Free The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers Page B

mock battles hold a special fascination for boys, but most of today’s schools prohibit them. Play swords and shields? Those, even in miniature, invite suspension. Boys charging into each other? Someone could get hurt (and think of the lawsuits). Young males pretending to kill one another? A prelude to wife abuse. Gender scholars have spent the past twenty years trying to resocialize boys away from such “toxic” masculine proclivities. And a boys school? The American Civil Liberties Union has recently joined forceswith a group of activist professors to expose and abolish the injustice of such invidious “segregation.” For them, what I saw at the Heights School is not “men fully alive”—it is gender apartheid.
    The war against boys is not over. It is fiercer than ever. But the stakes have risen, the battle lines have become clearer, and here and there one sees signs of resistance and constructive action. My second edition is dedicated to inspiriting the forces of reason and, eventually, reconstruction.

Acknowledgments
    I could not have written this book without the unstinting support of the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is the ideal scholarly environment where I was able to devote more than a year to this new version of The War Against Boys. I am especially grateful to the late Elizabeth Lurie. She believed in this book from its beginning in the late 1990s and was partly responsible for bringing me to AEI, where I wrote the first edition. She is dearly missed. I also want to thank Sue Koffel for her vital encouragement and support.
    I am heavily indebted to several research assistants and interns who have contributed so much to this project: Caroline Kitchens, Keriann Hopkins, Riva Litman, Emily Jashinsky, and Geneva Ruppert. Special thanks are also owed to two AEI colleagues and good friends who have been so generous with their time: Mark Perry and Karlyn Bowman.
    I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my editor at Simon & Schuster, Robert Bender, who encouraged me to write this second edition. Many thanks to Karyn Marcus, Jessica Chin, and Patricia Romanowski Bashe for shepherding this book through the production process.
    There is no adequate way to thank my husband, Fred Sommers. He is more interested in formal logic and metaphysics, but he patiently discussedevery page with me. If he is tired of hearing about the plight of American boys, he never let on.
    My sons, David and Tamler, were at the forefront of my consciousness when I first wrote The War Against Boys. They have grown up to become wonderful men, but they were the paradigmatic boys whose cause this book defends. I dedicate it to them.

Also by Christina Hoff Sommers
    One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance
    Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women

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