True Women’s Lib

Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute has an interesting essay on recovering a truly liberating feminism (via Arts & Letters Daily ). A sample:

That is an understandable but unwarranted reaction. Women in the West did form a movement and did liberate themselves in ways of vital importance to the evolution of liberal society. Feminism in its classical phase was a critical chapter in the history of freedom. For most of the world’s women, that history has just begun; for them, classical feminism offers a tried-and-true roadmap to equality and freedom. And even in the West, there are unresolved equity issues, and the work of feminism is not over. Who needs feminism? We do. The world does. Women everywhere need the liberty to be what they are—not, as contemporary feminism insists, liberation from what they are. This we can see if we look back at the history of women’s liberation—not as it is taught in women’s studies departments, but as it truly was.