SOURCE: Schaub, Diana. “Sisters at Odds.” Public Interest 118 (winter 1995): 100-05.

In the following review, Schaub compares the representation of feminism in Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? with the representation of feminism in Henry James's 19th-century novel The Bostonians. Schaub comments that Sommers's book is disappointing in that it fails to take into account a broader social and cultural context.

Just as the movement for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” had its Jacobins, so too the feminist movement, with its parallel call for women's liberation, the equality of the sexes, and politically conceived sisterhood. According to Christina Hoff Sommers [in Who Stole Feminism?], it is the final term of the triad that has inspired dangerous radicalism in the feminist camp and led to something on the order of feminism's own Reign of Terror.

Liberty and equality, yes—those are the hallmarks of what Sommers terms “equity” or “First Wave” feminism: “the traditional...