SOURCE: Schiffren, Lisa. Review of Who Stole Feminism?, by Christina Hoff Sommers. American Spectator 27, no. 10 (October 1994): 69-71.

In the following review, Schiffren asserts that Who Stole Feminism? is a brilliant and informative book, but comments that Sommers fails to place feminism in a larger political context.

Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? is a long overdue correction in the marketplace of ideas, which in recent years has been glutted with feminist cant masquerading as statistics. This book brilliantly describes the currently dominant feminism—Sommers calls it “gender feminism”—which comes largely from the network of scholars, administrators, and researchers who have wormed their way into universities. Gender feminism holds that “our society is best described as a patriarchy, a ‘male hegemony,’ … in which the dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive.” Its leaders believe that “all our institutions, from the state to the family to the...