[In the following review, Schiffren asserts that Who Stole Feminism? is a brilliant and informative book, but comments that Sommers fails to place feminism in a larger political context.]

Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? is a long overdue correction in the marketplace of ideas, which in recent years has been glutted with feminist cant masquerading as statistics. This book brilliantly describes the currently dominant feminism—Sommers calls it “gender feminism”—which comes largely from the network of scholars, administrators, and researchers who have wormed their way into universities. Gender feminism holds that “our society is best described as a patriarchy, a ‘male hegemony,’ … in which the dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive.” Its leaders believe that “all our institutions, from the state to the family to the grade schools, perpetuate male dominance.” Believing that, needless to say, leaves them eager to destroy or transform all of the offending institutions.

By contrast, Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at Clark University, believes that American women enjoy complete personal freedom, full legal equality, and access to economic opportunity. She does not believe women are victims, nor that there exists a conspiracy to suppress them. She even points out that during the “backlash” years of the 1980s, women gained more economic ground than in the entire postwar era before that. Younger women now earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by men of the same age, up from 69 cents in 1980. In a time of unprecedented opportunity for women, much of it hard won, she thinks it is important that we acknowledge just how much progress has been made in ensuring that women share fully in the American promise of individual rights.

But forget that progressive reality. The heart of the book is its review of the feminist propaganda that has shaped mainstream media coverage and prompted costly legislation. In the wake of the O. J. Simpson case, for instance, we have been barraged with statistics proving that domestic violence is as commonplace as, say, marriage. Many such claims first appeared at the time of the January 1993 Super Bowl, a day when feminists claimed there was a 40-percent increase in wife-beating. The media provided days of frenzied reporting, culminating in a public-service announcement from NBC right before the game, warning that wife beating is a crime. Ultimately, those pushing the 40-percent figure had no evidence to offer, yet the link between sports and violence against women persists, as recent op-eds demonstrate.

What's the truth in wife beating? The Department of Justice, after a nine-year study, estimates that approximately 626,000 women are beaten per year. Senator Joseph Biden, author of “violence against women” legislation, claims the figure is 4 million, and Time magazine reports 6 million. The National Coalition against Domestic Violence says that 50 percent of all women will be treated violently by their husbands in the course of marriage. A 1993 Harris Poll reported that each year 37 percent of married women are “emotionally abused,” and 3.9 million physically assaulted.

Sommers tracked down the leading researchers on domestic violence, who found that domestic violence has decreased in the past two decades. If 34 percent of wives reported that their husbands swore or stomped out of the room, only 2 percent reported being hit, and zero percent reported severe beatings or use of weapons. Advocates ignored distinctions between swearing, threatening, throwing objects (not at wife), pushing, hitting, severe beating, use of weapons—a very different picture indeed.

Sommers similarly deconstructs exaggerated claims of rape: The Justice Department says that 8 percent of American women will be victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetimes. Catharine MacKinnon says that half of American women will be raped. As for date rape, the leading feminist advocate claims that one in four college girls experience “date rape.” (Evaluation of the same figures by researchers unaffiliated with feminist groups suggests a rate of 3-4 percent.)

It's not just violence. A much-cited American Association of University Women study, “proving” that girls' self-esteem drops to crisis levels in adolescence, was the basis for Take Our Daughters to Work Day, yet white teenage girls get better grades and go to college in greater numbers than any other group. (The study undermines its own case in places, showing, for instance, that black males performed worst in school, despite impressively high marks for “self-esteem.”) Then there's the Wellesley report on “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” which prompted the ＄360-million Gender Equity in Education bill, despite the fact that girls now constitute a majority of college students.

Why do feminists falsify and exaggerate data to alarm women about the likelihood that they will be raped, beaten, and discriminated against? Some wish to portray the U.S. as an inherently misogynist society. As Gloria Steinem puts it, “Patriarchy requires violence, or the subliminal threat of violence, to maintain itself. … The most dangerous situation for a woman is with … a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.” Sommers also concludes that activist organizations like NOW, the Ms. Foundation, and others, rely on academic feminists to produce data that demonstrate alarming amounts of sexism to persuade the public that women need their protection. Liberal politicians need harms about which to be outraged, and which they can rectify with legislation. A media sympathetic to claims of oppression and given to liberal advocacy has no reason not to print shocking, if unsubstantiated, figures. Like many liberal causes that began in a sincere attempt to redress injustice, feminism has become a racket.

Sommers, trained in classical philosophy, takes an interest in the alternative universe of feminist epistemology. Early on she points out that because women have been excluded from the creative roles in culture and civilization until recently, Western civilization is largely a male creation. Knowing that, a woman has two choices: she can use her chance to join men in studying the best of the past and creating the future; or she can reject Western civilization as “androcentric” and “move to reconstruct the knowledge base.”

