[In the following review, Manne asserts that Who Stole Feminism? is an important book, and that Sommers is an important voice in liberal feminism. Manne, however, argues that Sommers's distinction between “equity feminism” and “gender feminism” is overly simplistic.]

If the Chinese communists' route to political revolution was via The Long March, in my more mischievous moments I sometimes think that feminism's path to social revolution might be described as The Long Whinge. As a young and politically curious student (I had surveyed the lot of women under the ancien regime of gender relations and found that it did not entirely appeal) I once attended a women's liberation conference. I sat through session after session where speakers displayed their new-found rage to foot-stamping approval and where dissidents were howled down. A sociologist I knew had unwisely ventured forth to give a paper and I noticed with interest that her face was scrubbed bare of its usual make-up and that she wore uncharacteristically baggy clothes. She need not have bothered with such an elaborate presentation of self, since she was denounced anyhow from the podium as a bourgeois sociologist, an Uncle Tom of male hegemony who had committed some kind of thought crime, the nature of which I have long since forgotten.

These thoughts were aroused by reading Christina Hoff Sommers' important new book Who Stole Feminism? Hoff Sommers describes herself as an old-fashioned equity feminist, as part of the liberal tradition which includes John Stuart Mill, the first-wave feminism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and a minority of second-wave “mainstream” feminists like Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan. The distinguishing characteristic of equity feminism, according to Hoff Sommers, was to utilise Enlightenment principles of individual justice to gain equal rights under the law: “We ask no better laws than those you have made for yourselves. We need no other protection than that which your present laws secure to you” (Elizabeth Cady Stanton).

Hoff Sommers is unequivocally in support of women's emancipation, but opposed to those she describes as gender feminists. Gender feminists, she argues, are subverting liberal feminism with a new, rancorous doctrine which believes women are all victims, one way or another, of male hegemony, “a sex/gender system in which the dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive”. A number of distinguished intellectuals—Iris Murdoch, Agnes Heller, Martha Nussbaum and Christina Stead—while situated within the project of women's emancipation, nonetheless have been critical of aspects of modern feminism. There are now also intelligent dissidents within feminism—Katie Roiphe's critique of the sexual McCarthyism in the campus panic over date rape, and the rebellion of the disobedient dionysian Camille Paglia against feminism's new puritanism. Hoff Sommers is clearly sympathetic to these dissidents, and offers much needed common sense—whether defending the right of women to swoon, if they wish, over Rhett Butler, or ironising the tendency to over-dramatise women's fragility in the face of the more trivial examples of sexual harassment.

I have long thought that Christopher Lasch's wonderful phrase describing Martin Luther King's movement—their “spiritual discipline against resentment”—was true of the first-wave feminists but throws an unflattering light on some second-wave feminism. Hoff Sommers' contribution is cool, clear and crisp, but is also unusually good humoured, being remarkably free of the rancour she identifies as one of the hallmarks of a variety of feminism which has elevated the emotion of resentment to the status of a pre-eminent political virtue. She gives witty and devastating descriptions of conferences with rage, anger and “ouch” sessions where privileged and successful women, who are in fact part of a new elite, bemoan their fate under the totalitarian regime of patriarchy. The deep pleasures of victimhood, it seems, are not to be given up lightly. Carolyn Heilbrun, holder of a prestigious chair in Columbia's English department, is quoted as saying, “In life, as in fiction, women who speak out usually end up punished or dead. I'm lucky to escape with my pension and a year of leave.” In a movement often preoccupied, like the rest of modern society, with self-esteem, it is interesting to notice the inexorable rise of self-pity.

As part of this war, according to Hoff Sommers, the gender feminists disseminate atrocity stories, which are designed to gather not only recruits but also financial and institutional help for their cause. Sommers may be an academic philosopher, but she is also a natural sleuth, and part of her book is devoted to a determined debunking, in the style of an investigative journalist, of certain atrocity stories. The story that Superbowl Sunday results in a forty per cent increase in domestic violence is revealed as false. A report that battery is now responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined turns out to be a fabrication, never corrected, and cited in the press all over America. The figure in Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth of 150,000 women dying each year of anorexia, which she likens to the Holocaust (“women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant … as Jews identify the death camps”) is exposed as a simple confusion of the number of sufferers with the number of deaths. The actual death toll in 1991 was fifty-four. Many of these figures have made their way into college textbooks and remain uncorrected. The story of the aetiology of these atrocity stories is equally interesting, with a scarifying portrait of the uses and abuses of social science by advocacy scholarship.

