Christina Hoff Sommers – Wikipedia

Christina Hoff-Sommers (Petaluma, 28 September 1950) is an American essayist and philosopher who deals with culture, adolescence and morality in American society.

His best known book to the general public is Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women . Sommers is considered within the American feminist current.

Of Jewish religion, Sommers was born in 1950 from Kenneth and Dolores Hoff. He attended the University of Paris, obtained a degree from the University of New York in 1971 and achieved a PhD in philosophy at Brandeis University in 1979. He holds a video blog, “The Facual Feminist”.

From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In 1980, he became assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when he became WH Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. During the mid -1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the theme of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (1984) and Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics (1986). In 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the books were “extremely well cared for” and “particularly strong on the motivation to study virtue and ethics first, and on theoretical discussions on virtue and vice in general”.

Starting from the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which he strongly criticized feminist philosopher and American feminism in general. In an article by Public Affairs Quarterly of 1988 entitled “The academy should support academic feminism?”, Sommers wrote that “the intellectual and moral credentials of academic feminism require an in -depth examination” and stated that “the tactics used by academic feminists have all been employed once or l Another to promote other forms of academic imperialism “. In other articles entitled “The Feminist Revelation” It is ” Philosophers Against the Family “, who published in the early 90s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were” radical philosopher “who sought a radical social and cultural change, such as the abolition of the family unit, thus revealing their contempt for the royalty wishes of the “common woman”. These articles would constitute the basis for Who Stole Feminism? .

Christina Hoff Sommers operates a distinction between “gender feminism” (Gender Feminism) and
“Equality feminism” (Equity Feminism). He sees the first represented mainly within American universities and focused on the realization of a more or less radical change of gender roles and in the demolition of “patriarchy”. The “feminism of equality” (in which she identifies), instead, claims the only equality of rights and opportunities for the two sexes. The Sommers believes that most American women consider themselves satisfied with the results obtained by feminism in the last thirty years, although some steps towards effective equality may and must be undertaken.

The Sommers believes that the feminism of equality is not the most “noisy” voice within the feminist current. Referring to numerous conferences on “gender feminism” in which he participated, it notes that the main problem of “gender feminism” consists in presenting women as fragile and subject to mental manipulations by men.
In a fairly similar way to Daphne Patai, it is convinced that the current American feminism is excessively focused on the sexual aspect of the man-woman relationship. In particular, it does not share the vision that male hegemony is realized through a compulsory heterosexuality
imposed by Patriarchate at the expense of women. Attending “gender feminism” to be a more than scientific religious movement, since it is a closed system that is not falsifiable and which interprets any data as confirmation of the patriarchal oppression. ^[first]

In his book Who Stole Feminism?, He describes how the feminist movement has moved to extreme positions, denying the original inspiring principles of equality of the two sexes.

Sommers married in 1981 Fred Sommers, owner of the philosophy chair Harry A. Wolfson at Brandeis University, and disappeared in 2014. The wedding provided her with a stepson, Tamler Sommers, also a philosopher.

Books [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Articles [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

• 1988, “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?” Public Affairs Quarterly 2 (1988): 97-120.
• 1990, “The Feminist Revelation” Social Philosophy and Policy 8, no. 1 (1990): 152-57.
• 1990, “Do These feminists Like Women?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 21, 2 (Fall 1990): 66-74

Other [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

• 1984, Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics . Co-edited with Robert J. Fogelin for the 2nd and 3rd editions, and with Fred Sommers for the 4th and subsequent editions. ISBN 0155948903.
• 1986, Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics . Co-edited with Robert J. Fogelin. ISBN 0-15-577110-8.