In 1995, Christina Hoff Sommers published Who Stole Feminism : How Women Have Betrayed Women. It remains the most frightening book since Huxley’s Brave New World and should be required reading in every highschool, just as the other was in my day. We’ll only know the danger has passed when it is. What distinguishes Who Stole Feminism from previous books that looked at where we’re headed is what makes it even more frightening. It’s not fiction. It’s five years of thorough research that reports what is happening now. Christina Hoff Sommers is a scholar in moral theory at Clark University, Boston, and active in human rights for decades. She also still calls herself a feminist, identifying with it from when it stood for social progress and before it became the reactionary force of today. To distinguish the two she calls herself and those still committed to fairness, “equity feminists” (as in social equality), and what took over feminism in the 1980s, “gender feminists” (women first and only). On one hand are the numerous assertions of female victimization she investigates that have been used to control the public with fear: rule of thumb, girls short-changed in education, low female teen self-esteem, domestic violence, 1 in 4 college girls raped, backlash, Abuse Bowel, and even anorexia. We follow her adventures in discovering their origins, then the experts and studies that show that the truth is very different from these popular social myths. It is a powerful lesson in how we, the public, are easily controlled with emotion. Push the right buttons and facts loose all meaning. Emotional and moral bullying are more effective than reason, even better than physical intimidation. But more important and more startling is what she knows from inside both the women’s movement and academia. Sommers takes us to conferences of feminist scholars where the focus is to be evangelically “engaged and enraged,” whether there‘s anything to be enraged about or not. To Women’s Studies classes whose purpose, according to Prof. Joyce Trebilcot, is “persuading students that women are oppressed” so they have something to be enraged about, and where the professor-recruiter identifies with her gender, not as an individual member of humanity. From Alison Jaggar’s, “the old ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy are insufficient,” to Kate Millett defining everything as Sexual Politics, to Marilyn Friedman insisting that the majority of women’s opinions on everything, when different from hers, should be ignored as patriarchally forced. It seems women can’t think for themselves. These women really believe this and are given wide scope. Even non-feminists accept much of it as credible. Is this extreme left wing or right? This is not some rag-tag fringe group. The above quoted women and their sisters are professors and politically ambitious, whose rally-conferences are sponsored by major foundations. They ensure new faculty applicants are asked, “How has feminist scholarship effected your work?”, target all social, scientific, academic, and economic life and do very well at it. For instance, the “transformation [of curriculum] movement,” underway at all levels of education, says that if 5% of historical figures are women, 50% of those studied must be women and treated as though they had the same impact as men. Because, as Elizabeth Fee says, “Knowledge was created as an act of aggression.” Did you know that about knowledge? Again, this is not some fringe group. They are mainstream and generally supported. What is happening at your child’s school? Who Stole Feminism is an important study of how any social movement that sees dominance in others can only seek it for themself. It will remain a classic for future generations. If not, no one stopped them. ©2007 KC Wilson To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons. - Marilyn French
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