What Feminism Means Today: Speaking with Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers is the author of books such as Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys. She is currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and previously taught philosophy at Clark University. A staunch supporter of what she calls “equity feminism,” Dr. Sommers believes that modern feminism has taken a turn towards a victim mentality that turns men into the opponent, instead of moving together towards greater equality. In this July 23rd conversation with Merion West’s Erich Prince, Dr. Sommers discusses the current state of men and women in the labor force, the differences between equity and gender feminism, and the future of the feminist movement.

In your book Who Stole Feminism?, you make this distinction between “gender feminism” and “equity feminism,” the former of which you view as being a negative trend and removed from the realities of being a woman today. What are some of the ways in which this skew towards gender feminism manifests itself in our society today?

I am a strong supporter of classical equity feminism—the sort of feminism that won women the vote, educational opportunity, and many other freedoms. Equity feminism developed out of the European Enlightenment: it wants for women what it wants for everyone—opportunity, dignity, and liberty. But equity feminism has never been that popular in the academy. Feminist theorists, led by the dazzling legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, view our society as a pervasive and all-encompassing patriarchy. It is not enough to change laws or reform customs. The sex/gender system itself has to be dismantled, thus my term “gender feminism.”

I never bought the idea of the U.S. being a patriarchy or a rigid sex/gender system—not in the 1980s, and certainly not today. To me, gender feminism has always seemed like a conspiracy theory. There is no way to prove it wrong. Anyone who tries can be dismissed as an unwitting tool of the system.