IDEAS: A Feminist on the Outs

What is feminism and is it likely to ruin your daughter’s life? One hesitates to jump into the latest catfight around this question, but with so much at stake, temptation overwhelms. It all started when Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University, came out in June with a book called Who Stole Feminism? Its point is that feminism has been derailed by a bunch of neurotic, self-indulgent intellectuals who have a direct personal interest in grossly overstating the woes of womankind. In women’s studies classes, young women are indoctrinated to believe they are downtrodden when they are actually, in Sommers’ words, “free creatures.”

A provocative idea, particularly coming from a self-described feminist. But it would probably never have propelled Sommers onto the talk-show circuit if the New York Times had not assigned the book to be reviewed by an academic feminist of the very sort Sommers decries. The June 12 review, by University of Pennsylvania professor Nina Auerbach, airily blew Sommers off as another “muddled” example of conservative backlash: “In Ms. Sommers’ world, there are no powerful men, only women shrieking irrationally in a vacuum,” wrote Auerbach. “But her treatment of social issues is so thin that it is she who is in a vacuum.”

Soon the Times was deluged with letters from furious Sommers supporters, who said the paper should have realized that it had assigned the review to someone who was attacked (although not named) in the book. In her July 3 reply, Auerbach acknowledged that she had attended one of the academic summits that Sommers derides but added that the book made no mention of the paper she gave there and “I therefore do not consider my presence to be a conflict of interest in reviewing the book.”

The flap has masked the fact that the book does expose some embarrassing exaggerations in feminist literature, along with much p.c. silliness on the part of Sommers’ academic feminist colleagues. Most strikingly, it debunks author Naomi Wolf’s assertion that 150,000 American women die each year in a “holocaust” of anorexia; the number is closer to 100. Similarly, Sommers claims that feminists exaggerate the extent of rape, wife battering and discrimination against girls in the classroom. She criticizes a much publicized study finding that girls’ self-esteem plunges at puberty. For one thing, the same study finds that black girls have much higher self-esteem than whites, which raises reasonable questions about what, if anything, “self- esteem” means as a predictor of future success.

But just when you thought you had found an honest feminist academic — perhaps the only one in existence — Sommers reveals the same sloppiness that she criticizes in other feminists. She plays fast and loose with anonymous sources and uses ellipses in mid-quote. She goes to great lengths to establish that the “rule of thumb,” which in the 19th century allowed a man to beat his wife with a rod no thicker than that finger, is a recent “feminist fiction.” Yet her favorite feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke out passionately against the right of a man to carry out this violence in a speech that Sommers quotes approvingly.

Throughout, Sommers lumps together as man-hating “gender feminists” individuals who in real life disagree furiously on censorship, pornography and the extent of women’s “victimization.” She attacks feminist pedagogy and, tellingly, she thinks N.O.W. stands for National Organization of Women when it is actually “for” women and open to male members.

In Sommers’ view, the gender feminists virtually rule the academy, where they effectively squelch all dissent. Never mind that Sommers herself has managed to thrive in this supposedly hostile atmosphere — getting tenure, being appointed to a high-level federal panel on higher education, and garnering six-figure support for her book. Sommers is right to emphasize women’s gains, but the biggest ones have been for women like herself and her ideological enemies, who are well-educated, upper-middle-class professionals.

Two temptations present themselves to women in this lucky minority: One is to downplay their own good fortune by exaggerating the forms of oppression they potentially share with the less fortunate — rape, for example, or eating disorders. This allows for much fatuous p.c. whining of the kind Sommers justifiably takes to task. But the other temptation is to imagine that just because you are a free and fortunate creature, so is the rest of your sex. This leads, in Sommers’ case, to a tone of distinctly unsisterly smugness.

In a world where millions of women have been losing ground before our very eyes — in newly fundamentalist cultures, in the postcommunist countries that have restricted abortion or ceased to fund child care, in the expanding global sex industry and in the increasingly miserly American welfare state — there is no need to exaggerate women’s oppression. And there is no excuse for downplaying it.