The War Against Boys — detailed summary

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The War Against Boys

Christina Hoff Sommers, revised edition, 2013. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men argues that American education spent decades building a sophisticated response to disadvantages facing girls while becoming much less willing to describe boys’ problems as gender problems.

Sommers does not argue that girls should lose support. Her recurring complaint is the asymmetry of diagnosis. When girls fall behind, educators look for bias, barriers, stereotypes, curriculum, and institutional reform. When boys fall behind in reading, writing, discipline, graduation, or college attendance, the explanation often shifts to masculinity itself: boys are immature, disruptive, emotionally defective, or insufficiently socialized.

The revised edition revisits debates from the first edition, adds newer evidence, and responds to critics. Sommers moves through federal reports, educational statistics, classroom practice, single-sex schooling, Carol Gilligan, self-esteem research, discipline, recess, reading, vocational education, character education, and the politics surrounding boys’ behavior.

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Preface to the new edition: the boy problem became visible

Sommers opens by contrasting the climate around the first edition in 2000 with the early 2010s.

When she first wrote the book, she says, educational debate was dominated by a “shortchanged girls” narrative. By the revised edition, boys’ lower reading performance, disciplinary problems, school disengagement, and lower college participation were much harder to ignore.

She points to responses in the United Kingdom and Australia as evidence that other education systems had begun treating boys’ performance as an issue worthy of targeted policy rather than as a politically inconvenient fact.

The preface also adds newer disputes: disappearing recess, zero-tolerance discipline, fear of rough play, and legal attacks on single-sex programs. Sommers presents these as part of a larger struggle over whether schools may acknowledge average differences in interests and behavior between boys and girls.

1. Where the Boys Are

The first chapter begins with vocational and technical education.

Sommers visits Aviation High School in New York, where many students are boys attracted by a demanding academic program tied to practical mechanical work and a clear occupational path. She uses the school to challenge a model of gender equity that treats a male majority in a field as presumptive evidence of unfairness.

The chapter then reconstructs the rise of the American “girl crisis” in education. Reports, advocacy organizations, and media stories claimed that girls were ignored in classrooms, suffered a severe collapse of self-esteem, and were systematically shortchanged by schools.

Sommers compares those claims with Department of Education data and other measures showing girls earning higher grades, reading and writing better, taking advanced courses, graduating at higher rates, and increasingly dominating college enrollment.

Her complaint is methodological as well as political. A claim that girls were silenced or damaged could spread through advocacy and training before strong evidence existed, while clear signs of boys’ underperformance were not given the same institutional attention.

She gives particular attention to black boys and other groups facing severe educational failure. A generic story about male privilege, she argues, hides boys who are nowhere near the top of any social hierarchy.

2. No Country for Young Men

The second chapter moves from achievement to behavior.

Sommers argues that modern schools have become increasingly uncomfortable with forms of play and activity more common among boys: noise, rough-and-tumble games, competition, toy weapons, physical risk, and restless movement.

She collects zero-tolerance cases in which very young children were punished for toy guns, drawings, small knives brought unintentionally, or play interpreted through the language of violence and harassment.

Recess becomes an important symbol. Sommers describes schools reducing free play while increasing supervision and risk avoidance. Boys who need movement and unscripted physical competition then spend more of the day in environments demanding stillness and verbal self-regulation.

She also criticizes violence-prevention and gender-equity programs that, in her view, blur the distinction between ordinary boyish aggression or teasing and a developmental path toward abuse.

Sommers does not argue that schools should ignore real violence. She wants discipline to distinguish harmful conduct from normal play instead of treating male-typical behavior as an early symptom of pathology.

3. Guys and Dolls

The third chapter takes on attempts to eliminate gender difference through education.

Sommers describes seminars and programs aimed at removing “gender schemas” from children, including efforts to discourage stereotypically masculine toys, competition, or separate play.

She contrasts this with single-sex schooling. Under changes associated with the No Child Left Behind era, American public schools received more room to experiment with separate classes or schools for boys and girls.

Sommers visits programs whose teachers say boys respond well to movement, competition, explicit structure, and material chosen around their interests. She presents single-sex education as an option rather than a universal prescription.

The chapter then follows legal and academic attacks on such programs. Sommers disputes claims that any sex-specific schooling reinforces harmful stereotypes and challenges studies used to argue that separation itself damages children.

Her larger point is that equality should permit educators to test different methods. Treating every average sex difference as a social prejudice can make schools less responsive to the students actually in the room.

4. Carol Gilligan and the Incredible Shrinking Girl

Sommers next examines one of the most influential intellectual sources of the girls-in-crisis movement: psychologist Carol Gilligan.

