Over the last decade or two, many women in the United States have distanced themselves from the feminist movement. It appears that a growing number of them associate feminism with anger and hostile rhetoric and have therefore concluded that they are not really feminists. This was reflected in a recent Time/CNN poll which showed that although 57 percent of the women responding felt there was a need for a strong women's movement, a full 63 percent said they didn't consider themselves feminists.
This fact is not surprising to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the controversial polemic Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women. Sommers contends that feminism has taken a wrong turn in recent years. It has become too self-absorbed, too unrepresentative, and too punitive to dissenters, she says. The conviction that women remain besieged and subject to a relentless male backlash has turned the movement inward. "We hear very little today about how women can join with men on equal terms to contribute to universal human culture," she writes. "Instead, feminist ideology has taken a divisive gynocentric turn, and the emphasis now is on women as a political class whose interests are at odds with the interests of men."
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former professor of philosophy at Clark University in Massachusetts. I met with her in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Who Stole Feminism?
Full interview is here. Interview by Scott London.
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