Who Stole Feminism?

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers Touchstone (1994). 

Traditional Feminists

The author talks about two kinds of feminists, which she calls “equity feminists” and “gender feminists”. Equity feminists are the traditional activists who achieved women’s suffrage, ownership and inheritance of property, equality before the law with respect to divorce and child custody, and abortion rights.

Gender Feminists

Gender feminists are what we would now call Cultural Marxists, although that term was not in vogue when the author wrote this book back in the 1990s. 

Transforming Education

The gender feminists have tried to create a transformation of higher education to promote a greater role for female achievers, even if that requires devoting much of the curriculum to women of mediocre achievement. The gender feminists criticize reason as masculine, and they resent high achievers in general, regardless of the sex. The author discusses quite a few women who are promoting this curriculum transformation:

• Jessie Bernard

• Susan Faludi

• Ann Ferguson

• Sandra Harding

• Carolyn Heilbrun

• Alison Jaggar

• Gerda Lerner

• Catherine McKinnon

• Peggy MacIntosh

• Elizabeth Minnich

• Caryn McTighe Musil

• Catharine Stimpson

• Naomi Wolff

Opponents

She also discusses some opponents of this curriculum transformation:

• Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

• Mary Lefkowitz

• Doris Lessing

• Iris Murdoch

• Cynthia Ozick

• Camille Paglia

• Katie Roiphe

Confusion

Another issue that bedevils gender feminists is that they often get their facts wrong. She presents three examples:

• Confusing incidence of suffering from anorexia with incidence of dying from anorexia

• Confusing how often babies are screened for birth defects with how often babies have birth defects

• Domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday

The Left Has a Point

The gender feminists have, however, a second agenda, which is not so easy to dismiss. Namely, broadening, so to speak, history to include activities that women specialize in, such as having and raising children.