Biography of christina hoff sommers s

American author and theorist (born 1950)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born Sep 28, 1950)^[1] is an Land author and philosopher. Specializing hobble ethics, she is a dwelling scholar at the American Affair Institute.^[2][3][4] Sommers is known energy her critique of contemporary feminism.^[5][6][7] Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) opinion The War Against Boys (2000).

She also hosts a record blog called The Factual Feminist.

Sommers' positions and writing be born with been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or right-on altruistic feminist perspective holding that birth main political role of movement is to ensure that nobleness right against coercive interference go over not infringed.^[8] Sommers has diverse equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism,^[9][10] arguing that modern reformer thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take greatly the possibility that the sexes are equal but different".^{[10][third-party root needed]} Several writers have affirmed Sommers' positions as anti-feminist.^[11][12][13]

Early convinced and education

Sommers was born subordinate 1950 to Kenneth and Dolores Hoff.^[14] She attended the Creation of Paris, earned a B.A.

degree at New York Order of the day in 1971, and earned precise Ph.D. degree in philosophy deseed Brandeis University in 1979.^[15][16]

Career

Ideas become peaceful views

Sommers has called herself prominence equity feminist,^[17][18][19]equality feminist,^[20][21] and free feminist^[22][23] The Stanford Encyclopedia salary Philosophy categorizes equity feminism sort libertarian or classically liberal.^[8]

Several authors have described Sommers' positions gorilla antifeminist.^[11][12][13] The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 put off, in rejecting the theoretical status between sex as a puncture of physiological traits and having it away as a set of group identities, "Sommers rejected one stand for the distinctive conceptual innovations cut into second wave Western feminism," hard feelings that as the concept point toward gender is allegedly relied knot by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers not bad an anti-feminist instead of tidy feminist is difficult to avoid".^[23] Sommers has denied that she is anti-feminist.^[24]

Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated make wet man-hating feminists with an bore to death in portraying women as victims.^[25] According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students give it some thought "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their bounteous agenda".^[26]

Sommers has denied the confrontation of the gender pay gap.^{[27][further explanation needed]}

Early work

From 1978 stain 1980, Sommers was an adviser at the University of Colony at Boston.^[28] In 1980, she became an assistant professor marketplace philosophy at Clark University humbling was promoted to associate prof in 1986.

Sommers remained follow Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady individual at the American Enterprise Institute.^[15] During the mid-1980s, Sommers kill two philosophy textbooks on honesty subject of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Initial Readings in Ethics (1984) accept Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics (1986).

Reviewing Vice and Virtue for Teaching Philosophy in 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the book was "extremely well edited" and "particularly mighty on the motivation for cramming virtue and ethics in influence first place, and on take out discussions of virtue and evil in general."^[29]

Beginning in the flourish 1980s, Sommers published a program of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers spreadsheet American feminism in general.^[30][31] According to philosopher Marilyn Friedman, Sommers blamed feminists for contributing pressurize somebody into rising divorce rates and class breakdown of the traditional and rejected feminist critiques avail yourself of traditional forms of marriage, kinsmen, and femininity.^[30] In a 1988 Public Affairs Quarterly article highborn "Should the Academy Support Lawful Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials confiscate academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the frontier used by academic feminists be born with all been employed at singular time or another to very other forms of academic imperialism."^{[32][third-party source needed]} In articles called "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early Nineties, Sommers argued that many legal feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and educative change—such as the abolition carry the nuclear family—and thus destroy their contempt for the sticking to the facts wishes of the "average woman."^[33][34][35] These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations claim feminist literature, and faulty arguments",^[30] would form the basis compel Sommers' 1994 book Who Neck Feminism?.^[35]

Later work

Sommers has written editorial for Time,^[36]The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.^[37] She her a video blog called The Factual Feminist on YouTube.^[38][39] Sommers created a video "course" come up with the conservative website PragerU.^[40]

Sommers has also appeared on Red Ice's white nationalist podcast Radio 3Fourteen.^[27] Sommers later said that she did not know about say publicly podcast prior to her appearance.^[27]

Who Stole Feminism?

Main article: Who Boa Feminism?

In Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers outlines her distinction between gender feminism,^[a] which she regards introduce being the dominant contemporary nearing to feminism, and equity feminism, which she presents as better-quality akin to first-wave feminism.

She uses the work to contradict that contemporary feminism is besides radical and disconnected from nobleness lives of typical American brigade, presenting her equity feminism choosing as a better match propound their needs.^[42] Sommers describes themselves as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become".^[43] She characterizes gender drive as having transcended the liberalism of early feminists so think about it instead of focusing on up front for all, gender feminists standpoint society through the sex/gender prism and focus on recruiting cohort to join the struggle blaspheme patriarchy.^[44]Reason reviewed Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and characterized gender feminism chimpanzee the action of accenting honesty differences of genders in disrupt to create what Sommers believes is privilege for women mop the floor with academia, government, industry, or birth advancement of personal agendas.^[45][46]

In censorious contemporary feminism, Sommers writes deviate an often-mentioned March of Dimes study, which says that "domestic violence is the leading petroleum of birth defects,” does note exist and that violence antithetical women does not peak as the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban account.

She argues that such statements about domestic violence helped make the Violence Against Women Augmentation, which initially allocated $1.6 platoon a year in federal method for ending domestic violence bite the bullet women. Similarly, she argues^[47] saunter feminists assert that approximately 150,000 women die each year hold up anorexia, an apparent distortion get through the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 poverty-stricken have some degree of anorexia.^[48][49]

The War Against Boys

In 2000, Sommers published The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

In interpretation book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new endure equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed."^[50] Criticizing programs that had antiquated set up in the Decennium to encourage girls and minor women, largely in response add up to studies that had suggested saunter girls "suffered through neglect uphold the classroom and the contempt of male-dominated society,"^[51] Sommers argued in The War Against Boys that such programs were homeproduced on flawed research.

She described that reality was quite glory opposite: boys were a generation and a half behind girls in reading and writing, shaft they were less likely make use of go to college.

She blessed Carol Gilligan as well importation organizations such as the Genealogical Organization for Women (NOW)^[51] use creating a situation in which "boys are resented, both similarly the unfairly privileged sex innermost as obstacles on the plan to gender justice for girls." According to Sommers, "a examination of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the make the best of side of an education intimacy gap."^[15][52]

The book received mixed reviews.

In conservative publications such translation the National Review and Commentary, The War Against Boys was praised for its "stinging impeachment of an anti-male movement roam has had a pervasive potency on the nation's schools"^[53] submit for identifying "a problem emit urgent need of redress."^[54] Scrawl in The New York Times, opinion columnist Richard Bernstein hollered it a "thoughtful, provocative book" and suggested that Sommers abstruse made her arguments "persuasively skull unflinchingly, and with plenty make known data to support them."^[55] Rejoicing accomplishmen Summers, in The Journal fanatic School Choice, said that "Sommers’ book and her public share are in themselves a short antidote to the junk body of knowledge girding our typically commonsense-free, completely ideological national debate on 'women's issues'."^[56]Publishers Weekly suggested that Sommers' conclusions were "compelling" and "deserve an unbiased hearing," while additionally noting that Sommers "descends jolt pettiness when she indulges place in mudslinging at her opponents."^[50] Alike, a review in Booklist not obligatory that while Sommers "argues cogently that boys are having important problems in school," the tome was unlikely to convince exchange blows readers "that these problems utter caused by the American Federation of University Women, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and William Brutish.

Pollack," all of whom were strongly criticized in the precise. Ultimately, the review suggested, "Sommers is as much of first-class crisismonger as those she critiques."^[57]

In a review of The Conflict Against Boys for The Fresh York Times, child psychiatristRobert Coles wrote that Sommers "speaks indicate our children, yet hasn't soughtafter them out; instead she attends those who have, in point, worked with boys and girls—and in so doing is speedy to look askance at Air Gilligan's ideas about girls, [William] Pollack's about boys." Much worldly the book, according to Coles, "comes across as Sommers's forcibly felt war against those twosome prominent psychologists, who have drained years trying to learn in any event young men and women enlarge to adulthood in the Coalesced States."^[15][58] Reviewing the book come up with The New Yorker,Nicholas Lemann wrote that Sommers "sets the probation bar considerably higher for class people she is attacking prevail over she does for herself," stir an "odd, ambushing style make stronger refutation, in which she importunity that data be provided catch her and questions answered, skull then, when the flummoxed being on the other end conclusion the line stammers helplessly, triumphantly reports that she got 'em." Lemann faulted Sommers for accusatory Gilligan of using anecdotal goal when her own book "rests on an anecdotal base" bracket for making numerous assertions mosey were not supported by influence footnotes in her book.^[59]

Writing concern The Washington Post, E.

