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Christina Hoff Sommers
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Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women Paperback – Illustrated, 1 May 1995

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 118 ratings
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In Who Stole Feminism?, philosophy professor Christina Sommers has exposed how a group of zealots are promoting a dangerous new agenda that sets women against men in all spheres of life.

In case after case, Sommers shows how these extremists have propped up their arguments with highly questionable but well-funded research, presenting inflammatory and often inaccurate information and stifling any semblance of free and open scrutiny.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  4. Publication date
    1 May 1995
  5. Dimensions
    13.97 x 2.29 x 21.43 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    0684801566
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0684801568
  8. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. She has a PhD in philosophy from Brandeis University and was formerly a professor of philosophy at Clark University. Sommers has written for numerous publications and is the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She is married with two sons and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Revised ed. edition (1 May 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0684801566
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684801568
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.29 x 21.43 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 118 ratings

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Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Hoff Sommers

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
118 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book excellent, wonderful, and enjoyable. They also describe the content as enlightening, full of facts, and serious evidence. Readers mention it's relatable and rational.

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5 customers mention ‘Readability’5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book excellent, wonderful, and enjoyable. They say it's light-hearted.

"...A truly excellent read, and as one of the cover review states, Miss Sommers simply rams home the truth, through all the false statistics and lies..." Read more

"...It’s a very aspiring book to read and it’s full of facts and serious evidence." Read more

"...and, in-spite of the weight of her account, it is light-hearted and enjoyable.I cannot recommend this book enough." Read more

"Excellent book. Highly recommended, especially if you are about to do a gender studies.course. If you have already started the course you will..." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Scholarly content’3 positive0 negative

Customers find the content enlightening, full of facts, and serious evidence. They also say it's rational, referenced, and relatable.

"...It's rational, referenced and relatable. More than that, it's empowering. Not in a hollow, self-affirming, empty aphorisms way...." Read more

"...It’s a very aspiring book to read and it’s full of facts and serious evidence." Read more

"...Truly enlightening. Scholarly, de-void of frivolous and provocative opinion (un-like the standard gender-feminist outpourings) and, in-spite of the..." Read more

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Andy Geoghegan
5.0 out of 5 stars A Not-Quite Timeless Classic Which Is Still Relevant Today
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 November 2015
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I'd like to write an intelligent, dispassionate, objective appraisal of this book. I can't. It takes all of my self-control not to write "THIS BOOK IS AMAZING!" a thousand times and hit "Submit".

This book completely changed my notions of gender equality, and yes, feminism. It's rational, referenced and relatable. More than that, it's empowering. Not in a hollow, self-affirming, empty aphorisms way. Empowering in a way that equips women (and men, like myself) with the tools needed to address real inequality.

Sommers' approach of facts backed by evidence leaves me proud to say: "I am a feminist."

In all fairness, however, the book is not perfect. Originally published in 1994, while the core of the book is every bit as relevant now as then (if not more so), this is understandably a bit dated. Sommers is thorough and intelligent, but not infallible. While I would recommend this work to anyone (regardless of their feelings in feminism), it is important to approach this work with a mind which is open, but also critical (and to remember just how long ago 1994 was).
16 people found this helpful
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bucksman
5.0 out of 5 stars Another "must read" book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 July 2006
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The term "feminazi" was found after searching for something totally unrelated on Google. Not knowing what the term meant, I searched for more information and a reference was made to this book. I read the reviews, and thought it would make good reading.

A truly excellent read, and as one of the cover review states, Miss Sommers simply rams home the truth, through all the false statistics and lies that have permeated the subject matter. Example follows example of selective statistical analysis, and more worrying, the hijacking of US academia by this mindset. This mindset is alive and well, and growing nicely in the UK.

If anyone argues against the points made in this book, then please do it with real case facts and figures, not just opinion and ideology.

