Yet Another Conservative Hates on Feminism
American Enterprise Institute scholar argues that feminism is sloppy in an equally sloppy column.
By Emily Rutherford
June 30, 2009
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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Sommer’s is an author with a PHD and tenure teaching at a top university. This leads me to believe Sommer’s knows exactly whats she talking about. By the way, why do feminists think everyone who doesn’t agree with them automatically hates them. It must be the victimization and hyper sensitivity that defines the very essence of the movement.
— Cabaret Voltaire - Jun 30, 11:52 AM - #Sommer’s is an author with a PHD and tenure teaching at a top university. This leads me to believe Sommer’s knows exactly whats she talking about. By the way, why do feminists think everyone who doesn’t agree with them automatically hates them. It must be the victimization and hyper sensitivity that defines the very essence of the movement.
— Cabaret Voltaire - Jun 30, 11:52 AM - #To Cabaret Voltaire:
Christina Hoff Summers has had a respectable career in many ways. In an essay I wrote earlier this year, I gave her some credit for being critical of certain things:
“In ‘Who Stole Feminism?,” Hoff Sommers is vehemently critical of gender feminists who “limit the prospects for sound research in this area” by refusing to adopt a rigorous system of review (200). She argues that the incentives are misaligned, rewarding researchers not for their objectivity, but for their ability to drive up the predicted rates of domestic violence. Her claim is hard to refute, given the prevalence of advocacy statistics.”
However, Hoff Sommers is guilty of just what she accuses others of doing: manipulating data.
Richard Gelles, the author of “Intimate Violence in Families,” argued that she used the data from his 1985 National Family Violence Survey to argue that ““there are as many (or more) battered men as there are battered women.” He writes that using the data to make such claims can misrepresent the study, which found that “women are as much as 10 times more likely than men to be injured in acts of domestic violence.” It is not uncommon for data to be used to reach conclusions that original researchers did not intend, and there is nothing wrong with taking an alternative view of a data set; however, intentionally omitting parts of a given data set is the work of an advocate, not an academic, which has been a consistent criticism of Hoff Sommers throughout her career.
— Andrew Bluebond - Jul 1, 12:08 AM - #Emily – you prove her point. Your column contains no substantive rebuttal of her arguments. You instead attack her as a “hater” and then you use anecdotal evidence and your very strong opinion to conclude she’s wrong. Feminists apparently can’t (or won’t) handle the truth.
— Oldfellow - Jul 1, 10:50 AM - #Cabaret Voltaire and Oldfellow are obviously victims of the same sad, patriarchal societal forces that have led this “scholar” to betray her responsibilities as an academic. You both make ridiculous generalizations about feminists: They “can’t handle the truth” and they “think everyone who doesn’t agree with them hates them.”
Emily rightly points out that this demagogue should not be able to prove her theory by a weak correlation and only two examples. Such lofty claims as her attack on feminist scholarship should require a deeper examination and a higher caliber of scholarship, including statistical analyses and perhaps a sociological approach to the culture of feminists in academia.
Instead, her diatribe amounts to little more than a muddled and pathetic synecdoche.
Emily, who doesn’t have the burden of proven that Feminist scholarship IS legitimate (honestly, do we expect sociologists or any other field to prove that their scholarship is legitimate?). It’s insulting to question the scholarship of these individuals, who have spent about a decade to earn their degrees. Despite this, Emily does provide statistical evidence, Oldfellow, but I guess you just glossed over that link in the middle of her post.
Great work Emily.
— Michael May - Jul 1, 04:29 PM - #We have some male victim feminist supporters on board like Michael May. He must be a hardy soul to know 1:) he is part of the patriarchy that oppresses his victim feminist friends and colleagues 2:) somewhere along the way he decided to line up with these victims, adopt their mythology and consider his fellow men as abusers and brutes. I believe that is called co-opting and feminists just love his type because they are so malleable. Michael just has to be an academic who also preaches to the students the same myths he tries to excuse in his rant against Ms. Sommers. Did you not know a lie is a lie and if you teach students that this is permissible you are no better than many ideological propagandists.
I feel sorry for people who can’t see the forest for the trees. Its really a pity that otherwise intelligent people, who can use big words and not understand their meaning, have responsibility for indoctrinating gullible students.
— Mike Murphy - Jul 1, 05:19 PM - #Micheal May – and your point is? Is it that Feminist scholars are legitimate because of the time they spent getting their degree? Any other rigorous acedemic requirements to be a feminist scholar?
I would point out that Emily is the one who used “conservativce hater” in the title of column or did you gloss over that? Tell you what, if either you or Emily could use your acedemic prowess to provide some actual proof from a credible, peer reviewed source (meaning non-feminsit) that proves a popular feminist claim that is backed by statisitic I will apologize. Pick one of these: 1) 1 in 4 women will be raped or sexually abused while at college; 2) only 2% of rape claims are false; or 3) the wage gap is due to discrimination against women.
Come on Mike, quit wishing you had access to a “woman’s way of knowing” and do some actual research. Prove one of these claims is actually true in an objective fashion and I will admit that I’m a victim of “patriarchal mythology.” If you can’t or won’t, then I will agree that you are a true feminist!
— Oldfellow - Jul 2, 06:14 PM - #I’d be happy to debate the author of this piece on feminst scholars’ chronic indifference to facts about the prevalence of rape and false rape claims. I became involved in the issue through my law practice and originally bought into the feminist urban myths about two percent and one-in-four. I actually took comfort in the canard that women don’t lie about rape.
However, the more
I examined the issue, the more I found that every unbiased study by respected researchers not having an political ax to grind showed not only that the feminist “facts” are wildly wrong, but they are wildly internally inconsistent, too. Every single one.
Those attacking Dr. Hoff-Sommers would do well to eliminate emotion from their arguments. You are most unpersuasive and come off as childish.
— Pierce Harlan - Jul 3, 12:17 PM - #KC Luciano has a pretty good response to criticisms of Sommers: bit.ly/DUKno
— Charlie McGill - Jul 7, 10:49 AM - #“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.” – You’re being ironic there, right?
— Chris - Aug 12, 03:13 PM - #The fundamental role Sommers plays in discussions about domestic violence is as a tool for the father’s supremacy groups. They love her and there is ample evidence why.
— Stephen McArthur - Aug 16, 09:17 AM - #