[In the following review, English asserts that the greatest strength of Who Stole Feminism? is Sommers's critical reporting, commenting that her analysis of feminism is unconvincing.]

Christine Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University and well-published conservative, is itching for a fight. One will be necessary, she tells us, in order to combat the current crop of feminist leaders, the doctrinaire “gender feminists,” and replace them with fair-minded “equity feminists” like herself.

Sommers's voice is brashly confrontational; her approach is both investigative and polemical. The investigative part ought to stimulate an invigorating debate, provoking passionate defenses as well as some retractions and rethinking. In contrast, her analysis of how things went wrong is breathless and overwrought. But one need not accept her politics to appreciate the best of her book: its critical reporting.

According to Sommers, the media are rife with “feminist fictions” ready for debunking. We accompany her odyssey through footnotes, computer searches and phone tag with “experts” as she pursues suspected factoids back to original researchers, triumphantly nabbing them as they exclaim, “That's not true!” “I was misquoted!” and even “Do you think we have one of these myth things here?” Here are some of her claims:

• • In the bestselling The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf reports that more than 150,000 women a year are dying in an epidemic of anorexia. The correct figure is less than 100.
• • The American Association of University Women claims that there is a crisis of self-esteem among adolescent girls. Sommers says the research methodology is flawed, and overall girls are doing well relative to boys, while boys have higher suicide rates.
• • A Ms. Foundation-sponsored survey reported very high rates of date-rape on campus. The figures are contradicted by surveys that Sommers says are far more credible. (Furthermore, Sommers contends, rape is completely misconstrued by feminists as a crime of misogyny, rather than as an act of violence perpetrated primarily by lower-class criminals.)

Is Sommers's own research believable? In some cases she has scored direct hits; in others she merely seems to discount work she disagrees with. In evidence of her own bias, she portrays women's studies conferences as places where participants hug teddy bears, and claims that campus feminists refer to women who haven't been raped yet as “potential survivors.” (A footnote reveals that her source for this last bit is an anecdote reported in The Washington Times.)

In response, some commentators will denounce her book as no more than anti-feminist backlash. Others may see her challenge as an opportunity to sort out the truth in the public interest. Facts do matter. Feminists should welcome any valid corrections of research. All ideologies—and feminism can be quite ideological—are subject to corruption in the name of the cause. The viability of feminist ideas is best tested by the ability of its adherents to scrutinize their own thinking. Sommers has not so much succeeded in debunking feminist arguments as in re-opening them for further evidence and debate.

While feminists organize their rebuttals, conservatives will feast on Sommers's repast. Unlike Katie Roiphe or Camille Paglia, Sommers is the sort of woman the political right can completely uphold. Roiphe scared off conservatives with her open yearning for a return to the wild, promiscuous sex of the '60s, as well as her cold disdain even for women who really were raped. Camille Paglia repelled potential conservative allies when she challenged them to embrace her—along with the homosexuals, rebels, artists and rock ‘n’ rollers who are her psychic entourage. Sommers is safe for Republicans. Indeed, she's a godsend. Her feminism consists in celebrating what women have achieved, and all the wonderful men who made it possible. To Sommers, if the glass is not quite running over, it is certainly close to full.

In all her fact-finding, however, Sommers seems to lose track of a simple reality: Even if there is some flawed feminist research, more conservative studies still point to severe problems. Detonating errors is valuable in itself, but it is unlikely to gather converts to Sommers's underlying philosophy that women are now entirely “free creatures.”

The errors Sommers found cause her to allege an intentional distortion of the truth in a concerted effort to dupe American women and work them up into revolutionary fervor. The responsible zealots include a grab-bag of well-known names: Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Catherine MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrun and many more.

What Sommers prefers to miss is this: These leaders are not in fact in charge of the women's movement, which is uncontrolled and unplanned, arising from deep-seated social and economic trends. If our society is as free and democratic as Sommers says it is, the movement cannot be “stolen” or even “betrayed” by a handful of scholars and writers, unless she conceives of all women as brainless sheep.

The root question is whether women want equality with men as they are, in the world men have shaped, or if women seek change in that world as well as in male/female relations. In light of this underlying issue, it was revealing that the cover of the June edition of the National Review featured an excerpt from Who Stole Feminism? But Sommers's text was altered, and each feminist quoted as Miss rather than Ms., as if actually printing the word Ms. would send a black cat scampering across William F. Buckley's path. A small point, perhaps, but a clue as to the conservative's own version of “politically correct.”

Sommers directly addresses the root issue of traditional masculinity and femininity, striking an ostentatiously girlish pose. Strangely, for a book that started out to be all about facts, statistics, and surveys, Sommers ends with a lengthy evocation of the bliss that awaits Scarlett O'Hara as she is carried upstairs to be “ravished, not raped” by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Here Sommers reveals what is perhaps her deepest fear—that feminists would banish that dreamy world where women are women and men are men: “Women who interpret sexual domination as pleasurable will then be few and far between and Scarlett, alas, will be out of style.”

Readers who have been taking her seriously up to this point may be understandably perplexed by Sommers's worries. Can this be what the deeper anxiety is all about? If so, perhaps all this needs is assurance that, after the revolution, romantic love will remain a protected right among consenting adults.