SOURCE: Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Sic Transit Gloria.” New Republic 211, no. 2 (11 July 1994): 32-6.

In the following review, Elshtain discusses Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? and Gloria Steinem's Moving Beyond Words. Elshtain praises Sommers for identifying and exposing misinformation put forth by feminist scholars, but criticizes her for failing to place feminism in a broader cultural and historical context or offer a viable alternative to current trends in feminist thought.

It seems that Simon & Schuster wishes to cover all the bases, producing more or less simultaneously a book whose thesis is that feminists have betrayed women and a book whose thesis is that women continue to be betrayed by patriarchy. My hunch is that the less familiar and predictable book, Christina Hoff Sommers's indictment of what “gender feminism” has wrought, may well carry the day. What Gloria Steinem has to say, and the way she has to say it, is utterly...