Hoff Sommers also gives a critique of the transformationist agenda in the academy, where a new gynocentric epistemology is emerging, claiming everything from an innate moral superiority of women in the philosophy of Carol Gilligan (uncomfortably echoing the old male supremacist arguments) to the discovery by gender feminism of a new female way of knowing which ranks with the breakthroughs of Copernicus and Darwin. There is a kind of anti-intellectualism and New Age kookiness which Hoff Sommers exposes, such as when the historian Gerda Lerner asserts that patriarchal knowledge teaches women that sound thought must exclude feeling: “Thus they [women] have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast?” (Oh, good grief!) Much of the thought revealed here is so highly charged with emotion, so lacking in coolness, analytic clarity or objectivity, so utterly soggy as to fulfil the worst prejudices of a misogynist.

Most importantly Hoff Sommers argues that the new epistemologies are short-changing young women, who are seeking the kind of education that most fits them for the task Hannah Arendt described as renewing the common world. This sense is expressed with great clarity by Iris Murdoch:

Men “created culture” because they were free to do so, and women were treated as inferior and made to believe that they were. Now free women must join the human world of work and creation on an equal footing and be everywhere in art, science, business, politics … However, to lay claim in this battle to female ethics, female criticism, female knowledge … is to set up a new female ghetto … “Women's” Studies can mean that women are led to read mediocre or peripheral books by women rather than the great books of humanity in general … Such cults can also waste the time of young people who may be reading all the latest books on feminism instead of studying the difficult and important things that belong to the culture of humanity.

Hoff Sommers has some interesting observations to make about the influence of gender feminism on the writing of history. Like John Hirst in last month's Quadrant, she recognises that traditional mainstream history has benefited from the contributions to social history not only of women's history, but also of the more general project of “history from below”. Her argument here, however, is that much of the redressing of certain imbalances in the focus of history has already occurred over the last twenty years, and more importantly, there are certain limits to this project. She acknowledges the ways in which women have often been excluded from the realm of the public commensurate with their talents, and accepts that women of distinction have sometimes been overlooked. But like John Hirst, Hoff Sommers makes the commonsense point that “lamentable as this may be, there is simply no honest way of writing women back into the historical narrative in a way that depicts them as movers and shakers of equal importance to men”.

The last chapter, “The Gender Wardens”, goes to the heart of what Hoff Sommers sees as a kind of illiberal authoritarianism at the heart of gender feminism which sees itself as an enlightened vanguard, and the kind of condescension implicit in the attitudes to their more “retrograde” sisters (ordinary women), who persist in wanting the wrong thing (relationships with men, looking after young children). Her argument is that once the institutional barriers have been removed to women's participation in the world of work and the public realm, then they must be free to exercise their autonomy in whatever way they see fit, including living, if they wish, the life of a traditional Hasidic woman, or any other religion for that matter. In sum, they must be free to choose not to exercise those rights if they wish.

It is this point that reveals what for me is an interesting tension within not only gender feminism, but also equity feminism. It is the tension between one of the movement's central values—autonomy—and the intolerance found in most transformative social movements. Simply put, what does the movement do with women who, like many of my friends, describe themselves as “very strong feminists” and then utilise their autonomy to stay home when their children are young? Say that all choices are equal but some are more equal than others? Argue for choice in women's lives only to reveal there is a right choice and a wrong one? The discussion between Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir here is revealing. Betty Friedan once told de Beauvoir that she believed women should have the choice to stay home to raise their children if that is what they wished. De Beauvoir's answer is both instructive and sinister: “No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorised to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

This brings me to an underlying analytic weakness in the book. Hoff Sommers' division of feminism into equity (good) and gender (bad) feminism is too simplistic. I think the real division is between a moderate and an ideologically extreme version of both. De Beauvoir was not part of a new wave of gynocentric epistemologists, but simply an extreme exponent of the variety of equity feminism which saw the dismantling of all traditional sex roles as the key to the creation of an androgynous utopia. Many second-wave feminists were really simply more radical equity feminists. In The Feminine Mystique, equity feminist Betty Friedan likens the suburban housewife to a prisoner in a concentration camp, revealing a continuity of hyperbole with gender feminism.

