The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
This book was written in 2000 by someone who works at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.As far as I can tell, this was part of a successful campaign by AEI to kill funding for the Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA, 20 USC §§ 7283-7283g), which among other things authorizes grants to promote gender equity in schools. WEEA received funding in the federal budget from 1976 to 2010, with a high of $10 million in 1980. The funding dwindled steadily every year and leveled off to about $2 million per year in the 1990s. In 2003, the Bush Administration stopped funding the WEEA Equity Resource Center, and since 2010 the Department of Education has not funded any WEEA program grants. The President’s budgets no longer request funds for WEEA. Thus, the campaign to kill funding for WEEA has been a success. After reading this book, I agree that the way this program was implemented was a waste of taxpayer money. This book contains some good reporting exposing the way that some of the grant-funded programs were not evidence-based.This book doesn't agree that the educational system needs to do more for girls. In 1992, "How Schools Shortchange Girls" was published. This was "A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education" commissioned by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and researched by what is now called The Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. This "study" concluded that our educational system was shortchanging girls, and more action was needed to correct the inequity. The author of this book takes issue with the findings of this study as well as its authors.The book takes aim at The WEEA Equity Resource Center in Newton, Massachusetts, run by Katherine Hanson, which was funded through a contract from the WEEA Program Office at the United States Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Its 5 year federal contract ended in February 2003.The author also didn't like Take Our Daughters To Work Day, so I would say this book was part of the impetus to change it in 2003 to Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.According to this book the materials produced by the WEEA Equity Resource Center with federal grant funds were heavily influenced by the work of Carol Gilligan while she was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gilligan wrote the book In a Different Voice, published by Harvard University Press. She got a Heinz Award in the category "human condition." I was convinced by this book that Gilligan's hypothesis that girl's lose their "voice" after Middle School really hasn't been validated by any data.This book also doesn't agree that boys and girls should be treated the same. She takes issue with the Ms. Foundation and Gloria Steinem who is known for saying "We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls." "Creating Sex-Fair Family Day Care," by Bonnie Raines, was another WEEA Equity Resource Center "equity in education" resource. It encourages boys to play with dolls. The book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood, by William Pollack (1998) also saw it as problematic to encourage boys to be "masculine." The author thinks it's stupid and contrary to biology to try to raise boys as if they were girls. It certainly should not be the basis for educational policy.The arguments that boys and girls should be treated the same also play out in the courts. The Supreme Court case United States v Virginia struck down the male-only admission policy of the Virginia Military Institute in 1996. Gloria Allred represented the plaintiff in Yeaw v Boy Scouts of America, in which the plaintiff claimed it was illegal for the Boy Scouts not to allow girls. In 1998, the California Supreme Court said girls had no right to be in the Boy Scouts.The author of this book is in favor of allowing boys to be educated in boys-only environments, and she believes traditional teacher-centered education with firm rules and strict discipline and high academic and code of conduct expectations are better for boys. The movement towards child-centered classrooms where students are taught to express their feelings and opinions and work together hurts boys. In general, the author opposes the educational effort to boost student self-esteem. Rather, she thinks schools should teach character.The author also takes issue with the sexual harassment education in schools. The publication "Quit It!" is still available on the Wellesley Centers for Women website, so presumably some schools still use it. The author thinks it and other similar educational materials go overboard in the "zero tolerance" policy for boys' touching girls or hitting on them. In the case Davis v Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that a student can sue under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (under which students must not be denied access to educational benefits and opportunities on the basis of gender) for severe and pervasive student-on-student sexual harassment, where the school is deliberately indifferent and has actual knowledge. The author thinks this case was decided wrong.Finally, the author thinks schools have become too permissive and don't foster moral education. In the case Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court held that a student had a First Amendment right to wear an armband indicating opposition to the Vietnam War. The author thinks this was the beginning of the end for discipline and morality in public schools.I think this book starts out being about how certain "feminists" have been influential in creating educational policies in certain schools that at best are just politically correct hooey, and at worse actually have a negative impact on boys. But then the book lapses into a kind of general attack on the influence of progressive liberalism in the schools. I agree that boys have a lot of issues in schools these days, but I was not at all convinced that this is the fault of "feminists." The feminists in this book are not necessarily representative of feminists in general and are really not all that influential in the big scheme of things. And a lot of the stuff the author opposes I would perhaps characterize as politically correct bullshit, but I wouldn't characterize it as "feminism." Clearly, the Supreme Court is not "feminist."One thing I agree with in the book is that people who believe that boys need to be more "empathetic" in many cases themselves lack empathy for boys. There is nothing wrong with non-emotional, philosophically-based ideas of justice that guide the way men act. Boys should not be told that it is not good enough to do the right thing, because they are feeling the "wrong" emotions. Education should focus on what kids do, not how they feel.Overall, I thought this was a thought-provoking book, although I doubt I share the author's political views.
