Who Stole Feminism?

Who Stole Feminism? was first reviewed in Kirkus Reviews in April 1994, two months prior to publication. The staff at Kirkus said that Sommers' book highlighted instances of "shoddy" research in feminist studies but failed to tell the reader about similar poor quality research in other fields. Sommers was said to be confused about categories of feminism, to have invented a sort of "gender feminism" to fit her purpose of promoting her brand of liberal feminism, and to have created "a theory of conspiracy equal in force to those she seeks to debunk." Kirkus said that Sommers presumed to speak for the majority of feminists "without providing persuasive evidence that most women are liberal feminists." Sommers was praised for her valid challenges to feminist ideology, but her assumptions were described as flawed.[6]

A June 1994 review by Nina Auerbach in The New York Times Book Review[7] was widely seen. Auerbach, a scholar of Victorian literature, was highly critical of Sommers, finding fault with her facts and logic; Auerbach said that the John M. Olin Foundation which paid for the book's publication should have found "a less muddled writer" for the task. Sommers responded to the criticism by saying that the Times should not have assigned Auerbach to the review, since as an organizer of a feminist event portrayed negatively in the book, she was sure to be prejudiced against the ideas in the book. Conservatives such as Jim Sleeper, Howard Kurtz and Rush Limbaugh defended Sommers; Limbaugh said that the Times was attempting to "kill this book".[8] The feminist columnist Katha Pollitt, however, thought Auerbach's review was too polite and failed to give Sommers' book "the pasting it deserved".[8]

Editor Deirdre English writing in The Washington Post Book World was appreciative of the investigative aspect of Sommers' work but she questioned the polarized depiction of feminism. Calling Sommers a "well-published conservative [who] is itching for a fight", she said the book would likely provoke debate "as well as some retractions". English said of the book that "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".[9]

The book was positively reviewed by Cathy Young who was an executive colleague of Sommers in the Women's Freedom Network. It was also highly praised in the National Review by Sommers' close friend Mary Lefkowitz.[8] Paglia called the book a "landmark study... which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation", adding that, "Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental principles she has clarified and strengthened."[10] Melanie Kirkpatrick, writing in The Wall Street Journal, gave the book high marks, saying that "Sommers simply lines up her facts and shoots one bull's-eye after another".[11]

John M. Ellis, a scholar of German literature, praised Sommers for challenging the "intellectual deterioration" that feminism has caused within humanities departments in the United States. He writes that Sommers' book, along with others by authors with similar views, was met with "bitter hostility" from campus feminists, and that when Rebecca Sinkler, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, gave the book to her friend and former teacher Auerbach to review, the result was a "predictable trashing." According to Ellis, "the malice and dishonesty of Auerbach's review was so obvious...that it provoked not just a storm of protest but a response almost without precedent." According to Ellis, a series of newspapers, including the New York Daily News and The Washington Post, commented on what they saw as unethical behavior by Sinkler and Auerbach.[12]

The gay rights activist John Lauritsen, writing in A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love, agrees with Sommers that women are the main victims of "gender feminists".[13]

Sommers' claims regarding the legal permissiveness of wife beating have been criticized as inaccurate. In arguing that British law since the 1700s and American law since before the Revolution prohibits wife beating, Sommers quotes Blackstone as saying that the "husband was prohibited from using any violence to his wife..."[14] Criticizing Who Stole Feminism?, Linda Hirshman and Laura Flanders separately noted that Sommers left out the other half of Blackstone's sentence that says in Latin "other than that which lawfully and reasonably belongs to the husband for the due government and correction of his wife".[15][16] Hirshman, writing in the Los Angeles Times, stated that while Sommers addressed two early American cases where men were convicted for wife-beating, she left out a case where the husband was not convicted.[15] Flanders noted in Extra!, published by progressive media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, that Blackstone's "complete text says the exact opposite of Sommers' partial quotation".[16] In an overall negative review, Flanders charged Sommers with making the same mistakes she accused feminists of making, and that Who Stole Feminism? contained "unsubstantiated charges", citations to "advocacy research", and statistical errors likely based on a misreading of the source material.[16] Sommers responded a week after Hirshman's Los Angeles Times piece, writing that Blackstone's quotation had been misinterpreted, and had only been citing an outdated law since superseded,[17] and responded to FAIR's criticisms in a letter to the editor of FAIR's monthly magazine, EXTRA![18]

Dale Bauer and Katherine Rhoades write that Sommers was mistaken in her assumptions about the way students approach challenging ideas presented to them. Sommers devoted a chapter to a negative depiction of a "feminist classroom" where the values of the teacher overwhelmed the students; she felt a classroom should be objectively free of values. Bauer and Rhoades contradict Sommers, describing how students "always bring their own assumptions and values to class" and that they expect an active and lively exchange of ideas between the teacher and the other students. Bauer and Rhoades found the book's "most serious conceptual flaw" to be Sommers' failure to account for why women in society "have not always been treated fairly", and that while they agree with the assessment that Sommers wrote her book primarily to sell many copies, the book represents a threat in its attempt to redefine feminism.[19]

Describing the book and other literature on "victimhood" politics as "ephemeral pop sociology", the criminologist Samuel Walker wrote in 1998 that in "demolishing some of the careless and absurd allegations made by some feminists", Sommers "ignores the underlying issue[s]".[20]

In 1999, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum described Sommers' categories of equity feminist and gender feminist as ambiguous, saying:

[A] gender feminist, for Sommers, is any thinker who believes that (1) women's suffrage did not remove a systemic asymmetry of power between women and men in our society, and/or (2) the existing preferences of women and men in our society concerning gender issues may be corrupted by social forces and not always reliable bases for the formation of social policy.[21]

According to Nussbaum, this concept of gender feminism "fits almost all contemporary social thinkers in political thought and economics", and so does not helpfully sort feminists into opposing categories.[21]

The sociologist Rhonda Hammer of University of California, Los Angeles, writes that Sommers, despite her debunking of the figure that there is a 40% increase of domestic violence incidents associated with the annual Super Bowl game, went too far in claiming that "no study shows that Super Bowl Sunday is in any way different from other days in the amount of domestic violence". Hammer said that Sommers ignored a variety of studies that showed increased domestic violence during the Super Bowl.[22]

The anthropologist Melvin Konner wrote that, like Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power (1993), Who Stole Feminism? is a good antidote to the way in which "real knowledge about sex roles...tends to get buried in postmodernist rhetoric."[23]

Anne-Marie Kinahan of Wilfrid Laurier University places Who Stole Feminism? alongside Rene Denfeld's The New Victorians and Katie Roiphe's The Morning After in the context of a "post-feminist" movement, and contends these books signalled a collective "fear of the perceived radicalism of feminism on university campuses, a radicalism which these authors attribute to the increasing influence of queer theory, 'radical' lesbians and feminists of colour." Kinahan charges Sommers, Denfeld and Roiphe with attempting to "reclaim feminism as a white, middle-class, straight woman's movement" and defending "traditional hierarchies of morality, religion, and the nuclear family." Kinahan finds Sommers to be contradictory in asserting that students are resistant to radical feminism, yet also claiming that feminist indoctrination of students poses a "drastic danger" which "powerless, naive, and unthinking students unquestionably endorse."[24]

The political scientist Ronnee Schreiber of San Diego State University wrote that the conservative Independent Women's Forum continues to use the book to portray feminists as scheming falsifiers of statistical data.[25]