Yet Another Conservative Hates on Feminism

Christina Hoff Sommers just doesn’t get feminist scholarship. (istockphoto)

Yesterday Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, proclaimed in the Chronicle of Higher Education that there are "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship." Sommers sweepingly says, "Among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors." The article is full of generalizations that I have seldom heard from any writer of high school age, much less of twenty years’ experience in academia. To prove that feminist scholarship is in a state of academic crisis, Sommers critiques one legal feminist textbook and a misleading chart in another to attack the entire discipline for vagueness, overstatement, and poor fact-checking.

Never mind that feminist scholarship uses as much of the humanities-based modes of inquiry that is used in literature, history, philosophy, theology and cultural studies as it does the statistics of social sciences. Never mind that it is not very good scholarly practice to make broad conclusions on the basis of only two pieces of evidence. Sure, Sommers can criticize what she believes to be a poor grip on the facts in the two texts she discusses, but to say it is because these texts are written from a feminist perspective is bizarre at best.

Sommers starts with a criticism of one law textbook, Domestic Violence Law by Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon. She attacks Lemon’s apocryphal story regarding the origin of the phrase "rule of thumb." Sommers accurately decries the origin story, and writes that it is "now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors." This turns out to be Sommers’ only legitimate point in the entire column.

According to Sommers, feminist professors are not doing their jobs of holding received narratives up to careful scholarly scrutiny and that "feminist misinformation is pervasive." She uses the work of conservative bioethicist Christine Rosen to say, "In [Rosen’s] 2002 report on the five leading women’s-studies textbooks, [she] found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and ‘deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.’" However, Sommers highly regards the work of "Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis; Janet Zollinger Giele, a sociologist at Brandeis; and Anne Mellor, a literary scholar at UCLA … models of academic excellence and integrity." It’s impossible to tell whether Hrdy, Giele, and Mellor are truly the "exception" that Sommers claims they are. Without the context of where these three “exceptions” fit into the broader feminist academic discourse, it is hard to know who to believe.

Sommers complains that feminist scholars’ politics often get in the way of their scholarship, arguing,

The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.

However, her criticisms of another work of feminist scholarship bely her own personal politics. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World gives the same rating to Uganda for rapes of women in Uganda as it does to the United States because of the radical anti-abortion actions against clinic workers here; Sommers takes issue with the rating, saying, "The activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements." Such an argument would no doubt seem hugely offensive to women who have been harassed by pro-life demonstrators when seeking an abortion or Dr. George Tiller’s friends and family. Sommers disagrees with the Atlas’ description of both Uganda and America as places where "‘patriarchal assumptions’ operate in ‘potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations.’" As much as this is a politically-charged assessment of American society, it is equally political to disagree. If, as Sommer alleges, "a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things," she has not proven herself to be excluded from their number.

The most disconcerting part of Sommers’ article, however, is at the end, where she lists "three reasons to be concerned" about inaccuracies in feminist research. She asserts that it "is largely no longer true" that "women face a ‘chilly climate’" in math and science. But this is both statistically as well as anecdotally untrue: Some of my female friends studying math, science, and engineering at the graduate level have encountered a hostile atmosphere. I suppose I must have missed the memo in which we simply decided to accept the gross gender imbalances in science and engineering departments and graduate programs as something that is not concerning.

Perhaps Sommers is unfamiliar with this particular phenomenon—she, after all, explains that her academic career (before she joined the American Enterprise Institute) was in philosophy, not the sciences. But surely she cannot have entirely bypassed the many ways in which academe more generally is hostile to women, which have been written about in the Chronicle‘s own pages. Surely she has known a colleague who was forced to choose between working towards tenure and raising a child, or who followed her spouse when he got a new job, instead of the other way around.

If problems such as these are still evident in academia, an environment populated by educated, privileged people, how must it be in other sectors of the workforce, and for people of different levels of education and opportunity? To suggest, as Sommer does—on the basis, as far as I can tell, of perceived misinformation in two textbooks—that there is no place for President Obama’s proposed White House Council on Women and Girls is truly mind-boggling.

Christina Hoff Sommers rails against the “misinformation” spread by feminist scholars, but feminist scholarship itself persists in order to call out declarations such as hers. As "someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity," and moreover as an educated adult, she should know better than to tar all feminist scholarship with the same specious brush.

Emily Rutherford is an editorial intern and staff writer at Campus Progress and a sophomore at Princeton University.

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