This latter choice has led to the growth of “gynocentric” history, which devalues the exceptional achievements of elite men, placing the work of Shakespeare and Michelangelo on par with female diarists or weavers of cloth, for instance. Feminist epistemologists criticize such “phallocentric” constructs as objectivity, logic, rationality, precision, and science. These modes of thought are “bourgeois, elitist and repressive.” In their place, feminists wish to introduce “emotionality—love, rage, anxiety, eroticism—into intellect.” They claim that women, not to mention minorities, think “laterally, not vertically.” Such feminism, of course, sounds like a parody of a misogynist's diatribe against female intellectual ability.

Sommers also transcribes, in malicious deadpan, the infantile behavior on display at feminist gatherings. Consider the National Women's Studies Association conference, where Phyllis, a panelist from the Mohawk nation, appeared at the end of a break waving animal puppets, to say, “Teddy and his friend say it's time to go back inside.” Phyllis then leads the meeting of distinguished feminist scholars in “a big self-hug.” After a bleak speech by Eleanor Smeal, the scholars are invited to sing a little song to cheer up.

(The New York Times Book Review chose a participant in that conference—the radical University of Pennsylvania professor Nina Auerbach—to review Sommers's book, in which Auerbach is severely and directly criticized twice, though not by name. The Times has a strict policy of not allowing people with a personal interest in a book to review it. After the fact Auerbach simply denied knowing that Sommers was referring to her—a disclaimer that is simply not believable to anyone who bothers to read the relevant passages.)

In her preface, Sommers explains that she wrote this book as “a feminist who doesn't like what feminism has become.” In contrast to the bad gender feminists, she is an “equity feminist.” Equity feminism, she explains, is the true heir of the classical liberal tradition that produced the original feminism of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, where women first organized politically to demand legal equality. It asks only that women be given an equal chance to prove themselves. Equal education, the vote, equal employment opportunity, access to political power—yes. But no outcomes, no epistemology, no sexual politics.

Sommers is free to call herself an equity feminist. Feminism's sharpest critics—like Wendy Kaminer, or Jean Bethke-Elstain—call themselves hyphenated feminists of some sort: libertarian, contrarian, etc. Even the confused Naomi Wolf, who gained fame as a victim feminist, sought to distance herself from gender feminism in her last book, and called herself a “power feminist.” In the world of political reality, however, there is only one feminism, and it is the gender feminism Sommers describes in such horrifying detail. It is gender feminism that pervades the organizations—NOW, NARAL, AAUW, and a host of others. Gender feminists have the power. They have the zealots. And they have the funding. How many legions have the equity feminists?

Sommers repeats the widely circulated 1992 poll data that reported that 63 percent of American women do not wish to be identified as feminists. Only 16 percent of college women were willing to be so identified. Sommers attributes this disdain to the “anger and resentfulness” and the man-hating of the gender feminism that has taken over feminist rhetoric and institutions.

Maybe. But Sommers elsewhere provides a more likely reason that women do not feel the need to organize and demand their rights: They already have them. Early feminists fought big battles—which in their time were considered extremely radical and not wholesome at all. Because they won them American women have full legal equality, equal access to education, the vote, the right to hold office, equal economic opportunity, and absolute sexual autonomy, including the right to abortion. There are still problems in women's lives, of course, but the war is over and the troops have gone home. We don't need a standing feminist movement.

If many elite women, like Sommers, fail to realize this, it is partly due to a semantic problem. In New Class circles, the word “feminism” remains wholly positive, interchangeable with “pro-woman.” Anyone who doesn't call herself a feminist may be accused of supporting repression, passivity, and dependence—and be peremptorily dismissed. What precisely does it mean for Sommers to insist that she is a feminist, of the pure faith? It is a little bit like those American Communists who, after learning the truth about Stalin, still clung to the notion that Communism itself was good, it had just “never been tried.”

Perhaps this would be clearer had Sommers placed feminism—the real-world, manifest feminism she examines, not the long-dead wholesome kind she espouses—in its larger political context. It is not an accident that feminism has become the anti-American, anti-religious, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-male movement that Sommers describes. Nor is it an accident that this movement has flowered in the universities. In fact, gender feminism is part of the Marxian politics that swept American culture in the 1960s. In the still larger political context—the “culture war” being played out in Hollywood, Congress, the public schools, the universities, and every other important institution in society—feminism is on the side of revolution.

For Sommers to illustrate so clearly that organized feminism is a hollow movement, yet to declare herself firmly a feminist bespeaks a certain political naïveté. Her book was funded by conservative foundations; her agents specialize in conservative authors; and National Review published an excerpt. Conservatives are generally too contemptuous of feminism to immerse themselves in feminism, which partly explains why they have been so ineffective in combating it.

Nonetheless, Who Stole Feminism? amounts to a major attack in the culture war. It will be interesting to see in what direction Sommers's political views evolve as she comes to understand the magnitude of the fight she has joined.