'Radical Feminism Destroying the Movement'

Christina Hoff Sommers Speaks at UMass

By Izzy Lyman
April 3, 2002

"Radical feminism is destroying the movement," said Christina Hoff Sommers, a former Clark University philosophy professor who spoke at the Campus Center of UMass/Amherst.

"We need a women's movement that is grounded in common sense and sound scholarship," she said.

A leading opponent of hard-line feminism, Sommers said that fewer and fewer females identify themselves as feminists, because they have come to consider the women's movement as the domain of "man-hating and male-bashing" militants.

Speaking on "The Death of the Feminist Movement," Sommers criticized the lack of intellectual diversity that exists in the movement, since women who espouse a "far left" ideology are the ones driving the debate, especially in the women's studies programs of many college campuses. Sommers lamented that these programs appeal to students "eager to believe the worst about men" who "only hear conservative views caricatured."

Conservative and libertarian viewpoints are indeed nonexistent among the core courses offered in the UMass women's studies department. During the 2002 spring semester, for example, the undergraduate course schedule includes such esoteric choices as "Agency, Resistance and Gender Violence in the Caribbean Development;" "The Social Construction of Whiteness and Women" and "Gender Politics of the Muslim World in Mass Media."

Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., is the author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. A former liberal, Sommers has been an outspoken critic of left-wing advocacy organizations, like the Ms. Foundation and the American Association of University Women, for promoting sloppy research that blames male power and masculinity for society's ills.

Citing one such example, she explained that radical feminists claim that thirty percent of women who seek care in emergency rooms do so because they have been involved in a domestic violence altercation. Sommers said that statistics culled from the Department of Justice tell another story: Less than one percent of women visit emergency rooms because a boyfriend or husband has beaten them.

"How are women helped by these bogus statistics?" she asked.

Sommers' quest to impose balance into a heated debate, the thesis of which seems to be "women are from Venus, and men are from hell," has earned her harsh rebukes from the feminist establishment. Gloria Steinem has derided her as "the Clarence Thomas of the feminist movement." And Patricia Ireland dubs dissidents like Sommers "the women who walked through the doors of opportunity that feminists kicked open." Sommers, however, remains upbeat.

Injecting a note of humor into her talk, which was hosted by the Republican Club, Sommers noted that schools, like the University of Massachusetts, provide a habitat for endangered species like Marxist economists and gender feminists. (Like the woman who insisted on being identified as the Lexington High School princessipal, instead of principal.)

"Some ideas are so ridiculous," said Sommers, quoting George Orwell, "only an intellectual could believe them."

Christopher Carlozzi, a UMass student and the publisher of The Minuteman, deemed Sommers' presentation a success. "Women and men alike got to hear about the troubling problems in women's studies departments. Hopefully, (they) walked away with some solutions to the problems," he said.