Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. - book reviews

National Review, July 11, 1994 by Mary Lefkowitz

Twenty-five years ago women who wanted to become academics had to overcome the hostility and disbelief of men. In my field (Classics), the Enemy consisted mainly of sympathetic male professors who were willing to encourage female graduate students, but only to the point of getting a degree. When I got my PhD, my thesis advisor asked me why I didn't settle down and have children (I should add that I was already married). He meant this advice kindly, but of course I understood it as a veiled suggestion that my work wasn't really good enough to remain in the field. Fortunately the women professors I had worked with in my undergraduate years at Wellesley had a different opinion, and I listened to them. To me, feminism meant equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work, recognition that a woman could do a job as well as a man.

But now "equity feminists" like me have themselves become the Enemy of other feminists who reject the values that we fought for. These women disparage the methods and content of traditional scholarship, arguing that it "privileges" works by propertied European males. They also criticize approaches employed in these works, such as logic and deductive reasoning. Instead, the new feminists advocate alternative ways of understanding or looking at the world, such as intuition. They suggest that if these other methods were used, students and eventually all of us would perceive a different and potentially better kind of reality.

As Christina Hoff Sommers observes in her new book, Who Stole Feminism?, the women academics who advocate these views do not seem to have noticed that their notions about women's otherness are virtually the same as those that were used for centuries by men to keep women in their "place." By emphasizing the differences between the genders (in thought processes, if in no other ways), those "gender feminists" are unwittingly setting in motion a process that will keep women from becoming the leading thinkers and scientists in our society.

If the gender feminists were concerned only with the education of women, there would be adequate reason to complain. But in fact their views are being widely adopted, not just by other gender feminists but by academics generally. If they set the agenda, everyone will be affected. The gender feminists want to change the very meaning of education for all students, male and female. Rather than be taught how to evaluate evidence and describe it objectively, students are to be instructed in the ills of society, such as the oppression of women and minority groups. Students cannot be left to decide for themselves whether or not to bring about some improvement - indeed, without the tools of analytic reasoning and logic it will become increasingly difficult for them to do so. Instead, students will use their time at universities to blame and to punish the groups responsible for the inequities described in their courses of study.

The trouble with this scenario is that it is no longer hypothetical, at least for some students, at some universities, some of the time. Hence this excellent new book, which everyone interested in the subject ought to read, even if he is prepared to dislike it. Mrs. Sommers describes what is going on, and suggests why it ought to stop. Her mode of discourse is argument and persuasion, not violence or revolution. She asks hard questions and examines the evidence. The basic issues were described some time ago by (dare we admit it?) Socrates: Can virtue be taught? What is virtue? How can we know it? In joining battle with the gender feminists, Mrs. Sommers puts her old-fashioned training as a philosopher to good use. (She is a professor of philosophy at Clark University.) She was taught to think for herself, rather than simply to accept what she is told.

The book begins with a description of a convention that featured speeches by leading feminists about "ouch" experiences stemming from racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, lookism. The audience was encouraged to return from a coffee break by a woman holding teddy-bear and dog puppets: "Teddy and his friend say it's time to go back inside." It's easy to laugh at such silly infantilizing of women, and to assume that this conference represents an extreme swing of the feminist pendulum. One almost sympathizes with the feminist philosopher who said she felt "uncomfortable" because she knew what Mrs. Sommers would think and write about all this.

Missing from this conference, and others that Mrs. Sommers attended in the course of writing this book, is the sense of give-and-take most academics are used to from conventional academic gatherings, where respondents criticize papers, rather than applaud them, and serious questions, sometimes quite hostile, are raised by members of the audience. As Mrs. Sommers observes, "gender feminists do not relish criticism." That made me realize that a conference I attended years ago was not unique: the principal speaker at one session, the feminist historian Gerda Lerner, was offended that I had been chosen by the organizing committee to comment on her paper. She had wanted to pick her own respondents.