The Fight for Equality Continues: The Problems of Christina Hoff Sommers’s History of Feminism

Recently Bill Frezza of Real Clear Radio Hour interviewed Christina Hoff Sommers about her new book, Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why it Matters Today.[1] Frezza also wrote a follow-up piece in the opinion section of Forbes magazine.[2] As Frezza describes it, Sommers’s book uncovers the hidden history of feminism and its implications for women today.

To start, Sommers identifies two major strands of feminism that have shaped the struggle for women’s rights: “egalitarian feminism” and “maternal feminism.” (For those familiar with Sommers’s earlier works, she previously labeled these competing strands as “gender feminism” and “equity feminism”).

Sommers traces the origins of egalitarian feminism to eighteenth-century English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft. According to Sommers, Wollstonecraft believed that “Men and women were essentially the same in their spirits and souls, [and] deserving of the same rights.” At its core, egalitarian feminism, as Sommers explains it, espoused the rights of both men and women to individual liberty and freedom. For Sommers, Wollstonecraft was “centuries ahead of her time.”

Sommers compares Wollstonecraft’s egalitarian feminism to the maternal feminism of Hannah More, an early-nineteenth-century English writer and philanthropist. As Sommers puts it, “Hannah met women where they were. She believed there was a feminine nature and that women were caring and nurturing, different from men but deserving equality.” Maternal feminists extolled the virtues of domesticity and they believed that there was a unique feminize value system. Above all, for maternal feminists, motherhood embodied womanhood. Maternal feminism, then, upheld the separate but equally important societal roles of men and women.[3]

Sommers goes on to discuss the women’s movement in the later half of the twentieth century. Specifically, she retraces the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Sommers insists that the leaders of NOW wanted to revolutionize American society in its entirety. Moreover, Sommers argues that NOW radicalized the egalitarian strand of feminism, which caused everyday-Americans to become disenchanted with the women’s movement as a whole. In all, Sommers contends that the radical nature of NOW led to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the demise of second wave feminism in the early 1980s.[4]

In the end, Sommers insists that both strands of the feminist impulse need to work together. Most importantly, she maintains that American feminists should stop complaining about what she sees as trivial issues in American society. For Sommers, these misguided efforts include the protesting of popular songs that objectify women. According to Sommers, American women should refocus their efforts towards international concerns—particularly the condition of women in what she calls “developing countries.” To this point, she explains, “I wish so much that American young women instead of talking about being traumatized and triggered by a statue or a song, were thinking about women in other countries, reaching out.” In short, Sommers concludes her analysis with a call to action: American women should work together to help women in other countries whose fight for equality remains unfinished.[5]

There are several problems with Sommers’s analysis. To begin, her description of so-called egalitarian feminism is particularly troubling. Her contention that Mary Wollstonecraft was a woman ahead of her time is a misleading assertion. To be sure, Mary Wollstonecraft advocated what she thought of as a forward-looking view of women’s education; however, traditional ideas about men and women’s societal roles are also embedded in her arguments. For example, in her work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft justified education for women, because “if political and moral subjects were opened to them…this is the only way to make them properly attentive to their domestic duties. An active mind embraces the whole circle of its duties, and finds time enough for all. It is not, I assert, a bold attempt to emulate masculine virtues.” As well, in a later section of the same work, Wollstonecraft asserted, “by the exercise of their bodies and minds women would acquire that mental activity so necessary in the maternal character…Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers.”[6]

In other words, Mary Wollstonecraft contended that the state should invest in women’s education, because education would help women become better citizens, which would then help them become better wives and mothers. In sum, Wollstonecraft did advocate a pioneering view of women’s right to education that enhanced women’s value as citizens. Yet, we should not ignore how contemporary ideas about women’s primary duties in the domestic sphere also influenced the contours of her arguments.

