Ohio University students are sponsoring a guest lecture by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers this evening at 7:30 p.m. in Galbreath Chapel on campus, reports the Athens, Ohio Post.
The event is sponsored by the George Washington Forum, the OU College Republicans and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and will be called "Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces and Moral Panics."
"She does touch on really controversial and really important topics," Anna Lippincott, President of the OU College Republicans said.
Lippincott said it was important to talk about the issues especially given the feminist presence at OU and the protests that have previously occurred on campus.
"I think it's a conversation that needs to happen, and I think she's the right person to spark it," Lippincott said.
Anna Lippincott, who became familiar with Dr. Sommers’ research of the feminist movement while working as a CBLPI summer intern last year, “encouraged everyone to attend what she said would be an ‘entertaining’ lecture.”
"This lecture isn't just for feminists. It's not just for people who are politically involved — It's for all of us," Lippincott said. "It's for all of us who have felt isolated by the modern feminist movement and for all of us who maybe identify as a modern feminist."
Dr. Sommers has drawn clear distinctions between two divided camps, or “schools,” within the feminist movement: the egalitarian school and the maternal school. (See The Battle Within the Women’s Movement for an quick outline of the two camps.)
Sommers argues that modern feminist “activists themselves have turned the women’s movement into a caricature” of what the noble movement for social equality once was, and it’s time to Take Feminism Back.
…today the movement has been taken over by aggrieved eccentrics. Marching under the banner of feminism, the current activists are fighting a gender war that few women support or understand. The potential for harm is enormous. Mainstream women are going to have to rescue feminism from the feminists.
We badly need a responsible, reality-based women's movement. Women in many parts of the developing world are still struggling for their basic rights. The classical style of feminism that made American women among the most liberated in the world offers a tried-and-true road map to emancipation. Even in the West, there are still unresolved equity issues.
Who needs feminism? We do. The world does. But not the feminism that prevails in the typical college "womyn's center."
Sommers calls for a new Freedom Feminism that appeals to many women and offers support to “the women [in the world] who have yet to find the liberty that Western women have won for themselves.”
My advice to today's college women: take back feminism now. Make it inclusive, fair, and reality-based. Make the movement attractive again to the majority of American women who want their rights but do not wish to be liberated from the traditions of femininity.