Who Stole Feminism?

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women

Cover of the first edition
Author	Christina Hoff Sommers
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Feminism in the United States
Published	June 3, 1994
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	320
ISBN

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split within between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.

Sommers argues that, "American feminism is currently dominated by a group of women who seek to persuade the public that American women are not the free creatures we think we are". She refers to the ideology of feminists who believe that "our society is best described as a patriarchy, a 'male hegemony,' a 'sex/gender system' in which the dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive", as "gender feminism". She identifies with "equity feminism", based on belief in fair treatment for everyone. She criticizes feminist authors such as Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem, writing that in The Beauty Myth (1990), Wolf falsely claims that in the United States 150,000 women die of anorexia each year, a claim repeated by Steinem. According to Sommers, while "most experts are reluctant to give exact figures", the actual figure is likely to be somewhere between 100 and 400 deaths per year. Sommers criticizes Sheila Kuehl, Laura Flanders of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and other writers and activists, for helping to popularize the claim that "incidence of domestic battery tended to rise by 40 percent" on Super Bowl Sunday, writing that the claim, widely reported by the American media, was unsupported by any study. Sommers argues that feminists have falsely accused English legal historian William Blackstone of supporting a man's right to beat his wife. She writes that British law has prohibited wife beating since the 1700s, and American law has done the same since before the American Revolution, though the laws were sometimes only "indifferently enforced."