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Who's Afraid of Feminism?*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers's target in Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is “gender feminism.” Her aim is to convince us that gender feminists are anti-intellectual opportunists who deliberately spread lies about the incidence of date rape (chap. 10), domestic battery (Preface, chap. 9) and about the general state of male-female relations in America (chaps. 1, 9 and 11), thereby generating fear and resentment of men (chap. 2), all so that they may secure vast amounts of government funding and high-paying jobs in the academy (chaps. 4, 5 and 6). Because gender feminists are condescending to and contemptuous of the “average woman,” they lack a grass-roots constituency (p. 22). Nonetheless, they are powerful enough to be feared. Gender feminists have managed to dupe the U.S. Congress (chap. 8), and an otherwise sceptical press literally eats out of their hands (p. 15). Gender feminism is also a leading cause of the weakening of the American university (p. 52), and has “made the American campus a less happy place” (p. 112).
- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Spring 1996 , pp. 327 - 342
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996
References
Notes
1 Sommers, Christina, “Philosophers against the Family,” in Virtue and Vice in Everyday Life, edited by Sommers, Christina and Sommers, Fred, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993), pp. 804–29, quotation at p. 828.Google Scholar
2 Sommers's typology of feminisms is first laid out in her “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 2, 3 (July 1988): 97–120.Google Scholar
3 To be sure, there are some feminist theorists who are deeply sceptical about the concept of gender; see, for example, Butler, JudithGender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).Google Scholar
4 Sommers, “Philosophers against the Family,” p. 816.
5 Sommers, Christina, “The Feminist Revelation,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 8, 1 (Autumn 1990): 141–58, quotation at p. 142.Google Scholar
6 In passing, it is worth noting the way in which Sommers's claim that equity feminism is the philosophy of the feminist mainstream appears to undercut her earlier assertion that American feminism is “dominated” by gender feminists.
7 In addition to those articles cited in notes 1,2 and 5 above, see Sommers, Christina, “Do These Feminists Like Women?,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 21, 2 (Fall-Winter 1990): 66–74Google Scholar, and Sommers, Christina, “Argumentum ad Feminam,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 22, 1 (Spring 1991): 5–20.Google Scholar The latter two are part of an exchange between Sommers and Marilyn Friedman. See Friedman, Marilyn, “‘They Lived Happily Ever After’: Sommers on Women and Marriage,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 21, 2 (Fall/Winter 1990): 57–65Google Scholar, and “Does Sommers Like Women?: More on Liberalism, Gender Hierarchy, and O'Hara, Scarlett,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 21,2 (Fall-Winter 1990): 75–90.Google Scholar
8 Sommers, “Philosophers against the Family,” p. 806.
9 Ibid..
10 Sommers, “The Feminist Revelation,” p. 151.
11 Sommers, “Philosophers against the Family,” p. 812.
12 Ibid., p. 828.
13 Sommers, “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?,” p. 99.
14 Bartky, Sandra Lee, Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 7.Google Scholar
15 See MacKinnon, Catharine, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
16 It must be emphasized, however, that Foucault's influence varies from theorist to theorist and is by no means universal among the women Sommers criticizes.
17 As a matter of fact, Michael Walzer is careful to distinguish between “Foucault's political positions, the statements he has made, the articles he has written, his response to ‘events’–May '68, the prison revolts of the early seventies, the Iranian revolution, and so on,” which he does term infantile leftism, and Foucault's political theory–“his account of our everyday politics, [which] though often annoyingly presented and never wholly accurate or sufficiently nuanced, is right enough to be disturbing … [and] captures something of the reality of contemporary society (p. 53)” (in Walzer, Michael, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by Hoy, David Couzens [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], pp. 51 and 53).Google Scholar
18 See Cornell, Drucilla, Beyond Accommodation (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 3, and Deveaux, Monique, “Feminism and Empowerment: A Critical Reading of Foucault,” Feminist Studies, 20, 2 (Summer 1994): 223–47.Google Scholar
