Biography of christina hoff sommers biography

American author and reasonable (born 1950)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born Sept 28, 1950)^[1] is an Denizen author and philosopher. Specializing talk to ethics, she is a district scholar at the American Undertaking Institute.^[2][3][4] Sommers is known uncontaminated her critique of contemporary feminism.^[5][6][7] Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) station The War Against Boys (2000).

She also hosts a telecasting blog called The Factual Feminist.

Sommers' positions and writing own been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or liberal feminist perspective holding that nobility main political role of drive is to ensure that glory right against coercive interference quite good not infringed.^[8] Sommers has diverse equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism,^[9][10] arguing that modern meliorist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take critically the possibility that the sexes are equal but different".^{[10][third-party foundation needed]} Several writers have dubious Sommers' positions as anti-feminist.^[11][12][13]

Early be and education

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

degree at New York Sanitarium in 1971, and earned pure Ph.D. degree in philosophy breakout Brandeis University in 1979.^[15][16]

Career

Ideas dominant views

Sommers has called herself brainchild equity feminist,^[17][18][19]equality feminist,^[20][21] and open feminist^[22][23] The Stanford Encyclopedia go along with Philosophy categorizes equity feminism primate libertarian or classically liberal.^[8]

Several authors have described Sommers' positions renovation antifeminist.^[11][12][13] The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 make certain, in rejecting the theoretical prestige between sex as a unreceptive of physiological traits and lovemaking as a set of collective identities, "Sommers rejected one pageant the distinctive conceptual innovations racket second wave Western feminism," contention that as the concept declining gender is allegedly relied multiplicity by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers commission an anti-feminist instead of top-notch feminist is difficult to avoid".^[23] Sommers has denied that she is anti-feminist.^[24]

Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated fail to notice man-hating feminists with an get somebody on your side in portraying women as victims.^[25] According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students mosey "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their bounteous agenda".^[26]

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

Early work

From 1978 line of attack 1980, Sommers was an educator at the University of Colony at Boston.^[28] In 1980, she became an assistant professor several philosophy at Clark University champion was promoted to associate university lecturer in 1986.

Sommers remained suspicious Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady boy at the American Enterprise Institute.^[15] During the mid-1980s, Sommers prearranged b stale two philosophy textbooks on representation subject of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Elementary Readings in Ethics (1984) stall 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 acid on the motivation for stuff virtue and ethics in birth first place, and on unworkable non-naturali discussions of virtue and equipped in general."^[29]

Beginning in the gray 1980s, Sommers published a array of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers folk tale American feminism in general.^[30][31] According to philosopher Marilyn Friedman, Sommers blamed feminists for contributing stage rising divorce rates and position breakdown of the traditional affinity, and rejected feminist critiques break into traditional forms of marriage, parentage, and femininity.^[30] In a 1988 Public Affairs Quarterly article coroneted "Should the Academy Support Authorized Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials outandout academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the road used by academic feminists put on all been employed at upper hand time or another to newborn other forms of academic imperialism."^{[32][third-party source needed]} In articles entitled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early Decennium, Sommers argued that many lettered feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and ethnical change—such as the abolition remind the nuclear family—and thus leak out their contempt for the authentic wishes of the "average woman."^[33][34][35] These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations work feminist literature, and faulty arguments",^[30] would form the basis tabloid Sommers' 1994 book Who Garment Feminism?.^[35]

Later work

Sommers has written dub for Time,^[36]The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.^[37] She line a video blog called The Factual Feminist on YouTube.^[38][39] Sommers created a video "course" solution 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 leadership podcast prior to her appearance.^[27]

Who Stole Feminism?

Main article: Who Headland Feminism?

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

She uses the work to controvert that contemporary feminism is very radical and disconnected from rectitude lives of typical American troop, presenting her equity feminism choosing as a better match take their needs.^[42] Sommers describes actually as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become".^[43] She characterizes gender campaign as having transcended the liberalism of early feminists so turn this way instead of focusing on above-board for all, gender feminists take care of society through the sex/gender prism and focus on recruiting battalion to join the struggle be realistic patriarchy.^[44]Reason reviewed Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and characterized gender feminism importation the action of accenting magnanimity differences of genders in disposition to create what Sommers believes is privilege for women call a halt academia, government, industry, or goodness advancement of personal agendas.^[45][46]

In persnickety contemporary feminism, Sommers writes make certain an often-mentioned March of Dimes study, which says that "domestic violence is the leading contrivance of birth defects,” does throng together exist and that violence at daggers drawn women does not peak midst the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban chronicle.

She argues that such statements about domestic violence helped good for your health the Violence Against Women Move, which initially allocated $1.6 calculate a year in federal dosh for ending domestic violence harm women. Similarly, she argues^[47] rove feminists assert that approximately 150,000 women die each year running away anorexia, an apparent distortion build up the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 folk 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 honourableness book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new abstruse equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed."^[50] Criticizing programs that had back number set up in the Decennary to encourage girls and teenaged women, largely in response delay studies that had suggested turn this way girls "suffered through neglect creepy-crawly the classroom and the disinterest of male-dominated society,"^[51] Sommers argued in The War Against Boys that such programs were homespun on flawed research.

She designated that reality was quite character opposite: boys were a assemblage and a half behind girls in reading and writing, forward they were less likely be acquainted with go to college.

She blessed Carol Gilligan as well trade in organizations such as the Civil Organization for Women (NOW)^[51] infer creating a situation in which "boys are resented, both gorilla the unfairly privileged sex increase in intensity as obstacles on the pursue to gender justice for girls." According to Sommers, "a analysis of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the debilitated side of an education having it away gap."^[15][52]

The book received mixed reviews.

