liberal democratic societies are hopelessly patriarchal and "rigged" against women. Lest the reader forget or downplay the importance of this, she reminds us that it is our children, particularly our daughters, who are at risk from the proselytizing of these gender feminists. In one pointed passage, Dr. Sommers says that she would like to see the more extreme examples of gender-feminized post-secondary institutions print the following warning on the first page of their student bulletins:

"We will help your daughter discover the extent to which she has been in complicity with the patriarchy. We will encourage her to reconstruct herself through dialogue with us. She may become enraged and chronically offended. She will very likely reject the religious and moral codes you raised her with. She may well distance herself from family and friends. She may change her appearance, and even her sexual orientation. She may end up hating you (her father) and pitying you (her mother). After she has completed her reeducation with us, you will certainly be out tens of thousands of dollars and very possibly be out one daughter as well."

The critique of gender feminist ideology continues by demonstrating the tendency for these feminists to create self-serving, well-paying and self-reproducing bureaucracies, usually under the guise of so-called "transformationist projects" that establish offices and committees devoted to "reforming" the curricula and monitoring every aspect of students' and faculties' expressions and behaviours while on campus. As Dr. Sommers dryly observes, "Large numbers of professionals with job titles like 'sex equity expert,' 'gender bias officer,' and 'harassment facilitator' are remuneratively engaged in finding, monitoring, and eradicating endless manifestations of gender bias." That it is in their best interests to continue doing so becomes obvious in the course of Dr. Sommers' exposition.

The last half of the book is devoted to major examples of what Dr. Sommers refers to as "advocacy research," research undertaken by committed gender feminists to "prove" that the American social, legal and educational systems are "rigged" against females. Dr. Sommers starts by taking direct aim at two studies commissioned by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the first of which, entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America made the claim that girls in early adolescence suffered a marked drop in self-esteemas compared to boys, which had negative consequences for their ability to learn and to achieve. The second, a follow-up study entitled How Schools Shortchange Girls, purported to show the ways in which girls were being harmed by the American school system and attempted to put forward recommendations on ways to remedy this situation. As Dr. Sommers shows, however, both studies were seriously flawed as to assumptions, methodology and conclusions, and the results of these studies are considered to be almost useless by most educational and psychology experts. Moreover, her personal accounts of the roadblocks she encountered while trying to obtain the original studies and research underlying the alarmist media releases issued by the AAUW will lead the reader to question the sincerity, and perhaps the competence, of the sponsors, authors and publicists of these studies.

Following these two chapters are two more entitled Noble Lies and Rape Research in which Dr. Sommers continues her critique of advocacy research and the flawed and tendentious conclusions drawn from such research. Her overall thesis throughout these chapters is simple: no good can come from a philosophy of research which is directed by a desire to arrive at foreordained conclusions, and such research actively harms the twin causes of achieving genuine equality between the sexes and protecting those who have been genuinely harmed. As she so succinctly puts it, "even the best-intentioned 'noble lie' ultimately discredits the finest of causes." She continues on to demonstrate the wide variety of "noble lies" surrounding issues such as eating disorders, rape, domestic abuse and wage differentials, decrying the tendency of gender feminist research to obscure these very real problems by extending or distorting their definitions to the point where the trivial and innocent becomes every bit as bad as the genuine and extreme. Dr. Sommers is particularly scathing in her denunciation of the way in which this research is used to allocate scarce funding to privileged, upper-middle and upper class women's concerns, while ignoring the more pressing needs of women in the lower socioeconomic strata. To Dr. Sommers, such active misallocation of funding is yet another example of the selfishness and self-preoccupation of gender feminists.

The second to last chapter, entitled "The Backlash Myth," is devoted to assessing the books Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. These two books promulgated the belief, now widely held as true, that "masses of seemingly free women were being mysteriously manipulated from within," that there is an interior psychological discipline of submission and subordination which a male-dominated culture instills into the minds of women, thus enslaving them even while they maintain the appearance of being free. Both Faludi and Wolf attempt to marshal evidence (what Dr. Sommers elsewhere characterizes as a "smoking gun") to show that this "interior discipline" is indeed the state of affairs for American women today. Once again, Dr. Sommers casts a thoroughgoing and critical eye over the supposed "evidence," finding it at best highly suspect and at worst simply incorrect. Both Wolf and Faludi, according to Dr. Sommers, are guilty of egregious misuse of available statistical data, and both are highly selective in their presentation of the "smoking gun," inexplicably leaving out masses of data which directly contradict their ideas of "backlash." (To be fair, Dr. Sommers also notes that Ms. Wolf, in her new book Fire With Fire, has effectively retreated from this extreme and untenable theory and the siege mentality which it caused, much to the dismay of many of her former allies, who now decry Ms. Wolf's newest tome as another example of "backlash," and Ms. Wolf herself as a "traitor.")

Finally, Dr. Sommers outlines the inordinate fondness gender feminists have for authoritarianism, as well as their implicit contempt for women who do not fit their mould or embrace their visions. As she puts it, "[This] is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.... In the end, the gender feminist is always forced to show her disappointment and annoyance with the women who are to be found in the camp of the enemy. Misandry moves on to misogyny." Indeed, as Dr. Sommers shows repeatedly throughout this book, the gender feminist's harshest words are reserved not for men, but for other women who do not agree with them and their narrow, divisive and destructive beliefs.

Despite all the above, Dr. Sommers finds reason to take heart. She observes that "mainstream feminists are only just becoming aware of the fact that the Faludis and the Steinems speak in the name of women BUT DO NOT REPRESENT THEM [her emphasis]. With the new awareness that the feminist leaders and theorists are patronizing them, there is a very real possibility that the mainstream is the tide of the not-too-distant future." If this is so -- if a humane and compassionate egalitarianism once again achieves ascendancy -- then Who Stole Feminism will be a watershed in the struggle to take back feminism from the extremists who now dominate it and set its agendas. Dr. Sommers is to be congratulated for a work of rare courage and principled, accessible scholarship. I recommend this book to anyone who cares about the future of feminism and the achievement of full equality between the sexes.

                            http://www.vix.com/men/books/sommers/gwood-sommers.html

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