Assessing Women Thinkers

Re “Feminist Fatale,” Opinion, Feb. 13: Charlotte Allen’s inability to name important female intellectuals whose work speaks to a wide audience of educated people reveals little else than politically motivated ignorance. Rather than obsessing over those feminists who so infuriate her, I suggest that Allen spend the next several months reading more widely.

Here’s a list to begin with: Saskia Sassen, Katherine Newman and Nancy Schepper-Hughes on economy and globalization; Lizabeth Cohen on consumerism and politics; Arlie Hochschild on work and family; Sherry Ortner and Toni Morrison on power and culture; Elaine Pagels on Christianity.

All write brilliant, lucid, jargon-free prose -- some of it arrestingly beautiful -- aimed at thoughtful readers in and out of the academy. All are deeply engaged in public activity. In service to a more informed public debate, perhaps The Times could begin a series of profiles on these and other female intellectuals whose work is changing the way we understand our world.

Andrew Wiese

Assoc. Professor of History

San Diego State University

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You don’t have to be a great intellectual to understand that how the world deals with the female sex is the moral question of the age. Both female and male feminists know this. Millions of female fetuses are aborted because the societies in which these women live devalue the female sex. Millions of parents are deeply disappointed when they learn “It’s a girl.” Millions of girls are deprived of equal schooling; two-thirds of the illiterate people on the planet are women. Millions of girls are fed less than their male counterparts. Medical care is also sought less when a girl or woman is sick.

Giving women control over their fertility is “controversial.” Why should this be true? Economic systems and government decisions the world over are men-centered. All over the planet there has been a willful denial of girls’ and women’s full humanity by individuals, governments, religions, cultures and customs. This must change for there to be any chance for the survival of the human race, environmental balance, sustainable development and peace and stability in the future.

Jane Roberts

Redlands

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Allen laments the lack of female public intellectuals, naming feminism as the cause: “The vast majority of women who might otherwise qualify as public intellectuals would rather recite the feminist catechism ... than carve out a place for themselves in the larger public world.” Allen is part of the Independent Women’s Forum, which, as MediaTransparency.org puts it, “is neither independent nor a forum.” It is funded by extreme right-wing foundations, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Scaife family foundations.

The IWF website states that the forum wants to counter “the influence of radical feminism in the courts.” But it has a history of being against mainstream policies that might empower women, such as the Violence Against Women Act, Title IX and the Women’s Educational Equity Act. It is against gender equity, period.

It was no surprise that on Jan. 19, the CEO of the IWF claimed that the president of Harvard was right when he said that women have less success in science because of their genes, not discrimination or other social factors. The IWF is consistently anti-feminist. It’s no surprise that the forum can’t find any women who qualify as public intellectuals, not even themselves.

Sherryl Kleinman

Chapel Hill, N.C.

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Allen seizes upon the death of Susan Sontag to bemoan what she sees as the current paucity of female public intellectuals. She explains this supposed deficit by claiming that today’s female thinkers are too narrowly focused on feminism.

Yet when she gets around to making lists of male and female public intellectuals, her list of males is no more copious than her list of females, and arguably more obscure. By her own count, she has discovered a cause without an effect.

There is indeed a problem here, but not with feminists. Ours is not a country with a particularly healthy interest in intellectuals, public or not. Our president clearly exemplifies this attitude, so perhaps we will discover together, over the long run, the wisdom or folly of this indifference.

Scott Banks

Claremont