“We must put an end to all the crisis mongering,” writes Christina Hoff Sommers in a book titled THE WAR AGAINST BOYS. I’ll pause for a moment to contemplate the irony.I picked up this book after I learned from my then kindergarten daughter that the children at her school were told not to run on the playground during recess and that a male schoolmate was informed he would be sent to the principal’s office if he continued to form his finger into a gun and say, “Pow, pow, pow.” (I used to think these sorts of school stories were ridiculously rare exceptions, until they started coming home to me.) Sommers occasionally treats extreme examples as normative and allows some assumptions and logical fallacies to slip into an otherwise convincing argument. She clearly has an axe to grind with one particular feminist (she dedicates a good chunk of the book to tearing down the woman’s work), but many of her basic points are sound. Sommers argues that there is a “war against boys” in the American education system, that is to say, in less polemical terms, that (1) girls receive more academic attention and focus, attend college in greater numbers, and earn higher grades than boys, even while feminists claim girls are being shortchanged, (2) stereotypically masculine characteristics and behaviors (such as competitiveness, physical courage, and war play) are discouraged while boys are encouraged to exhibit more stereotypically feminine characteristics (the “feminization” of boys), and (3) the pedagological methods employed and materials used favor girls over boys. As a solution to this problem, Sommers proposes that boys be taught in an all-male classical school environment, with an emphasis on drilling, high standards, strict discipline, competition, moral/character education, and more boy-centric reading materials. I agree with her basic points, and I think her proposed solution has potential, although I am ambivalent about the gender-segregation component, because I think gender-segregation has many benefits as well as many disadvantages. (Personally, I’m glad my education was co-ed.) Despite my general agreement with her arguments, I was bothered by the way she seemed to make everything into an attack on boys. For example, she notes that there is a gender literacy gap between boys and girls: girls are typically a year or more ahead in reading level, and girls read more often for pleasure than boys. This, she suggests, is because of the evil feminist attempt to “feminize” our boys. Yet, when it comes to the math/science gap between girls and boys, she simply puts that down to gender differences. She doesn’t understand why feminists get so worked up trying to close this gap, trying to make girls, on average, equal boys in math/science performance. Even though she admits that research shows women excel more than men in verbal areas, she doesn’t seem to consider that this, and not a “war on boys”, may possibly account for much of the literacy gap. Boys are shown to improve their literacy greatly in an all-male classical school environment with strict standards. But I imagine girls would too. Schools are short changing our kids, yes, but it isn’t just our boys. Give them both classical educations, and they’d both probably pull ahead in many subjects, but would the gender gaps in literacy and in math/science close dramatically? Probably not. Even assigning Jane Eyre as required reading is part of the “war on boys,” because wouldn’t it be better if they assigned works of more interest to boys? Well, yes, boys will more likely read works of more interest to them, but the girls in my school suffered through Mutiny on the Bounty, so why can’t the boys suffer through Jane Eyre? A liberal education does not consist of being exposed ONLY to what interests you. I get the impression that Sommers wants me to be worked up over a boy who is expelled from a private school (a *private* school, no doubt with a strict code of conduct that the student signed) for saying sexually crude things and making crude gestures to a girl. Sorry. I don’t see that as part of the “war on boys.” I see it as a rare insistence on the complete unacceptability of crude behavior. Unfortunately, many conservatives of today say, “Boys will be boys” where conservatives of yesteryear probably would have said, “Where is his sense of honor?!” Further evidence of the “war on boys”: girls earn higher grades and go to college in greater numbers. Now, there are all sorts of reasons boys may be academically underperforming girls that have nothing whatsoever to do with feminist efforts to feminize boys. But Sommers does not seriously explore or convincingly refute these alternative explanations. Nor does she ask whether boys are, in the long-term, truly shortchanged , compared to girls, by this academic underperformance. Are women now earning more income, on average, over a lifetime, than men? Are they making more revolutionary innovations in medicine, business, and technology than men? Do they hold more political offices? She does not address such questions, to which, I’m pretty sure, the answer is no. Indeed, she acts very like the feminists she chastises, decrying a sexist war on boys the same way they decry a sexist war on girls, without adequate consideration of the myriad reasons why people do not always excel. As an example of her assumption-based logic, she mentions that (A) girls are called on in class much more often than boys, and that (B) boys are much less educationally interested and focused than girls. She assumes that (A) causes (B), but isn’t it just as likely that (B) causes (A)? While I am not in favor of “feminizing” boys, I am in favor of "civilizing" children, boys among them. Feminization seeks to suppresses male nature; civilization, much less ambitiously, merely seeks to channel it. But civilizing boys requires lauding and grooming stereotypically masculine virtues, such as honor, chivalry, and courage. It also requires girls to exert pressures on boys by practicing stereotypically feminine virtues such as chastity and modesty. And gender stereotypes are never popular with feminists. Thus we insist that gender differences are social constructs and try to “remake” masculinity. The result of this experiment, Sommers argues, has not been beneficial for boys. I’d argue that it hasn’t been beneficial for girls either.