She reviews In a Different Voice and the claim that girls and women possess a distinct “ethic of care” that traditional psychology undervalued. Gilligan’s later work on adolescent girls described a developmental crisis in which confident girls lose their voices under pressure from patriarchal culture.

Sommers argues that these claims became far more influential in schools and public policy than their empirical foundations justified.

She revisits the famous self-esteem debate, the American Association of University Women’s reports, and studies that found smaller, different, or absent effects compared with the public story of a dramatic female collapse.

The chapter’s historical point is that an emotionally powerful theory can become educational common sense before researchers have settled whether the underlying effect is large, general, or even measured correctly.

5. Gilligan’s Island

The fifth chapter follows Gilligan’s framework when it is applied to boys.

Sommers describes theories in which boys are harmed by early separation from mothers and pushed into a patriarchal masculinity built around emotional disconnection, domination, and fear of femininity.

She objects to treating ordinary male development as damage. In her account, the theory starts with a preferred model of emotional expression and then interprets boys’ differences from girls as evidence of loss.

Sommers brings in research on fathers and father absence to argue that boys often need stronger male attachment and identification rather than less distinction between male and female roles.

The chapter also defends military courage, heroism, and traditionally masculine virtues from a framework that sees them mainly as products of damaged emotional development.

Her alternative is not emotional silence. She wants boys to have fathers, male models, discipline, and permission to develop in ways that may not look like female development.

6. Save the Males

This chapter turns to other writers who diagnosed a male emotional crisis.

Sommers discusses William Pollack’s Real Boys, Susan Faludi’s Stiffed, and popular reporting that portrayed boys and men as trapped by a “mask of masculinity.”

She agrees that some boys suffer badly and that male suicide, violence, school failure, and isolation are serious. She disputes the leap from those problems to the claim that ordinary masculinity is itself a psychological emergency.

Sommers is skeptical of programs that respond to boys primarily with therapeutic exercises designed to increase emotional disclosure. She cites research suggesting that boys and girls may differ in how rewarding they find prolonged problem talk with friends.

Her concern is that adults can mistake a preferred communication style for psychological health. A boy who would rather solve a problem, play a game, or do something beside a friend is not necessarily emotionally repressed.

7. Why Johnny Can’t, Like, Read and Write

The seventh chapter is the practical center of the book.

Sommers looks at strategies used in Britain and Australia to improve boys’ performance. The methods she emphasizes are concrete: structured lessons, teacher-led instruction, clear deadlines, short targets, regular testing, disciplined classrooms, and reading material boys are more likely to choose voluntarily.

She argues that schools often give boys too little of the literature that interests them: science fiction, adventure, sports, war, biography, technology, fantasy, and nonfiction about how things work.

Reading becomes a gender issue when the institution defines “good reading” through a narrow literary culture and then blames boys for reading less.

Vocational and technical education receives the same treatment. Sommers argues that hands-on pathways can engage boys who are poorly served by a college-for-everyone model. She criticizes gender-equity initiatives that focus on changing the sex composition of vocational fields without asking whether students freely prefer different kinds of work.

The chapter’s principle is straightforward: begin with methods that help the struggling students rather than with a theory of what their interests should be.

8. The Moral Life of Boys

Sommers then asks what schools should do about boys who genuinely become antisocial or violent.

She rejects two opposite answers. One treats aggression as a natural expression that adults should simply tolerate. The other explains male misconduct through patriarchy and tries to redesign masculinity itself.

Sommers favors moral education: clear rules, adult authority, consequences, honesty, self-command, respect, courage, and responsibility.

She traces the history of character education in the United States and reviews programs that attempted to teach virtues directly. The evidence she presents is mixed; some studies report gains while a large federal evaluation found little effect from several programs.

Despite that uncertainty, Sommers maintains that moral formation cannot be replaced by value-neutral technique. Boys need adults willing to say that some behavior is wrong and some forms of courage and self-restraint are good.

9. War and Peace

The final chapter tries to move beyond the gender war implied by the book’s title.

Sommers argues that correcting old discrimination against girls does not require denying problems facing boys. Reversing the direction of unfairness does not produce justice.

She uses stories of feminist mothers who initially tried to suppress toy weapons, rough play, or stereotypically boyish interests and later became more accepting of their sons’ temperaments.

The phrase she favors is a “great relearning”: adults rediscovering that boys and girls can be equal in worth without being identical in average interests or behavior.

Sommers ends optimistically. She thinks evidence of boys’ educational problems has become too visible to keep dismissing and that a fairer approach can preserve gains for girls while giving boys the kind of schooling they need.

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