Who Stole Feminism?

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book on American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, then a professor of philosophy at Clark University. It belongs to the debate over American feminism in the 1990s and is aimed at a general readership rather than at specialists.

Sommers's central thesis is that feminism has split into two currents. On one side is equity feminism, with which she identifies, which seeks equal legal rights and fair treatment for men and women. On the other is what she calls "gender feminism", which holds that society is a patriarchy or "male hegemony" in which a sex/gender system keeps women submissive, and which aims to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. In her account, it is this second current that has come to dominate American feminist discourse.

Sommers argues that gender feminism has spread claims that are false or exaggerated. She criticizes, among others, the figure of deaths from anorexia that Naomi Wolf attributed to the United States in The Beauty Myth (1990), and the idea, popularized by activists and the media, that domestic violence rose by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday. She also disputes the portrayal of William Blackstone as a defender of a husband's right to beat his wife. She points to the influence of thinkers such as Marx, Sartre, Marcuse and Fanon, and of texts such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), in shaping the movement's direction. Finally, she denounces that these positions have come to exert considerable control over women's studies programs, hiring and funding committees, and that dissenters are labeled sexist, reactionary or traitors.

The book received sharply polarized reactions. Conservative outlets and some academics praised it as a bold challenge to feminist ideology, while progressive critics found it partial and marred by errors in its sources. A widely discussed case was Nina Auerbach's review in The New York Times Book Review, which described Sommers's reasoning as vitiated by logical flaws; the episode sparked debate about the fairness of the review itself. Over time, the book has been cited as a founding text in debates about third-wave feminism and the dispute between equality feminism and difference feminism.