Some of the examples given had me laughing out loud - they are that good.
20 people found this helpful
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kuhdzong
5.0 out of 5 stars A brief and brilliant introduction of modern feminism
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 January 2021
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The author, Christina Hoff Sommers, has discussed many issues with the modern gender feminism on how they are trying to reform American cirrocumulus, how the university campuses have been under the tyranny of the intolerable authoritarian dictatorship of gender feminists and most importantly the flawed studies concluded by AAUW and other women’s groups.

It’s a very aspiring book to read and it’s full of facts and serious evidence.
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Dr. W
4.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of food for thought, although sadly very dated
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 July 2009
Having recently finished Prof. Hoff-Sommers' masterpiece 'The War Against Boys' I regressed backwards and read this, her first notable publication. It is wonderful to see how she had developed her literary style and grown academically; the gulf between these two works is substantial. Although she does briefly touch upon and allude to topics and themes she will later address in 'Boys', this work is almost entirely independent in thesis. However, like 'Boys', this text also shares an obvious attention to detail, a meticulous researching and reference and a passion and zest for the Truth.

What the author did in this text, when it was first published a decade ago, was to light the first match that broke the darkness that had since the late '60s been slowly enveloping a number of sociological disciplines which have become known colloquially as 'feminism'. This is in itself, no small feat, especially when one considers that up until this point, legitimate topics such as those raised and scrutinised in the book, have been off-limits to close examination and serious academic inspection. Anyone who 'dares' to question the authenticity or authority of anything put out by the female-supremacist machine, is immediately publicly tarred and feathered and labelled 'misogynistic', 'sexist' or 'scared of change'. This is of course merely smoke and mirrors, a primitive, anti-intellectual ploy used to silence critics and divert the nation's attention away from the real Truths. One of which is the massive funding that paranoia and guilt receives in the name of supposed academic research under the 'equality' or 'gender studies' umbrella. Another of which is the disproportionate percentage of public funds which are being pointlessly squandered by white middle-class, educated women in positions of privilege. Funds that could and should be used to help poor, under-educated white and non-white woman, who are in dire need of services such as shelters, community centres, training facilities and such like. It is an utter sham and a total injustice how the white female elite have diverted funds away from their more needy sisters. Those cited in this book and being responsible for such waste should feel utterly ashamed at further contributing to the plight of the genuinely needy.

Hoff-Sommers' other notable achievement is that as a serious academic, she has the mental faculty to question not only the Empress' clothes, but her very existence too. Instead of a single Empress, what Dr. Hoff-Sommers reveals instead, is a horde of embittered new-age, touchy-feely, inner-child seeking, anti-intellectual impostors all eager for funding and thirsty for personal publicity. And a docile and unquestioning media that either is simply not doing their job, or that has been taken in and wishes to avoid being tarred as 'un P.C.'

Although this text is a decade old, it it certainly worth reading and should form part of the wider readings for any enquiring mind, any citizen who wishes to better understand the world around them, especially the failing of the media and the gullibility of trusting humans in the face of organisations who knowingly pervert the Truth and the facts.

The only really negative aspects to this otherwise creditable text are:
i) It was written in 1994, which in any academic field is just too long ago. Certainly any data-based conjecture she presented or any conclusions she drew are really no more than supposition in today's world.
ii) Hoff-Sommers' writing does tend to be rather myopic and somewhat repetitive, and this makes the book lose pace somewhat. Although to be fair, what she has done is to take a dry Academic discipline and turn it into a best-seller; she has taken Academia and made it palatable for the average person. In aspiring to and reaching such a noble goal, it is understandable that she has to alter her style somewhat.
N.B. This 'adaptation for the masses' is not apparent in her subsequent offering 'The War Against Boys'.