Suffragist Rotundo stated that "in goodness end, Sommers ... does shed tears show that there is straight 'war against boys.' All she can show is that feminists are attacking her 'boys-will-be-boys' hypothesis of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion." Sommers's title, according to Rotundo, "is not just wrong nevertheless inexcusably misleading...

a work accomplish neither dispassionate social science unheard of reflective scholarship; it is top-hole conservative polemic."^[60]

In the updated arena revised edition published in 2013, Sommers responded to her critics by changing the subtitle look upon the book from How ill-advised feminism harms our young men to How misguided policies attraction our young men, and allowing new and updated statistics rove position her earlier work, pathway her view, as prophetic.^{[61][third-party pitch needed]} When asked by Maclean's whether her work is similar controversial, Sommers responded:

It was when I first wrote class book.

At the time, women’s groups promoted the idea consider it girls were second-class citizens nervous tension our schools. [...] David Sadker claimed that when boys buyingoff out answers in school, officers are respectful and interested—whereas in the way that girls do it, they move backward and forward told to be quiet. [...] This became a showcase factoid of the shortchanged girl development.

But it turned out ramble the research behind the command was nowhere to be fail to appreciate. It was a baseless myth: the result of advocacy investigation. I have looked at U.S. Department of Education data put back into working order more conventional measures: grades, academy matriculation, school engagement, test lots. Now more than ever, ready to react find that boys are initiate the wrong side of nobility gender gap.^[62]

Advocacy

Sommers has served run the board of the Women's Freedom Network,^[25][63][64] a group conversant as an alternative to "extremist, ideological feminism" as well introduction to "antifeminist traditionalism" but ostensible by historian Debra L.

Schultz as comprising mostly "conservative ideologues in the political correctness debates".^[25] In the 1990s, she was a member of the Tribal Association of Scholars, a cautious political advocacy group.^[31] She in your right mind a member of the Table of Advisors of the Initiate for Individual Rights in Education.^{[65][third-party source needed]} She has served on the national advisory surface of the Independent Women's Forum^[66] and the Center of primacy American Experiment.^[67]

Sommers has defended blue blood the gentry Gamergate harassment campaign, saying dump its members were "just police a hobby they love." That advocacy in favor of Gamergate earned her praise from brothers of the men's rights development, inspiring fan art and high-mindedness nickname "Based Mom", which Sommers embraced.^[27] During Gamergate, Sommers arrived at several events with far-rightpolitical commentatorMilo Yiannopoulos.^[27] In 2019, Sommers endorsed Andrew Yang's campaign over the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.^[68]

Awards

The Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of warmth twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit burst Media Awards^[69] for her The New York Times article “The Boys at the Back.”^[70] Collective their description of the winners, NWPC states, "Author Christina Sommers asks whether we should go pale girls to reap the emolument of a new knowledge family unit service economy and take dignity mantle from boys, or requirement we acknowledge the roots spectacle feminism and strive for tie up education for all?"^[69]

Personal life

Sommers wedded conjugal Fred Sommers, the Harry Marvellous.

Wolfson Chair in Philosophy finish Brandeis University, in 1981.^[15][71] Bankruptcy died in 2014.^[72] The wedlock provided her a stepson, Tamler Sommers, who is a wise and podcast host.^{[73][15][37][74]}

See also

Selected works

Books

Articles

• (1988).

  "Should the Academy Support Theoretical Feminism?". Public Affairs Quarterly. 2: 97–120.

• (1990). "The Feminist Revelation". Social Philosophy and Policy. 8(1): 152–157.
• (1990). "Do These feminists Like Women?". Journal of Social Philosophy. 21(2) (Fall): 66–74.

Notes

References

External links