Who Stole Feminism?

Since the Julian Assange/Sady Doyle thing's been going on, I've been re-reading Christina Hoff Sommers', Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women.

I was hoping to just type up a big summary with some awesome block quotes from the book, but that takes a long time. I'll look for some of her articles later, but in the meantime, there's an interview with Scott London, probably from the mid-1990s when the book came out: "The Future of Feminism: An Interview with Christina Hoff Sommers."

Check it out:

Over the last decade or two, many women in the United States have distanced themselves from the feminist movement. It appears that a growing number of them associate feminism with anger and hostile rhetoric and have therefore concluded that they are not really feminists. This was reflected in a recent Time/CNN poll which showed that although 57 percent of the women responding felt there was a need for a strong women's movement, a full 63 percent said they didn't consider themselves feminists.

This fact is not surprising to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the controversial polemic Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women. Sommers contends that feminism has taken a wrong turn in recent years. It has become too self-absorbed, too unrepresentative, and too punitive to dissenters, she says. The conviction that women remain besieged and subject to a relentless male backlash has turned the movement inward. "We hear very little today about how women can join with men on equal terms to contribute to universal human culture," she writes. "Instead, feminist ideology has taken a divisive gynocentric turn, and the emphasis now is on women as a political class whose interests are at odds with the interests of men."

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former professor of philosophy at Clark University in Massachusetts. I met with her in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Who Stole Feminism?

Scott London: What inspired you to write this book?

Christina Hoff Sommers: In the late 1980s, I began to have disagreements with some of my colleagues in philosophy. In 1988, I actually went to the American Philosophical Association and read a paper critical of key points in academic feminism. I thought it would be a lively debate and that people would be angry. That often happens in the American Philosophical Association. But you always part as friends and go out for drinks and so on. But we did not part as friends at that event. People were furious. They were hissing. One woman almost fainted. I had never experienced anything like it. That evening I was excommunicated from a religion I didn't even know existed.

London: Did you consider yourself a feminist at that point?

Sommers. Yes. As a philosopher, you have to want dissent. That keeps you honest and keeps the research credible. But they didn't appreciate any kind of dissent in the movement and that spelled trouble. There is a system of quality control in scholarship, it is called criticism. But they were disallowing it.

London: The tone of feminism has become angrier and more resentful, and the explanation is often that there has been a "backlash" in the culture. Isn't there some truth to that?

Sommers: It's a myth. The eighties, which Susan Faludi called the "backlash decade," was a period when women made more progress than they did during most of the postwar period combined in terms of improved earnings. Women are now approaching parity with men in law school, medical school, business school. There are more women than men in college. A lot of this happened in the so-called backlash decade. So that, in itself, is a myth. What historians and economists will have to explain was how there was so much progress in so short a time. That's the big story of the eighties, not the backlash. They got it backwards. Now, why they got it backwards is interesting: because the leadership and some of the more extreme feminists are addicted to a language and a rhetoric of oppression. They want to view American women as a subordinate class. They say we are oppressed by the "patriarchy." All of that is very silly. And it's also very inaccurate. Women today have so many advantages today they didn't have in previous times and in many places around the world — most places around the world. So not to pass along the good news to young women seems to me to be wrong. That is part of the reason why I wrote the book — to give young women a different perspective. 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. So there is something askew here, something amiss.

More at the link.