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WHO STOLE FEMINISM? HOW WOMEN HAVE BETRAYED WOMEN Christina Hoff Sommers. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Within the present backlash climate, the publication of Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women was largely foreseeable. Like its 1993 sister text, Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism On Campus which depicted feminists as frigid hysterics who created the date rape crisis, Sommers' controversial J'Accuse provides an extremely uncomplimentary portrait of feminists as a group of frenzied "gender warriors" in quest of recruits, vindication, and ammunition. Predictably, most North American feminists have relegated this book to their overcrowded backlash shelf, a justified reaction to Sommers' smug, often shortsighted liberal idealism, and occasional McCarthyite rhetoric. Apart from her stale critique of the chimera known in backlash vocabulary as "victim feminism," however, Sommers does advance at least one legitimate criticism which the feminist movement, recently plagued by exceptionally bad press, cannot afford to ignore.
An associate professor of philosophy at Boston's Clark University, Sommers takes her book's title from her main contention that "gender feminists have stolen feminism from a mainstream that had never acknowledged their leadership." It was the ascendancy of this new feminism, characterized by gynocentrism and misandrism, over liberal "equity feminism," and not a media backlash as Susan Faludi has claimed, that led to women's large-scale defection from the movement. Upholding Naomi Wolfs Utopian presentation of women's...