SOURCE: Phillips, Melanie. “In a Gendered Salem.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5114 (6 April 2001): 9.

In the following review of The War against Boys, Phillips applauds Sommers's assessment that there is a “war against boys” in the American education system.

In her previous book Who Stole Feminism? (1994), the American professor of philosophy Christina Hoff Sommers took on the academic feminists who, she claimed, demonized men and so had betrayed the women they claimed to represent. That book was an act of some bravery in a country where academic freedom has been all but incinerated in the white heat of political correctness. Indeed, Hoff Sommers's work should be required reading for those who think political correctness is no more than a faintly tedious joke.

In her new book, The War against Boys, Hoff Sommers maintains that this is a bad time to be a boy in America. The conventional view is that...