Secondly, one might look beyond the falsity and foolishness Hoff Sommers so vividly portrays, to see an echo of something that is true in parts of what is really an emerging third wave of feminism that is lacking in equity feminism. This is simply the thought that without accepting the legitimacy of a social hierarchy between men and women, and acknowledging the importance of equity feminism in opening up the realms of work and the public to women, there may be areas of our lives—in our creatureliness—where differences matter. One is more likely to gain affirmation of the deep connectedness women might feel with their children from the more recent “feminism of difference”, for example, than from equity feminism. Hoff Sommers simply avoids the whole question, for example, of the problems of institutional childcare. Similarly, it is gender feminists, along with conservatives, who have grasped the implications of the darker aspects of male sexuality revealed most dramatically by the market for violent misogynist pornography. There is in sexual libertarianism, and perhaps in the optimistic liberalism of Hoff Sommers, a failure of imagination in dealing with a landscape which includes American Psycho and snuff movies.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her review of Who Stole Feminism? in the TLS, made the very necessary point that treating women as completely the same as men may bring injustice. There is an impulse in equity feminism to always treat men and women as identical, with some even arguing against special workforce provisions for pregnancy or parental leave. To treat women as exactly the same as men during the reproductive years may well be unjust. There came to my mind too, the terrible consequences for those women who, having lived the traditional life pattern, found themselves abandoned and poverty-stricken with children to support as a result of the liberalisation of divorce law. Some ideological equity feminists insisted that they be treated as economic equals after divorce, when patently they were not.

The question of how far the developments described in Who Stole Feminism? are rife in Australia is an interesting one, and reveals that Hoff Sommers' portrait of second-wave feminism as generally synonymous with “gender feminism” is not always accurate. There have been in Australian feminism examples of de Beauvoirian illiberalism. A feminist-influenced family policy has been hostile to women spending any time out of the paid workforce, best illustrated by Eva Cox's oft-expressed view that women struggling on one income to look after small children “expect to be kept in comfort serving their husbands more than anyone else, at the expense of the taxpayer”. Yet there is evidence that this may be changing. Anne Summers, perhaps the most impressive of Australia's second-wave feminists, in a recent Four Corners program on feminism conceded that while for obvious historical reasons the women's movement had first concentrated on removing workforce barriers, there was now a need to pay attention to the needs of women at home. She also listened respectfully while the Adelaide campaigner for financial justice for women at home, Carol Carroll, spoke of the importance of child-rearing. Beatrice Faust has resisted the hysterical and panic-stricken atmosphere of the Age's “War against Women” and also in Backlash Balderdash has developed her own critique of “wimp” (gender) feminists like Naomi Wolf.

Although some aspects of the American experience, as with multiculturalism, have been reproduced here, it is important to distinguish between the two political cultures. Not only was the Australian variant dominated by an extremely pragmatic group with a penchant for utilising particularly the bureaucracy for effecting change, but there is too, perhaps, something in the Australian temper—maybe even indolence—which seems to soften some of the ideological excesses so evident in America. As with McCarthyism in the Cold War, our experience of sexual McCarthyism is different.

Further, although I admire the political spirit of tolerance of first-wave feminism, the fact is that it was not nearly as politically successful as its more radical counterpart. At the time second-wave feminism emerged, there were still all kinds of cultural contradictions affecting women as yet unresolved. One emerged from the collision of one of the central values implicit in traditional roles for women—renunciation of self—and the command of equal education—to develop one's talents. Was it ever possible to sustain the idea that a woman might spend the first part of her life discovering and developing her talents, but that upon marriage she must renounce all worldly ambition? Another contradiction arose from the clash between the traditional perception that a woman's domain was the private realm, and the extension of the social contract to include women (by giving them the vote). Was it possible to sustain forever the notion that in a society which derives its legitimacy from extending certain rights—such as participation in the public realm—equally to all of its citizens, that women should confine their contribution to the private realm?

It was inevitable, in a world where one of the radical anti-war male activists could respond to women's desire to have an equal decision-making capacity by jeering “The only good position for a woman is prone”, that some kind of social movement bent on transformation would emerge. Within that diverse social movement, like the socialist movement which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, there are the equivalent of social democrats, anarchist socialists and, more ominously, Bolsheviks, who not only felt that the end justified the means, but elevated one political value—the pursuit of economic equality—above all others, including the rule of law, liberty and tolerance. Within the social revolution initiated by feminism, there are those for whom the value of gender equality obliterates all other political values. But if the movement has its Bolsheviks, it also has its social democrats. Feminism needs fearless yet civil voices like Christina Hoff Sommers. She expresses a principled and moderate liberal feminism in a clear challenge to those illiberal ideologues, who, in wanting freedom for themselves, seek to impose conformity and obedience upon everyone else.