Christina Hoff Sommers - Reception

Reception

The War Against Boys was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2000.

Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University, has compared Sommers' book with the separate but complementary work of psychologist William S. Pollack, author of Real Boys' Voices and Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan.

Richard Bernstein, a New York Times columnist, praised the book, writing, "The burden of thoughtful, provocative book is that it is American boys who are in trouble, not girls. Ms. Sommers...makes these arguments persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them."

E. Anthony Rotundo of the Washington Post, in reviewing Sommers' The War Against Boys, has stated: "In the end, Sommers fails to prove either claim in the title of her book. She does not show that there is a 'war against boys.' All she can show is that feminists are attacking her 'boys-will-be-boys' concept of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion. The difference between attacking a concept and attacking millions of real children is both enormous and patently obvious. Sommers's title, then, is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... Sommers's book is a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic."

In an article circulated by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a national progressive media watch group, Laura Flanders wrote " book is filled with the same kind of errors, unsubstantiated charges and citations of 'advocacy research' that she claims to find in the work of the feminists she takes to task... Sommers relies heavily on a handful of oft-repeated anti-feminist anecdotes — or folktales."