women’s history

The Fight for Equality Continues: The Problems of Christina Hoff Sommers’s History of Feminism

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Recently Bill Frezza of Real Clear Radio Hour interviewed Christina Hoff Sommers about her new book, Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why it Matters Today.[1] Frezza also wrote a follow-up piece in the opinion section of Forbes magazine.[2] As Frezza describes it, Sommers’s book uncovers the hidden history of feminism and its implications for women today.

To start, Sommers identifies two major strands of feminism that have shaped the struggle for women’s rights: “egalitarian feminism” and “maternal feminism.” (For those familiar with Sommers’s earlier works, she previously labeled these competing strands as “gender feminism” and “equity feminism”).

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Book Review: Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976).

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 Linda Gordon traces the development of the birth control movement from the 1870s to the 1970s. In the process she weaves together material from a range of topics including feminism, socialism, psychology, and eugenics. Ultimately, Gordon unearths the threads of various ideas that influenced the struggle for reproduction control. Gordon also places birth control within a broader social and political framework through an examination of a variety of sources such as the American Birth Control League papers, local and national Planned Parenthood archives, medical journals, diaries, and letters. In the end, Gordon contends that reproductive freedom is central to the struggle for social justice.

Gordon argues that the history of birth control must be placed in a larger social, political, and ideological context. “Reproductive patterns,” she explains, “are determined by sexual morality, by the overall-status of women, by class formations, and by the nature of the struggles for social change.”[1] In Gordon’s view, the struggle for reproductive freedom should not be separated from class systems, capitalist economics, male-dominated politics, and sexual relations. Moreover, according to Gordon, birth control is a symptom and a cause of various elements and patterns in American history.

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