It seems that the origins of Sommers’s egalitarian feminism can be more accurately traced to Simone de Beauvoir. In her work, The Second Sex, Beauvoir argued that women were not biologically determined and their domestic roles were not essential products of nature; rather, Beauvoir maintained, such roles were cultural and societal constructions that could be changed through human initiative.[7]

Sommers’s description of NOW as an extremist group that radicalized egalitarian feminism also contains flaws. As I discuss in my dissertation, reformist and revolutionary impulses shaped the renewed female activism of the 1970s and early 1980s. NOW and other national organizations represented the reformist impulse; in sum, this branch used the established legal, political, and media institutions to secure measures that sought to combat sex discrimination and improve women’s societal position. These reformist organizations eventually came to support the ERA as an essential tool for ensuring that women had the same access as men to participate in mainstream society.[8]

While the reformist branch worked to enrich existing society, the revolutionary impulse wanted to smash up the entire societal structure. The small, local groups that made up the radical strand were more fluid than the reformist national organizations, because they prided themselves on their lack of conventional modes of organization.[9] More importantly, Jo Freeman reminds us that a considerable number of the groups associated with the radical branch did not explicitly, or actively, support the ERA; for these groups, the measure was inherently flawed, since it only aimed to incorporate women into an already fundamentally corrupt societal system.[10] Thus, the renewed female activism of the late-twentieth century did feature radical elements; however, it is wrong to suggest that such elements were defining aspects of NOW and the struggle for the ERA. [11]

Another problem with Sommers’s analysis is its implicit adherence to what Susan Douglas has identified as a societal obsession with “cat fights.” In her work, Where the Girls Are, Douglas explains that the American media commonly portrays women as impassioned animals who are constantly fighting with one another.[12] Certainly, Sommers concludes her work by urging American women to come together to spread what she sees as the successes of American society. Even so, her overreaching argument depicts the history of feminism as a struggle between women, about women, and only concerning women. This narrow description not only obscures the broader historical significance of the struggle for women’s rights; it also reinforces the discriminatory attitude that women are less capable than men at working together.[13]

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Sommers’s analysis is her suggestion that the fight for gender equality in America has been completed. As Soraya Chemaly recently documented, the remaining disparities between men and women’s societal positions are not trivial issues. For example, Chemaly shows that everyday sexism, such as street harassment or workplace bias, has become so ingrained in our society that we have come to accept it as normal and natural. Yet, as Chemaly demonstrates, these entrenched sexist behaviors restrict women’s access to political, economic, and social power. To this point, Chemaly explains:

We have our children in a media environment that marginalizes women’s historical efforts, sexualizes girls with  outdated rules, provides gender imbalanced social structures and, for good measure, incorporates gendered classroom dynamics that hurt both boys and girls. Why is anyone shocked by the confidence gap? By the time boys and girls leave high school and enter college, boys are twice as likely to say they are prepared to run for office…The sad fact is that while it is polite to express sexist ideas, confronting them is considered the height of rudeness and humorlessness.[14]

As Chemaly contends, sexist ideas are deeply woven into our societal practices and traditions, which sustains the gap between men and women’s positions. While we should certainty help women in other countries who are struggling to secure equal rights for men and women, we should also recognize that the fight continues in America as well.

~Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.

 

[1] Christina Hoff Sommers, Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2013).

[2] Bill Freeza, “Studying the History of Feminism Might Save Feminists from Themselves,” Forbes, 9 June 2014.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; repr., Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996), 176 & 183.

[7] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; repr., New York: Random House, 2012).

[8] Rebecca DeWolf, “Amending Nature: The Equal Rights Amendment and Gendered Citizenship in America, 1920-1963,” (PhD diss., American University, Washington D.C., 2014), 416-434.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Jo Freeman, “Feminist Organizations and Activities from Suffrage to Women’s Liberation,” in Women: A Feminist Perspective Fourth Edition, ed. Jo Freeman (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1989), 554.

[11] DeWolf, “Amending Nature,” 416-434.

[12] Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994). 221-244.

[13] This aspect of Sommers’s analysis is most evident in her discussion of the ERA conflict in the 1970s and the opposition role of Phyllis Schlafly. See Freeza, “Studying the History of Feminism.”

[14] Soraya Chemaly, “Do You See These 10 Everyday Sexisms?” Everyday Feminism, 21 June 2014.

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