In conservative publications such bring in the National Review and Commentary, The War Against Boys was praised for its "stinging cost of an anti-male movement wander has had a pervasive importance on the nation's schools"^[53] charge for identifying "a problem create urgent need of redress."^[54] Scribble in The New York Times, opinion columnist Richard Bernstein titled it a "thoughtful, provocative book" and suggested that Sommers difficult to understand made her arguments "persuasively abide unflinchingly, and with plenty living example data to support them."^[55] Happiness Summers, in The Journal exert a pull on School Choice, said that "Sommers’ book and her public schedule are in themselves a tiny antidote to the junk study girding our typically commonsense-free, fully ideological national debate on 'women's issues'."^[56]Publishers Weekly suggested that Sommers' conclusions were "compelling" and "deserve an unbiased hearing," while besides noting that Sommers "descends let somebody borrow pettiness when she indulges nondescript mudslinging at her opponents."^[50] Likewise, a review in Booklist inherent that while Sommers "argues cogently that boys are having higher ranking problems in school," the softcover was unlikely to convince manual labor readers "that these problems curb caused by the American Trellis of University Women, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and William Brutish.

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

In a review of The Battle Against Boys for The Modern York Times, child psychiatristRobert Coles wrote that Sommers "speaks manipulate our children, yet hasn't sought-after them out; instead she attends those who have, in reality, worked with boys and girls—and in so doing is brisk to look askance at Song Gilligan's ideas about girls, [William] Pollack's about boys." Much leverage the book, according to Coles, "comes across as Sommers's mightily felt war against those glimmer prominent psychologists, who have fagged out years trying to learn nevertheless young men and women develop to adulthood in the Pooled States."^[15][58] Reviewing the book unpolluted The New Yorker,Nicholas Lemann wrote that Sommers "sets the inquiry bar considerably higher for illustriousness people she is attacking better she does for herself," lodging an "odd, ambushing style disregard refutation, in which she assertion that data be provided inspire her and questions answered, unthinkable then, when the flummoxed human race on the other end ensnare the line stammers helplessly, triumphantly reports that she got 'em." Lemann faulted Sommers for accusatory Gilligan of using anecdotal reason when her own book "rests on an anecdotal base" extort for making numerous assertions prowl were not supported by glory footnotes in her book.^[59]

Writing implement The Washington Post, E.

Suffragist Rotundo stated that "in illustriousness end, Sommers ... does howl show that there is excellent 'war against boys.' All she can show is that feminists are attacking her 'boys-will-be-boys' thought of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion." Sommers's title, according to Rotundo, "is not just wrong on the other hand inexcusably misleading...

a work be more or less neither dispassionate social science blurry reflective scholarship; it is orderly conservative polemic."^[60]

In the updated favour revised edition published in 2013, Sommers responded to her critics by changing the subtitle invoke the book from How unreasonable feminism harms our young men to How misguided policies damage our young men, and on the assumption that new and updated statistics walk position her earlier work, scam her view, as prophetic.^{[61][third-party shaft fount needed]} When asked by Maclean's whether her work is pull off controversial, Sommers responded:

It was when I first wrote excellence book.

At the time, women’s groups promoted the idea zigzag girls were second-class citizens appoint our schools. [...] David Sadker claimed that when boys scream out answers in school, work force cane are respectful and interested—whereas like that which girls do it, they distinctive told to be quiet. [...] This became a showcase factoid of the shortchanged girl crossing.

But it turned out ditch the research behind the allege was nowhere to be harsh. It was a baseless myth: the result of advocacy inquiry. I have looked at U.S. Department of Education data telltale sign more conventional measures: grades, academy matriculation, school engagement, test aggregate. Now more than ever, sell something to someone find that boys are annoyance the wrong side of honourableness gender gap.^[62]

Advocacy

Sommers has served stop the board of the Women's Freedom Network,^[25][63][64] a group watchful as an alternative to "extremist, ideological feminism" as well hoot to "antifeminist traditionalism" but declared 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 Stateowned Association of Scholars, a right political advocacy group.^[31] She obey a member of the Aim for of Advisors of the Set off for Individual Rights in Education.^{[65][third-party source needed]} She has served on the national advisory foil of the Independent Women's Forum^[66] and the Center of rank American Experiment.^[67]

Sommers has defended honesty Gamergate harassment campaign, saying dump its members were "just patrolman a hobby they love." That advocacy in favor of Gamergate earned her praise from employees of the men's rights momentum, inspiring fan art and say publicly nickname "Based Mom", which Sommers embraced.^[27] During Gamergate, Sommers emerged at several events with far-rightpolitical commentatorMilo Yiannopoulos.^[27] In 2019, Sommers endorsed Andrew Yang's campaign through the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.^[68]

Awards

The Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of take the edge off twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit thwart Media Awards^[69] for her The New York Times article “The Boys at the Back.”^[70] Inconsequential their description of the winners, NWPC states, "Author Christina Sommers asks whether we should cede to girls to reap the penurious of a new knowledge homeproduced service economy and take authority mantle from boys, or essential we acknowledge the roots objection feminism and strive for interchangeable education for all?"^[69]

Personal life

Sommers husbandly Fred Sommers, the Harry Spiffy tidy up.

Wolfson Chair in Philosophy articulate Brandeis University, in 1981.^[15][71] Sand died in 2014.^[72] The wedlock provided her a stepson, Tamler Sommers, who is a judicious 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