TDR Interview: Christina Hoff Sommers

By Viraj Patel | Monday, June 2, 2003

Once a philosophy professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Christina Hoff Sommers took a career turn in 1994 when she published her book Who Stole Feminism?How Women Have Betrayed Women. Originally an essay for The Atlantic Monthly, the book became an immediate success upon release, bringing her fame as well as the ire of many feminists and academics for its iconoclastic viewpoints. Ms. Sommers has since become the Chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Independent Women's Forum and the W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she continues to study feminism and morality in American culture.In 2000 she published another successful book The War Against Boys.Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and she has spoken on such television shows as Nightline, 20/20, Crossfire, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and 60 Minutes.Ms. Sommers came to Dartmouth on May 1 to deliver a talk called 'Sex, Lies, and Feminism.'

The Dartmouth Review: What is the state of feminism on campuses today?

Christina Hoff Sommers: The feminism on campuses today tends to be dominated by hardline feminists, feminists from the more eccentric wing of the movement who believe that women are from Venus and men are from Hell. The typical women's center is largely monopolized by young women who I would describe as radical, inclined towards male-bashing, and who are rather hostile toward anyone who disagrees with them.So I would say that it's certainly not a model of inclusivity or diversity. They don't welcome those who don't stick pretty close to the party line.

TDR: How would you compare the influence of feminists today versus in the 1960's when they had their heyday?

CHS: I think they have less and less influence on students because, as I said, many of the academic feminists are rather angry at men and get carried away with victimology. They are somewhat humorless. College-aged women between eighteen and nineteen tend to be fond of their male friends and have humor and vitality and simply aren't going to be drawn to that melancholy philosophy. So I don't think they have tremendous power over the minds of students; however, they do have tenure and there are large numbers of hardline feminists found in English departments, gender studies, and foreign languages. I'm sure Dartmouth, you know, is an exception [laughs].

TDR: It is common to hear on campuses that that gender is a social construction. What do you think are some of the important differences between men and women? Why should we embrace these differences?

CHS: Well, someone should tell the Women's Studies professors, the gender experts, that mother nature is not a feminist. Gender is not a social construction—there's a biological basis for the difference. Of course, culture has an influence, but over all, males have better spatial reasoning skills, women have better verbal skills. Men are more physically aggressive, females are more nurturing. There are differences in not only aptitudes but preferences. You're much more likely to find females in fields that engage them as nurturers—taking care of children, early childhood education, nursing. You'll be able to find more men in what my friend Camille Paglia calls the 'people-free zones:' computer technology, metallurgy, or electrical engineering.Now, there are exceptions. As many as twenty percent of women will completely defy the stereotype or twenty percent of men—but eighty percent embody them. So there are exceptions, I'm just giving the rules.

TDR: You often use the terms gender feminism and equity feminism.What do they mean?

CHS: Yes, I consider myself an equity feminist and I hope that most of my fellow Americans are equity feminists because I believe it's the great American success story. Equity feminism is informed by the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, which flowered in the eighteenth century with ideas of the intrinsic dignity of all human beings, the essential equality of human beings. It's the foundation for our constitutional democracy. The sort of feminism I believe in applies those principles to everyday life. So, for example, as an equity feminist, I would not like to see arbitrary barriers put up as they once were, when women were not allowed in certain professions or mistreated if they entered those professions. So I don't think the project of equity feminism is completed but the 'fairness glass' is three quarters full and getting fuller all the time. So as I said I think it's something—really a great achievement.

Gender feminism is not based on the European Enlightenment. It grows out of the radical movements of the sixties and early seventies, which were informed by the philosophy of Marx and, more recently, French philosophers such as Michel Foucault. It takes a very, very harsh view of all things in American society. The typical gender feminist would believe that American society is patriarchal, oppressive; they refer to male hegemony, that women are a subordinate class. I find this absurd—actually, it's not so much absurd as much there's just no basis in reality for this world view. I mean look around. More women than men in this country go to college. Women live, on average, five or six years longer than men. Women have more choices than men in how they live their lives. That does not sound like a description of an oppressed class. And yet you find victim feminists on campus, or as I call them gender feminists, complaining about the subordinate position of women in American society.

TDR: You have said that in terms of gender equity you think that the 'fairness glass' might be three-fourth's full. What do you think are some of the ways that women are still subordinate to men?

CHS: Well, I don't really think that there are any ways that women as a group are subordinate. I think that there are individual women who are in difficult situations. But, you know, it would be hard to say that there aren't just as many men who, in their own way, are in difficulty as well. I guess if someone asked me what I thought are the remaining equity issues, I think that my generation of feminists did not solve the problem of how to combine a career with raising children.It's just simply an issue that remains, as I said, so far without a good solution. So that's something I think we need to work on. But because I believe men and women are different, I don't quite see the answers as retraining little boys to play with dolls and be nurturing just like girls so they can take care of children. I mean, there are feminists who are trying to do that. I have written about them in my book The War Against Boys. That's not the solution, but I think we can find some more creative ideas.I also believe the major goal for equity feminism is to export the rights that women in the United States enjoy to women in other parts of the world, who are primarily in the third world, where they are egregiously oppressed.

