Domestic Violence: a Feminist-Scholarship Debate

Interesting pair of essays in The Chronicle Review. I may use this in my journalism class for a unit on statistics, advocacy, and the importance of open-minded skepticism in the reporting of the news.

Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay “Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship” (The Chronicle Review,
online edition, June 29), criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in
domestic-violence law at the University of California at Berkeley’s
School of Law, for publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits,
Domestic Violence Law, and for not taking seriously her
continuing criticisms of the book. “One reason that feminist
scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable,
evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack,” Sommers
charged. Following is Lemon’s response to those criticisms and
Sommers’s rebuttal. Sommers is a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.