What do You think about The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2001)?
This is a hard book to read, and I did not finish. While I agree with most of what the author presents, I just can't help but feel underlying currents of neo-conservatism, and that really turns me off and made me not want to continue reading. After only a few pages you will know just about everything Ms. Sommers has to present: feminism/liberals = bad. If anyone that has even the slightest bend towards a centrist or leftist view, she will attack it.As the father of two boys, I witness how boys social and physical needs are continually suppressed, to their determent and the benefit of girls. Most boys need competition and physical challenges. So many groups, including schools, have nearly eliminated those teaching methods in favor of "feel good" policies, and this harms boy's development. I couldn't agree more.Now, don't get me wrong. Ms. Sommers has some good points, but her counter-arguments are scattered, anecdotal, and sometimes hard to follow. About all you need to know from her is that our institutions, in the desire to make education equal for both sexes, have left boys behind. I got it. But after a couple of hundred pages I began to feel like I was being hit in the head with a large hammer. Enough, I quit.In the end, the author offers few solutions.
—Karl
A thoughtful book condemning the feminist attack on boys and masculinity. Sommers begins by debunking the ill supported theory purported by feminist organizations that girls are in trouble - she cites study after study showing the advancement of women in all areas: school, college entrance, scholastic achievement, etc. To say that girls are under siege and being driven underground is patently false. The sexist 'equity' programs touted by feminist groups are anything but equal and instead amount to a full scale attack on boys and masculinity by portraying every male as a violent, potential rapist/batterer. These same women's groups are also calling for a change in how boys are raised, so that instead of embracing innate differences 'boys should be raised as girls'. Ludicrous! What boys need is a back to basics movement in education, less falsified self-esteem and training in morals and values. This is a must read for parents of boys.
—Brittany
This teacher comments: One of the best non-fiction books I've read all year!I graduated from Indiana University in 1990 - just as the 'girls are fragile' movement was gaining momentum. I was taught the 'facts' that Sommers refers to in numerous in-services (for all of you non-teachers, many teacher in-services are attempts at teacher training in which a speaker comes and entertains or horrifies us with a speech that usually has little or no practical value - when I taught in the inner city it was usually the horrifying type: "these kids are all failing and blah-blah percent of them will end up dead or in jail and it's all because you didn't teach them how to multiply fractions or diagram a sentence correctly!"). Anyway, I did buy into some of the stuff about girls being fragile and being overrun in the classroom. I have heard the statistics Sommers skewers so completely and thoroughly and I swallowed many of them hook, line and sinker because it was early in my career and as a young person I foolishly believed that if a Harvard PhD researched the facts they must be right. As a more jaded professional, I appreciate Sommers' meticulously endnoted work. In The War Against Boys she embarrasses the 'fragile girl' theorists by burying their under-researched (and sometimes un-researched) theories in a blizzard of relavent studies and facts from responsible and trusted sources (for example, I've had the '4 million women die from physical abuse from a man' stat thrown at me in a diversity seminar. Yes, verbally thrown at me - as if I were the man who personally beat them all to death! Well, if it happens again, I'm armed with the REAL facts from the Centers for Disease Control, thanks to Sommers). Sommers overwhelmingly makes the point that our 'touchy-feely' self-esteem oriented schools are a great big turn-off to most of the boys. (in my experience as a high school teacher, the girls don't buy into it much either). Schools are not designed for most boys, especially as we take away physical activities and recesses. Male boisterousness is seen as wrong - a mental disorder and/or a sign of ADHD. Boys have to be medicated specifically for their built-in attributes that they possess as boys...Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
—Dale