TDR: It is commonly thought that boys are favored to girls in the classroom.What do you think?

CHS: That would be a big surprise to most boys, to most teachers, to any government statistician who's paying attention to the Department of Education. The average seventeen-year-old boy in the United States has the writing skills of a fourteen-year-old girl. Boys are three years behind in writing, a year and a half behind in reading, and far less likely to go to college than the girl sitting next to him. Once they get to college, girls get—well all through school, girls get better grades. You find more girls at the high end—in terms of grades and academic achievement—and more boys at the low end. There's simply no credible case to be made that girls are second class citizens in the classroom. On the contrary, they're winning all the prizes.

TDR: And you think these poor performance statistics about boys are the result of a flawed education system?

CHS: It's a little more complicated than that.I blame groups like the American Association of University Women and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, because they disseminated this information and allowed the country—gave the country—a false portrait of its children, and that was wrong. And they made it seem as though the boys were just thriving educationally and leaving the girls way behind. But the reverse was true. So I do fault those groups. What I think happened is that the problems with boys were denied altogether or ignored.

TDR: It's been about three years since your last book came out. Have you observed any changes in the state of the education system since then?

CHS: I've seen improvements. For example, the 'Take Your Daughter To Work Day' became the 'Take Your Child To Work Day.' People realized that boys needed to think about their futures because, in fact, Department of Education studies show that girls have higher aspirations. The typical ninth or tenth grade girl—actually, even girls in their senior year—have higher aspirations than boys. Also, there's much more attention now paid to the literacy needs of boys, to trying to make the classroom a little friendlier to boys, but we still have a long way to go. Overall right now, the classrooms are rather hostile and will remain so until really there's some galvanizing movement to improve the situation.

TDR: A current fad in the elementary and middle school systems seems to be to de-emphasize competitiveness and aggressiveness, and focus instead on feelings and self-esteem. How do you feel about that?

CHS: I think it's a very good example of how schools are moving away from 'just the way boys are.' They are competitive; they will be more engaged if the teacher introduces a contest, for example. One of the most successful classrooms I encountered was an inner city school in Baltimore, and these were at-risk kids as it was—and they were so much at risk that the school system was experimenting with all-male and all-female classes. In the all-male class, the teacher—first of all, he really liked boys, that's important that teachers do because they're more of a handful. This teacher divided the class into teams and everything was done for points. He understood the mind of little boys, and suddenly what had been very serious problems—chronic truancy and tardiness, for example—reversed because if you didn't get to school on time or you missed a day, your team lost points. And boys will do anything for their team. Now I think this would work for girls as well, but for boys, it's simply well known that that's just how they're made.

TDR: You've said that the British are ten years ahead of us in recognizing the gender gap. What do you think they're doing right that we're not?

CHS: Oh, well, the British are experimenting with all-male classrooms; they're developing a special pedagogy for males, especially at-risk, semi-literate males who will have no future in an information economy, in a knowledge economy, unless they become educated. So they're reaching out to these boys and doing all sorts of politically incorrect things that would never be permitted here. For example, as I said, all-male classrooms, bringing back competition, bringing back books that little boys like with male heroes, adventure stories, war stories. We're quite a ways from doing these sorts of innovative strategies adopted by the British.

TDR: Well, a part of that system, as you said, was to appeal to the aggressiveness of boys by reintroducing war stories. But in America, especially after the Columbine incident, where many parents are extremely concerned about school violence, how do you balance the two interests?

CHS: Well, first of all, violence is not that common in schools, so one has to be careful about the statistics. School shootings are actually rarer now than in previous decades, its just that they happen in white suburbs, instead of the inner cities, and the news media gives it a lot more coverage. And of course, these were very bizarre crimes, but they were committed by two sociopathic boys who are not representative of American children. A lot of experts moved in and wanted to take the Columbine shooters as emblematic of American males. I find that totally unacceptable. I mean how many boys commit violent felonies—less than one percent under eighteen are arrested according to the FBI for violent felonies so you have to be very careful not to take something that is a bizarre anomaly and pretend that it's the norm.

I think that as a country—I hope this is changing—but for a while we were ready to take monsters as symbols of American young males. What I take as a symbol are the soldiers who are fighting in Iraq, the rescue workers who were at Ground Zero. They reminded the country that there's something called honorable masculinity—that the survival of our society depends on the valor and courage of our soldiers, who are mostly male. There are certainly females who are wonderful soldiers, and I'm actually not against women being in combat, but I think that they will always be a very small percentage of the armed forces. It's largely a male pursuit. So I would look at a member of the armed forces or one of the firefighters or rescue workers at Ground zero as an example of masculinity, not the Columbine killers. They're the example of sociopaths and always have and always will be.

TDR: You were recently quoted in the Washington Post expressing concerns that male enrollment and performance in college is declining. A reader wrote back citing statistics that women make only seventy-six percent of what men earn on average and that only fourteen percent of Congress is female. It seems that whenever a statistic showing men lagging behind women is cited, two other statistics, whether relevant or not, showing women lagging behind men are volleyed back.How do you respond?

CHS: Well, first of all, I don't accept the way she uses that statistic, seventy-six cents on the dollar. I mean let's be reasonable. If an employer could pay a woman seventy-six cents for what he could pay a man a dollar for the same amount of work, clever entrepreneurs would fire all their male workers and hire only females. Now why hasn't that happened? The reason is because that statistic is just a distortion. All that is is a snapshot of all the men and women working full time in the country right now. It doesn't take into account length of time in the workplace, it doesn't take into account how many hours you work per week. Even among full time workers, men work more hours on average. It doesn't take into account your profession. What if more men are in fields like—I don't know—plumbing or car mechanics that make more than, say, someone that works in childcare. Once you get into the details, what happens even with feminist economists when they look carefully and do the proper controls, the wage gap begins to narrow and there are just a few cents that can't be explained. It could be discrimination, we don't know—but it's certainly not that seventy-six cents. That's a piece of misinformation.

And fourteen percent of women in Congress... Well, women, if they become candidates—and they are, more and more—women are coming through the State Houses and they're Governors, Senators, State Legislators. It takes a while, but we're going to see a lot of progress. Women win elections, and voters don't just reject someone because of discrimination. It's also harder to recruit women. The pool of women who are willing to run is smaller than that of the men, so, again, it's really not an issue so much of discrimination but of preferences, choices.

TDR: What about statistics that say only seventeen percent of engineering graduates and twenty-seven percent of computer science graduates are women?Couldn't this become a problem for women as we move into more of an information economy?

CHS: Well, only about nine percent of the jobs in the country are connected with computer technology, and what would be worrisome to me was if women were arbitrarily prevented from entering these fields. Now women used to be arbitrarily prevented from entering fields like medicine and law and business, but when the barriers came down, you couldn't stop us—we just went through and became what we wanted to become. Women wanted to be lawyers and they have now achieved parity in law school. Women want to be doctors and have achieved parity in medical school. The same has occurred with business. In engineering, it appears to be the case that they do not have, on average, as much interest in engineering as medicine, law, psychology, social work.

Now certain fields are dominated by women: psychology for example, veterinary medicine, and pharmacy. So I think you have to factor in the sex difference. Feminists never do that. Or if they do, they do it only when it suits their purpose—they're very agitated with the Fortune 500, for example. You know, there are hardly any women who are CEO's, but on the other hand, the vast majority of violent felons serving in our prisons are males, and they don't consider that an inequity. And it's possible that something about males might explain why they show up on the extremes of success and failure. There may be more aggression, and there may be more of monomaniacal obsessive focus on a purpose. If it's a good one they may be immensely successful; if it's aberrational, they may be spectacularly unsuccessful.

TDR: Is this why you think that the 'natural competitiveness of boys is responsible for much of what is right in the world'?

CHS: If you were to review the feminist textbooks, it looks as though masculinity is a pathology. They are full of stories about basically sociopathic males who are rapists and brutal batterers. What they've edited out is the majority of men who are good decent people. What I'm talking about is honorable masculinity.In this country, for example, the majority of American men are law-abiding and hardworking. What happens in the Women's Studies curriculum is that pathological masculinity is viewed as the norm. So you'll hear a lot about the Columbine killers or you'll hear a lot about the violent wife abusers, but you will not hear about heroic masculinity or merely honorable masculinity which I believe is the norm.

If you don't raise a little boy to have character, you know, good character, with a strong moral compass, you turn someone into a person who can be very dangerous. Masculinity without ethics is surely dangerous to society. But masculinity with ethics is a powerful force for good. So most societies spend a great deal of effort civilizing their young men.It's especially important in this country to continue the tradition of teaching boys to be gentlemen.Again it seems as though some of my colleagues—the hardline feminists—want to train little boys according to feminist specifications to be more like girls. So we find efforts in the school to feminize little boys, to get them to do the same activities as little girls—not to engage in that rough-and-tumble, happy, masculine play that they so much enjoy. What I suggest is that there is an alternative: its called ethics, its called helping them to become gentlemen.

TDR: Thanks you Ms. Sommers.

TDR Interview: Christina Hoff Sommers

Article Tools

Related Articles