In this wonderfully harsh polemic against modern feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers essentially sets out to hunt a mouse with an elephant gun.  In a successful effort to demonstrate that radical feminists have betrayed the concerns of the vast majority of women, she does a great job of reporting horror stories from the gender wars, but she is not as good at analyzing the ideology that is causing them.  When she's done, her target has certainly been destroyed, but there's not much meat left for us to chew on.

Her basic thesis is inarguable: the "First Wave" of feminism was based on the idea of equity, that women should have equal opportunity to succeed in society; but the "Second Wave" of feminism is based on a fight against men and an imaginary patriarchy bent on subjugating women.   Unfortunately, the book consists almost exclusively of presenting anecdotes to demonstrate that the second half of this thesis is accurate.  Whereas, if only Ms Hoff Sommers had taken the time to examine her own argument and place it in a broader historical and philosophical context, she could have both obviated the need for presenting quite so much detailed proof and taken advantage of the powerful preexisting critiques of this same tendency in other groups.

The transition she identifies is after all nothing more than the common historical movement by disadvantaged interest groups from a demand for equality of opportunity to a demand for equality of results.  The Second Wave feminists, or gender feminists as she refers to them, are simply your garden variety radical egalitarians.  Their ideas are nothing new--they are borrowed from Marxists and Black activists and others--all that has changed is who gets grouped in the victim class (in this case it's women rather than proletarians or people of color) and who gets grouped in the oppressor class (men instead of the bourgeoisie or whites).  The solution offered by the gender feminists is nothing new either; when equality of opportunity fails to produce equal results, egalitarians only have one recourse and that is to place restrictions on those who are succeeding in the existing system.

Egalitarians are always coercive utopians.  Having determined an ideal set of outcomes, but unable to produce them in the rough and tumble of the free market, they resort to limitations on certain individuals and classes, and to privileges for others, as the only means to reach their cherished goal.  It is hardly surprising that some 100 years into the era of women's rights, the most radical fringe element of the women's movement should have reached this stage.

This book offers an important portrait of the real life effects that these feminists and their authoritarian tactics are having, particularly in American schools.  The litany of abuses which these activists have perpetrated should serve as a wake up call to anyone who is concerned about the decline of the educational system and who believes in freedom of expression, in basic civil rights, in equality of opportunity and, ultimately, in the future of women specifically and society in general.  One can only wish that the author had drawn back a little from her passionate but parochial concern with gender feminism and integrated her argument into the much wider ongoing struggle against coercive egalitarians everywhere.

For a fuller discussion of some of these ideas, see:

Hayek, Frederick
    -The Road to Serfdom

Henry, William A.  III  (1950-1994)
    -In Defense of Elitism (1994)  (read Orrin's review, Grade: B-)

(Reviewed:05-Jul-00)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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