I once told my father that I was not a feminist. He furrowed his eyebrows with a look of confusion and said something along the lines of, “That is a completely absurd thing to say.” He told me that whether or not I thought I was a feminist, I was one.
As a woman who certainly believes in gender equality, why does the term “feminist” hold such a negative connotation for women like myself?
Author, professor, and public intellectual Christina Hoff Sommers has spent a good portion of her career discussing this phenomenon. Sommers earned her B.A. from New York University in 1971 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979. She immediately began teaching philosophy with an emphasis in ethics until the late 1990s, ending her teaching career at Clark University in 1999. Since then, Sommers has been “best known for her critique of late-twentieth-century feminism.” She currently works as a resident scholar for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and writes for a number of different publications including Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic, amongst others. Her work has also included critiques of the American education system, particularly its effects on boys, and “her textbook, Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, a bestseller in college ethics, is currently in its ninth edition.” However, Sommers is most notable as the author of books such as Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, The War Against Boys, One Nation Under Therapy, and The Science on Women and Science.
As a woman who has similarly experienced a reluctance to accept mainstream feminism, Sommers’ critiques on this subject are what really drew me to her writings. Recently, she published an article for The Atlantic, entitled “How to Get More Women (and Men) to Call Themselves Feminists,” on the reasons why there needs to be a shift in the discussion on feminism. She cites a Huffington Post/YouGov poll that found that only 23% of women and 16% of men classified themselves as “feminists.” This is an extremely low proportion of the population, especially for a nation that champions freedom and equality, so clearly we are not alone. She noted that “accomplished women as diverse as Taylor Swift, Sandra Day O’Connor, Marissa Mayer, and Beyonce” have also all been hesitant to publicly classify themselves as feminists. Why?
Sommers believes it has to do with the way feminism has been disseminated to the masses and particularly, the educated. There is a dogmatic, angry tone to what most people have come to consider as modern “feminism,” and much of this rhetoric simply does not appeal to the general population, even the female one. In her book Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers recalls an experience she had at a feminist conference in New York in 1992 called “Out of the Academy and Into the World with Carolyn Heilbrun”:
“ Jane Marcus, of the City University of New York, called the afternoon ‘Anger Session’ to order, introducing herself as ‘an expert on anger’ and thanking Heilbrun for teaching her ‘to use my rage in my writing’…The women at the Heilbrun conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. Many of the women on the ‘Anger’ panel were tenured professors at prestigious universities. All had fine and expensive educations. Yet, listening to them one would never guess that they live in a country whose women are legally as free as the men and whose institutions of higher learning now have more female than male students,” (20-21).
Sommers’ point here is that these angry women are the current voices of feminism and continue to perpetuate this anger-based feminism through academia. These are the types of women who teach in our universities and “educate” women about feminism. Because of this, what women learn about feminism becomes associated with the unhappy, negative feelings that their educators foster. These “gender feminists,” as Sommers names them, almost discredit themselves because of their focus on anger rather than women or gender equality. It is no surprise that many women shy away from this resentful tone.
Because “most American women subscribe philosophically to that older “First Wave” kind of feminism whose main goal is equity,” it is also no wonder that the majority of American women do not consider themselves feminists (22). This is especially relevant when “current feminist notables…adhere to a new, more radical, “Second Wave” doctrine: that women, even modern American women, are in thrall to a ‘system of male dominance,’” (22). This is a significant realization that Sommers points out, for if there is any group of women who do not want to believe that anyone can constrain them, it is today’s American women. The modern American woman believes she can do whatever her heart desires, so it is no surprise that these powerful women do not want to subscribe to an ideology that asserts otherwise.
Most importantly, Sommers’ discussion of this ideology raises some deeper issues that the majority of American females find unnerving and probably untrue. The idea “that American women are not the free creatures we think we are,” is an extremely dubious notion (16). It discredits nearly all achievements we have made in the last 300 years or so, and essentially insinuates that American women are unable to make freethinking decisions apart from the male social structure. This is a slippery slope, and brought to its extreme, implies that women are still subordinate to men, since the epitome of being an independent, sovereign human being is the ability to think freely. Furthermore, this idea implies that the intellectual works of both the gender feminists and the equity or freedom feminists, the category under which Sommers classifies herself, are also an effect of patriarchy and not truly free ideas.
While this is essentially what modern feminists have come to believe, Sommers challenges these preconceptions. She instead insists that “women should be free to defect from stereotypes of femininity if they so choose,” but that people, and women in particular, should respect “the choices of free and self-determining women when they choose to embrace conventional feminine roles.” Sommers argues that when 61% of mothers today claim to prefer part-time work so as to have time for their families and are still more likely to choose “pink-collar” careers such as teaching, child care, social work, or pediatrics, that women should accept these as free, independent decisions. While this should be the case, Sommers does seem to disregard the fact that many women probably care more about making time for their families and choosing careers that fit this type of lifestyle because of centuries of female subordination. Up until relatively recently, men have historically always worked outside of the home, so it is thus more understandable that they still feel that this is their place in the world whereas women feel that they must balance their careers and families. However, Sommers is correct in that despite these socially constructed gender roles, a woman’s choice in modern America, where she is legally as free as a man, should be considered as free of a choice as a man’s. The consequences of thinking otherwise only hurt the cause for gender equality.
Sommers not only critiques current feminist views, but she also proposes viable reforms to the feminist movement. She champions what she calls “freedom feminism,” which “stands for the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes – and the freedom of women to employ their equal status to pursue happiness in their own distinctive ways.” It is important to note that while Sommers believes in the freedom of American women, she does not deny or belittle the residual effects of centuries of male-dominated society. She points to the prevalence of misogyny in American pop-culture as well as the fact that more single women are affected by poverty than any other group of Americans. However, she provides solutions to these issues through her freedom feminism. Rather than simply blaming men for our problems, freedom feminists would lobby to work on the “root cause of poverty in America: missing fathers.” The freedom feminists’ “primary focus would be on combating male-averse educational and social policies that have helped create a dysfunctional culture of fatherlessness.” This is extremely important, for there can be no true progress for gender equality if we ignore the other gender. Women alone cannot combat issues such as misogyny, poverty, rape, or what have you without getting men on board. These issues concern both genders, and thus need the support of men to bring about change. When mainstream feminism continually blames men and their conspiracy against women, it helps absolutely no one, especially women. As Sommers eloquently puts it, “Who needs feminism? We do. The world does.” It is not an isolated issue, and it must include men in the conversation, not as perpetrators of patriarchy but as allies for equality.
However, what truly solidifies Sommers’ status as a public intellectual is her call to include more women in a movement meant for women. Not only does she ask the feminists of today to include more moderate and conservative women in the cause, but she also calls for American women to use the equal rights that they have earned to “make common cause with women across the globe who are struggling for their basic freedoms.” As Professor Stephen Mack of the University of Southern California states:
“Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives. And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling.”
Without question, Sommers does just this. She challenges feminism, spins it on its head, and gives women another option to declare themselves as feminists. Not in the typical, angry, leftist sense that scares most of us away from the label, but in a universal acceptance of one another. She calls for women to stop resenting both men and themselves and instead to focus on ensuring that all women are free to choose whatever life makes them happiest. Sommers pushes us to realize that not only is feminism important, but also that we need to change it to make it effective. What is most sobering, however, is how she shifts the self-centered, self-indulgent nature of the current American feminist movement and calls feminists out to work toward actually securing the equal rights we as American women enjoy today for other women around the world who are not as lucky.
Now, that is the type of feminism that I can get behind.
Works Cited:
Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Print.
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