Finally, it is somewhat sadly ironic that the female-supremacist hold up every word Dr. Hoff-Sommers puts down on paper, to such rigourous examination. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they subjected their own biased, anti-intellectual half-truths and blatant falsehoods to such scrutiny. if they did, it might ultimately strengthen their cause.
12 people found this helpful
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Mx Valentine Brook
5.0 out of 5 stars Child Abuse is legal in the U.S.A.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 June 2015
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Sommers writes well as usual, unearthing the lies and half truths which delivered the American education system into the hands of so called 'feminists', who, by their shocking and sadistic behaviour, should be described more accurately as 'FemiNazi' than anything human or humane. The subject of the book, the abuse and destruction of the school/college American male, is even more shocking when one keeps in mind that it is happening NOW, in the 'land of the free', and its ignorance, arrogance and misandry is all perfectly legal. She does attempt to end on a positive note but the title of the follow-up 'The War Against Boys' says it all.
11 people found this helpful
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Clarry Kitten
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely wonderful. With an extraordinary level of journalistic integrity (rare ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 September 2014
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Absolutely wonderful. With an extraordinary level of journalistic integrity (rare these days) Christina has tracked down elusive studies, rogue statistical analysis, wild extrapolations and found where they began, who created them and how they were used. Truly enlightening. Scholarly, de-void of frivolous and provocative opinion (un-like the standard gender-feminist outpourings) and, in-spite of the weight of her account, it is light-hearted and enjoyable.

I cannot recommend this book enough.
17 people found this helpful
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thehappycyclist
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended for those about to do a gender studies course.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 May 2014
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Excellent book. Highly recommended, especially if you are about to do a gender studies.course.
If you have already started the course you will be beyond help, indoctrinated and automatically dismissing alternative point of view.
27 people found this helpful
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Lily
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy for kindle
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 March 2015
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I can't read it - it is sideways and most of it is missing. I want a refund or a proper edition of the book that I can read. Don't buy on kindle. It doesn't work.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr interessantes Buch und eine ungewohnte Perspektive
Reviewed in Germany on 29 April 2023
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Ich fand das Buch sehr interessant. Eine sonst relativ seltene Perspektive - Kritik am aktuellen Feminismus durch eine altgediente Feministin.
Sie beschreibt sehr schön die Absurditäten, die sich in bestimmten Bereichen des Feminismus inzwischen entwickelt haben.
Gleichzeitig ist sie natürlich weiterhin Feministin, die für eine Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter eintritt, aber eben eine echte Gleichberechtigung, keine Umkehrung der Verältnisse.
Ich kann das Buch uneingeschränkt empfehlen.
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Paulo Roberto Mattos Luiz
5.0 out of 5 stars Ação Afirmativa ao redor do mundo
Reviewed in Brazil on 21 November 2018
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Livros de boa qualidade! Recomendo.
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Steam
5.0 out of 5 stars All women should read this
Reviewed in France on 9 August 2015
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A more complete book on the breakdown and spitting apart of the Feminist Movement than her other book Freedom Feminism and at times a bit boring but in the end it gives a more complete picture of who is destroying the movement and putting women off Feminism.
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P Gaenir
5.0 out of 5 stars Someone needed to write this.
Reviewed in the United States on 6 March 2010
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I'm 44 now, but as early as around age 18, I've been bewildered at what is called 'feminism' today.

I always had a great admiration for women working to bring 'equality of opportunity' since the suffragette days, and currently. Women have made amazing strides in our culture. I feel that further work needs done, but, this is something that men should be as much involved with as women at this point.

And yet, the modern women claiming that feminist label always seemed irrational, paranoid, hyperbolic, often with a pre-set overwhelming paradigm that everything logical, or traditional, was 'masculine', and everything male was 'bad'. As if that wasn't bad enough, a huge anti-democracy socialism politic always seemed to wend through it.

Particularly in some colleges, there is a clear quasi- religious/political cult indoctrination; an insidious fifth-column style pervasive brainwashing of college youth and a women's-mafia-without-the-guns-style "pressure and leverage" put on anybody else who does not buy their victimization-as-salvation obsession. I've heard about this from others for years but hadn't believed it could be that bad. After reading ths book I'd say apparently in some schools it is.

