SOURCE: Gardner, Marilyn. “If We're Not Careful, Boys Won't Be Boys Much Longer.” Christian Science Monitor (20 July 2000): 16.

In the following review of Sommers's The War against Boys, Gardner advocates a non-polemical approach to supporting and encouraging both boys and girls in education.

The 1990s may go down in history as the Decade of Girls. In countless books, studies, and programs, American girls were portrayed as being “in crisis” and “at risk,” hapless “victims” of a culture that supposedly favors boys.

Now, in a new century, the spotlight is shifting. Authors and social scientists are turning their attention to boys, arguing that they are the new “victims” of female-dominated educational agendas and antimale cultural biases.

As Christina Hoff Sommers states in the opening sentence of her provocative and controversial book, The War against Boys, “It's a bad time to be a boy in America.”

In 1991, Sommers explains, a widely...