19 Marilyn Friedman, “Does Sommers Like Women?,” p. 83.
20 See Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, edited and with an Introduction by Sher, George (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), chap. 2, p. 10.Google Scholar
21 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 395Google Scholar, emphasis added. But see Babbitt, Susan E., “Feminism and Objective Interests,” in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 245–64, for an argument that Rawls does not go far enough.Google Scholar
22 Sommers, “The Feminist Revelation,” p. 146.
23 In fact, Sommers does not appear to be cognizant of any of the considerable literature in feminist legal theory or of the recent history of feminist activism in the courts. See, for example, Feminist Legal Theory, edited by Katharine, T. Bartlett and Kennedy, Rosanne (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).Google Scholar
24 See R. v. Butler [1992] 1 S.C.R. 452, in which the Supreme Court relied heavily on LEAF'S arguments to the effect that some kinds of pornography pose a threat to women's substantive equality.
25 See, for example, Belenky, Mary FieldClinchy, Blythe McVickerGoldberger, Nancy Rule and Tarule, Jill Mattuck, Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986).Google Scholar
26 The embedded quotation is from Held, Virginia, “Feminism and Epistemology: Recent Work on the Connection between Gender Knowledge,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985): 299.Google Scholar
27 To do her justice, Sommers does discuss feminist critiques of science and analytic philosophy at more length in her paper, “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?” She rightly points out that these critiques are normatively lacking: “we are not even given a vague idea of how [the particular way that women see and ‘know’ the world’… would affect the study of the natural sciences” (in ibid., p. 122). But this worry has not eluded at least one feminist epistemologist. Helen Longino writes, “although many of the most familiar feminist accounts of science have helped us to redescribe the process of knowledge (or belief) acquisition, they stop short of an adequate normative theory (Longino, Helen, “Subjects, Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science,” in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth [New York: Routledge, 1993], pp. 101–20, quotation at p. 102).Google Scholar
28 Haack, Susan, “Epistemological Reflections of an Old Feminist,” Reason Papers, 18 (1993): 31–43Google Scholar, cited in Sommers on p. 75. Readers might be surprised to hear that Haack is “one of the most respected epistemologists in the country” (Ibid..).
29 For example, Elizabeth Minnich writes, “What we [feminists] are doing, is comparable to Copernicus shattering our geo-centricity, Darwin shattering our species-centricity. We are shattering andro-centricity, and the change is as fundamental, as dangerous, as exciting” (Minnich, Elizabeth, “Friends and Critics: The Feminist Academy,” keynote address, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual GLCA Women's Studies Conference, November, 1979, quoted in Theories of Women's Studies, edited by Bowles, Gloria and Klein, Renate Duelli [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983], p. 4, cited in Sommers, “The Feminist Revelation,” p. 153).Google Scholar
30 Sommers, “The Feminist Revelation,” p. 152.
31 Sommers also devotes an entire chapter to rape research (chap. 10). Her discussion is problematic in a number of respects, but unfortunately an adequate treatment of it is beyond the scope of the present review.
32 Code, Lorraine, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 15–48, quotation at p. 31.Google Scholar
33 Sommers does say, “There is, to be sure, much interesting new scholarship on women” (p. 63). But she provides no citations for this work. Given that she is so critical of the material she does discuss, fairness would have demanded that some mention be made of the work she considers worthy. The failure to provide the relevant citations leaves the impression, intended or not, that there really is not much good feminist scholarship.
34 Sommers acknowledges this danger in the Preface. In reply she writes, “I want to underscore at the outset that I do not mean to confuse the women who work in the trenches to help the victims of true abuse and discrimination with the gender feminists whose falsehoods and exaggerations are muddying the waters of American feminism” (p. 17). Sommers“s apparent inability to understand the connections between theory and practice is staggering.
35 Sommers, “Philosophers against the Family,” p. 828. I am grateful to Marguerite Deslauriers and Paul Pietroski for comments and discussion, and to a referee for Dialogue for helpful suggestions.