The 'infiltration' from people for whom this is an entire worldview and evangelistic drive, into positions of administration and authority, creates a fairly massive lock on money (funding) and power to rewrite history, revise education, and repress any view that is not thier party line (and do real damage to any person not just not agreeing, but not actively supporting them). It's pretty successful, enough to make scientology's most uncharming points of infamy look downright wimpy and unaccomplished by comparison.

As a woman with a daughter who will be entering college in a few years, I think I want to find the school rated 'worst for women' by modern feminism standards and make sure she attends that one. That way nobody will be indoctrinating her with socialism and whiney-ism in the name of intro english classes. Nobody will be rationalizing why women 'think differently', or considering traditional subjects like math and science just part of that "logical" way of thinking that is so bad and much of how da-man keeps us women down. That's precisely the anti-female crap that DID keep women down for centuries, doing needlework instead of science for the most part because women weren't supposed to worry their little heads about things like real education.

Modern feminism comes off not like an informed opinion, but a pathology out of control.

It seems to me a relatively small group of women have managed to pass off to the media their own opinion as somehow representative of women. Unless a perspective represents nuns and housewives and catholic moms and retired 50-years-married women, just as much as it represents unmarried mothers and lesbians and businesswomen, it does not represent enough women in our culture to deserve any voice 'on behalf of' anybody.

And why it isn't obvious that making men 'bad' is just as retarded as making women 'bad' is beyond me. The species is designed for these two to survive together, and anything that injustly treats either of them is not healthy. There are several points in our culture in which men are in a position of real injustice too and these things on both sides should be corrected.

Every time I hear or read some feminist speech/writing, I'm seized with the urge to yell, "Would you grow up!" It's like a bunch of little rich kids with a huge sense of entitlement and nothing but griping about how nothing is fair to them and it's always someone else's fault. A woman doesn't give any inspiration to being considered an equal when she acts irrational and manipulative. People like that are poison to any society, from a family to a church group to a whole culture.

It's amazing any man who survives one of the heavily feminist-controlled colleges doesn't come out of it vastly more against women than he could possibly have gone in. If these people had been the representatives of 'women's rights' historically we would still be fighting for the right to vote and own property. Thank goodness the original suffragettes were nothing like the modern day claimants.

Sommers does in this book what needed doing: taking several of the most 'famous statistics' allegedly proving just how horrifying females have it, and makes it clear that they are pretty much the same unfactual hyperbole that most of the so-called 'feminist' movement is infamous for. (Note the tags suggested for this book here on amazon, like 'delusional' and 'hateful'. Nothing that might lead to or relate to facts mind you; just name calling, which is about the mental age level we're dealing with from that side. As if it's perfectly ok for them to relegate half the population (men) to everything-bad imaginable, even without their doing anything at all; but should anyone merely disagree with a woman in that group, they're "hateful.")

The author differentiates between what she calls "Equity Feminism" -- that is apparently what I've always innately been in line with -- and "Gender Feminism" -- which is the man-bashing women-as-whiney-victims socialist and manipulative BS that "stole feminism" as their own label in the media... forever making it something more people sneer at and don't take seriously, than the term of respect the women of prior days earned for it.

She also listed several other women who are "Equity" feminists who I will make a point to learn more about. Ironically I have read a lot more from the 'gender feminist' side and I actually thought this represented feminism, and all my life wanted nothing to do with it as a result. (I don't think these women need more equality, I think they need more therapy.) I'm a bit cheered up to think there may be more women who are not irrational, hysterical and anti-men, but who recognize what's come before for women and what still needs to come and are interested in the subject. I guess I thought the dark side was all there was. I kinda wish I'd been aware of this equity vs. gender difference a long time ago.

I don't know enough about the 'equity' side of this equation (I mean officially) to know how the book rates in that regard, but I found it very interesting and somewhat educational, and leading to doorways of further exploration.
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Liza CK
5.0 out of 5 stars An eye opener for sane people
Reviewed in Germany on 28 April 2017
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An excellent account on how the Feminist movement went completely derranged, blinded by far left Ideology and cult like adherents.
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