Christina Hoff Sommers

The book received mixed reviews. In conservative publications such as the National Review and Commentary, The War Against Boys was praised for its "stinging indictment of an anti-male movement that has had a pervasive influence on the nation's schools." and for identifying "a problem in urgent need of redress." Writing in The New York Times, opinion columnist Richard Bernstein called it a "thoughtful, provocative book," and suggested that Sommers had made her arguments "persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them." Joy Summers, in The Journal of School Choice, said that 'Sommers’ book and her public voice are in themselves a small antidote to the junk science girding our typically commonsense-free, utterly ideological national debate on “women’s issues.' Publishers Weekly suggested that Sommers' conclusions were "compelling" and "deserve an unbiased hearing," while also noting that Sommers "descends into pettiness when she indulges in mudslinging at her opponents." Similarly, a review in Booklist suggested that while Sommers "argues cogently that boys are having major problems in school," the book was unlikely to convince all readers "that these problems are caused by the American Association of University Women, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and William S. Pollack," all of whom were strongly criticized in the book. Ultimately, the review suggested, "Sommers is as much of a crisismonger as those she critiques."

Sommers said in 2014 that she is a registered Democrat "with libertarian leanings". She has described herself as an equity feminist, equality feminist, and liberal feminist and defines equity feminism as the struggle, based upon Enlightenment principles of individual justice, for equal legal and civil rights for women, the original goals of first-wave feminism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal.

The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of its twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards for her The New York Times article “The Boys at the Back.” In their description of the winners, NWPC states, "Author Christina Sommers asks whether we should allow girls to reap the advantages of a new knowledge based service economy and take the mantle from boys, or should we acknowledge the roots of feminism and strive for equal education for all?"

Several authors have called Sommers' positions antifeminist. The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 that, in rejecting the theoretical distinction between sex as a set of physiological traits and gender as a set of social identities, "Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism", and that as the concept of gender is relied on by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid".

In 2000, Sommers published The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. In the book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new and equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed." Criticizing programs which had been set up in the 1980s to encourage girls and young women - largely in response to studies which had suggested that girls "suffered through neglect in the classroom and the indifference of male-dominated society" - Sommers argued in The War Against Boys that such programs were based on flawed research, arguing that it was just the other way around: boys were a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing and less likely to go to college.

Sommers is a longtime critic of women's studies departments and of university curricula in general. In a 1995 interview with freelance journalist Scott London, Sommers said, "The perspective now, from my point of view, is that the better things get for women, the angrier the women's studies professors seem to be, the more depressed Gloria Steinem seems to get." According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students that "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda" and are peddling a skewed and incendiary message: "Women are from Venus, men are from Hell."

Sommers married Fred Sommers, the Harry A. Wolfson Chair in Philosophy at Brandeis University, in 1981. He died in 2014. She has two sons, one of whom is her stepson, philosopher and podcast host Tamler Sommers.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general. In a 1988 Public Affairs Quarterly article titled "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials of academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the tactics used by academic feminists have all been employed at one time or another to further other forms of academic imperialism." In articles titled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early 1990s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and cultural change—such as the abolition of the nuclear family—and thus revealed their contempt for the actual wishes of the "average woman." These articles would form the basis for Who Stole Feminism?

From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In 1980, she became an assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to associate professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. During the mid-1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the subject of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (1984) and Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics (1986). Reviewing Vice and Virtue for Teaching Philosophy in 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the book was "extremely well edited" and "particularly strong on the motivation for studying virtue and ethics in the first place, and on theoretical discussions of virtue and vice in general."

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born September 28, 1950) is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.

Christina Hoff Sommers was born September 28, 1950 in Sonoma County, California. She earned a BA degree at New York University in 1971, and a PhD degree in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979.