Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The AAUW did not spend $150,000 promoting Lee's study, nor did it tone down its own partisan rhetoric. On the contrary, dissenting views provoked the organization to anger and abuse. In the spring of 1997, the AAUW newsletter AAUW Outlook attacked the "gender bias revisionists" who "like John Leo, Christina Hoff Sommers, or your local columnist" had questioned the myth of the fragile girl: "We have all heard of revisionist history. There will always be some individuals who will insist that the Holocaust did not happen....The revisionists often distort the facts so thoroughly that their take on history loses all semblance of reality."

In the summer of 1997, the AAUW followed this attack on its critics with a four-day "leadership conference" at which the AAUW's "media staff" trained thirty teachers and other equity leaders in strategies for coping with "revisionists" in the media and elsewhere. I attended one of the sessions at the AAUW's Washington, D.C., headquarters. (I was not a welcome guest and was eventually politely asked to leave.) Outside the conference room, there were tables filled with shortchanged-girl souvenirs. The teachers could buy "equity teddy bears," coffee mugs, and

T-shirts bearing the slogan "When We Shortchange Girls, We Shortchange America." There were "I am a star" buttons intended for hapless girls with lagging self-esteem.

The AAUW staff coached the teachers in coping with questions about boys. In a special training workshop entitled "Why Focus on Girls?," teachers rehearsed their answers to queries about boys and AAUW personnel critiqued their performance. One AAUW equity trainer advised the teachers to use "key AAUW words and phrases" as often as possible in their answers -- especially the AAUW all-time favorite, "shortchanged girls." Trainers advised the teachers to practice using "confident language," such as "research shows that."

Although the AAUW headquarters where this conference took place was the epicenter of the girl-crisis movement, some of the teacher-fellows had the temerity to speak up for boys. A young teacher from Baltimore volunteered that in her school the boys were just as vulnerable as the girls -- "if not more." And in a discussion of how to defend the "girls-only" character of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, four teachers protested that boys should be included. In both instances, the AAUW equity experts gently guided the discussion back to girls.

More Dissonant Notes

The girl partisans love to gather in groups to tell stories abut how girls are being victimized. In November 1997, the Public Education Network (PEN), a council of organizations that support the public schools, sponsored a conference entitled "Gender, Race and Student Achievement." The conference's honored celebrities were Carol Gilligan and Cornel West, a professor of Afro-American studies and philosophy of religion at Harvard University. Gilligan talked about how girls and women "lose their voice," how they "go underground" in adolescence, and how women teachers are "absent," having been "silenced" within the "patriarchal structure" that governs our schools. Cornel West spoke of having had to overcome his own feelings of "male supremacy."

Even at this most politically correct of gatherings, the serious deficits of boys kept surfacing. On the first day of the conference, during a special three-hour session, the PEN staff announced the results of a new teacher/student survey entitled The American Teacher 1997: Examining Gender Issues in Public Schools. The survey was funded by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as part of its American Teacher series and conducted by Louis Harris and Associates.

During a three-month period in 1997, 1,306 students and 1,035 teachers in grades seven through twelve were asked a variety of questions about gender equity. The MetLife study was not produced by a feminist advocacy organization; it had no doctrinal ax to grind. What it found contradicted most of the pet "findings" of the AAUW, the Sadkers, and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women. It politely said as much: "Contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers' expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom."

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers