In the early 1990s I was among those who responded with outrage to the ‘postfeminist†book The Morning After. Written by Katie Roiphe (daughter of the ‘second-wave†feminist novelist Anne), it argued that instead of empowering women, the second-wave revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had fundamentally betrayed us.
Rebecca Walker, daughter of the novelist Alice Walker, disagreed, insisting that men still held most of society’s power, and that the label ‘postfeminism†was wildy premature. ‘I am not a postfeminist feminist — I am the third wave!†she declared in Ms magazine. To Walker, ‘third wave†meant a feminism linked to her mother’s, but different. It meant continuing and improving upon the best that second-wave feminism had to offer — grassroots activism and critique of the media, for instance — but still shaving your legs.
What is liberating to one generation is oppressive to the next. This year, modesty champion Wendy Shalit, author of the new book Girls Gone Mild, blames the ‘third-wave feminist establishment†for carrying their sexual revolution too far. Shalit maintains that third-wave feminists, among other forces, have conditioned young women to become sluts.
She profiles younger girls who embrace chastity as the route to self-determination — apparently because they feel oppressed by their older sisters’ alleged equation of pole dancing with empowerment — and heralds the coming of a milder fourth wave. Which invites the question: has the third wave of feminism failed?
I doubt it. But its critics, among them a slew of journalists and some elders, including Germaine Greer, claim that the third wave has achieved little. Whereas the feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s did work (creating women’s shelters, feminist institutions and legislative change), it is now stylish to suggest that the third wave was child’s play and that — in the leap from legislation to lipstick — feminism’s focus devolved.
Many of the self-described third- wave writers and leaders I interviewed for my book, Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, take issue with the notion that free love and a stripping pole in every living room were all they set out to achieve. Third-wave feminists have been hard at work. In the United States, for instance, they have founded organisations and launched projects such as the Young Women’s Project, the Third Wave Foundation, the Younger Women’s Task Force and the Real Hot 100. In the United Kingdom they have created alternative media — six new feminist publications launched in the past 18 months.
Feminists are blogging about the same searing questions that women have been asking for years: are women equal? If not, why not? And feminism’s daughters are asking a new question, too — what does it mean for women to be powerful? For an unimaginative few, power meant sexual power and stopped there. But for the majority of feminism’s young reinventors, sex is not the only issue, and power continues to mean parity across political, economic, social and domestic realms. They are third wavers. Hear them roar.
Young women today are engaged in a continued experiment in a world that has not fully progressed. It is confusing to be a daughter of feminism in a culture that has changed in your favour — but stopped halfway (at most). Perhaps this is why the third wave is less defined than the second: the remaining targets are less clear.
But all this goes ignored in a narrative of third wavism that emphasises the power of the pole. What the burned bra was to the second wave, the stripping pole has become to the third — a bogey that distracts us from the far less sexy reality that feminism is and always has been — serious work.
It is time to stop deploying rigid and vapid clichés — damsel, good girl and slut — and fixating on the alleged excesses of one contested aspect. We need to keep our eyes on the wider array of women’s issues. May the stripping pole go the way of the charred bra, a quaint reminder of how those calling it from the sidelines got it very wrong. —