[25] According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students that "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda".
"[29] Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general.
"[32][independent source needed] In articles titled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early 1990s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and cultural change—such as the abolition of the nuclear family—and thus revealed their contempt for the actual wishes of the "average woman.
"[33][34][35] These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations of feminist literature, and faulty arguments",[30] would form the basis for Sommers' 1994 book Who Stole Feminism?.
In the book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new and equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed.
"[54] Writing in The New York Times, opinion columnist Richard Bernstein called it a "thoughtful, provocative book" and suggested that Sommers had made her arguments "persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them.
"[55] Joy Summers, in The Journal of School Choice, said that "Sommers’ book and her public voice are in themselves a small antidote to the junk science girding our typically commonsense-free, utterly ideological national debate on 'women's issues'.
"[50] Similarly, a review in Booklist suggested that while Sommers "argues cogently that boys are having major problems in school," the book was unlikely to convince all readers "that these problems are caused by the American Association of University Women, Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and William S. Pollack," all of whom were strongly criticized in the book.
Much of the book, according to Coles, "comes across as Sommers's strongly felt war against those two prominent psychologists, who have spent years trying to learn how young men and women grow to adulthood in the United States.
"[15][58] Reviewing the book for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that Sommers "sets the research bar considerably higher for the people she is attacking than she does for herself," using an "odd, ambushing style of refutation, in which she demands that data be provided to her and questions answered, and then, when the flummoxed person on the other end of the line stammers helplessly, triumphantly reports that she got 'em."
Sommers's title, according to Rotundo, "is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic.
"[60] In the updated and revised edition published in 2013, Sommers responded to her critics by changing the subtitle of the book from How misguided feminism harms our young men to How misguided policies harm our young men, and provided new and updated statistics that position her earlier work, in her view, as prophetic.
[...] David Sadker claimed that when boys call out answers in school, teachers are respectful and interested—whereas when girls do it, they are told to be quiet.
I have looked at U.S. Department of Education data on more conventional measures: grades, college matriculation, school engagement, test scores.
[62]Sommers has served on the board of the Women's Freedom Network,[25][63][64] a group formed as an alternative to "extremist, ideological feminism" as well as to "antifeminist traditionalism" but described by historian Debra L. Schultz as comprising mostly "conservative ideologues in the political correctness debates".
This advocacy in favor of Gamergate earned her praise from members of the men's rights movement, inspiring fan art and the nickname "Based Mom", which Sommers embraced.
[68] The Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of its twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards[69] for her The New York Times article “The Boys at the Back.”[70] In their description of the winners, NWPC states, "Author Christina Sommers asks whether we should allow girls to reap the advantages of a new knowledge based service economy and take the mantle from boys, or should we acknowledge the roots of feminism and strive for equal education for all?