In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Women's History 12.4 (2001) 215-221



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: Third Wave Feminism in the United States

Stephanie Gilmore


Barbara Findlen, ed. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation. Seattle, Wash.: Seal Press, 1995. xi + 264 pp.; no bibliography or index. ISBN 1-878067-61-3 (pb).

Rebecca Walker, ed. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. viii + 292 pp.; no bibliography or index. ISBN 0-385-47261-7 (cl); 0-385-47262-5 (pb).

Many second wave feminists have recently offered "instructions" to the next generation to educate and remind them of their feminist heritage and battles yet to be waged or won. As a historian, I am thrilled by the awareness of feminists who recognize the historical importance of recent and current social movements; recall their own participation in these movements; and publish monographs, memoirs, and anthologies on the subject. They defy a canonical tradition of omitting women's past from the historical texts, not only rectifying unjust omissions of women in previous centuries, but also assuring that women are not elided from the immediate past. To this end, feminist scholar Phyllis Chesler has offered Letters to a Young Feminist, in which she chronicles how women of her generation fought for social change to enhance the lives of women in the present generation. 1 Activists Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow have done their part to restore the feminist legacy of the modern women's rights movement in The Feminist Memoir Project; and journalist Susan Brownmiller has recalled what life was like In Our Time. 2 Yet these works also imply that young women today are not paying attention to their feminist legacy. While I am grateful for these authors' recollections and reminders that the struggle is far from over, I also wonder if they are taking time to listen to The Voices from the Next Generation as they tell us what it means To Be Real.

As historian Leila J. Rupp points out in her article for this special issue, "Is Feminism the Province of Old (or Middle-Aged) Women?" women are identified with a social movement when they evince a commitment of time, money, and stature, all of which, in turn, affect women's abilities to participate in social movements. 3 Such necessary commitments, however, work against the possibility of understanding young women as actors and leaders of the feminist movement because they do not usually possess large amounts of disposable time and money and they have not [End Page 215] achieved social standing. Younger women are often reminded that there are structural disadvantages to youth (in addition to race, sexuality, religious beliefs, and class) that preclude them from being active in a feminist movement. So, perhaps I am not so surprised after all that second wave activists, historians, and social movement theorists might be reluctant to recognize third wave feminism as a movement.

A serious implication of ignoring young women in the concept of feminist movements is the mistaken idea that young women ignore feminism and feminist activism, or, that their participation is not particularly meaningful to them or to the movement. In reality, many young women do consider themselves feminists, and even more integrate feminist values into their lives. As editor of the feminist magazine Ms. Barbara Findlen writes in her edited collection Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation, such praxis "is an important barometer of the impact of feminism, since feminism is a movement for social change--not an organization doing a membership drive" (xiv). To combat this erroneous assumption, third wave feminists often highlight what they believe to be marked differences between their principles and priorities and those of second wave feminists. However, I would hazard to suggest that the continuities between these two waves of feminist activism are more prominent than the discontinuities.

Despite economic and structural disadvantages vis-à-vis older women, young women have been involved in feminist activism. Publishing has been an important and conspicuous method of reaching...

pdf

Share