Since the mid 2000s, the intense focus on feminist generational conflict and rebellion that
characterized much of the 1990s and early 2000s has been replaced by an increasing concern for how to
continue the fight, how to finish the unfinished business of the women’s movement. In part, this shift
occurred because the original spokespeople for this new “wave” were getting older, and many of them
began to focus their energies on new goals. A number of the key figures of the initial “third wave” period
stopped writing in the voice of “feminism’s daughters” and began writing about their own experiences as
mothers—including Walker, Baumgardner, and Richards, among others. New voices began to emerge,
including those who used the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to argue for an anti-imperialist,
transnational feminist movement built by creating coalitions among progressive groups. And a new
generation of feminist scholars began writing about the Millennial period. As Rory Dicker and Alison
Piepmeier, the editors of one such study of this new feminism, wrote: “We need a feminism that is
dedicated to a radical, transformative political vision, a feminism that does not shy away from hard work
but recognizes that changing the world is a difficult and necessary task, a feminism that utilizes the new
technologies of the Internet, the playful world of fashion, and the more clear-cut activism of protest
marches, a feminism that can engage with issues as diverse as women’s sweatshop labor in global
factories and violence against women as expressed in popular music.”^39
New Feminist Writing: In Print and Online
Texts have helped to spread feminist ideas since the beginning of the U.S. women’s movement—from
suffragist newspapers in the nineteenth century to mimeographed manifestos of the late 1960s to
bestselling feminist books in all eras. As discussed in chapter 2, in the late 1960s, it was not uncommon
for feminist groups to write political statements, or manifestos, outlining their beliefs and goals. Such
documents tended to come out of consciousness-raising and political groups, produced by a collective of
women rather than just one author. Documents of this type, such as the “Redstockings Manifesto” (1969),
were widely circulated in pamphlet form and often republished in feminist journals and anthologies, some
of which became bestsellers, such as the collection Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970). Likewise, the
emergence of a new feminist sensibility in the post-1990 era can be connected to texts, whether Rebecca
Walker’s 1992 Ms. essay or feminist books preceding it, such as Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The
Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of
Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991). Texts were especially important in giving a presence to this
new feminism, since it did not rely on the gathering of women in activist groups, as discussed in the
previous chapter. If the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was characterized by
the rapid formation of groups and publication of their manifestos, the feminism that emerged in the mid-
1990s developed primarily through the publication of individually authored texts. Texts named the
generation, texts energized it, and reading texts became a way of participating in the contemporary
movement.
The boom in new feminist writing in the 1990s and 2000s, much of which used the terms “third wave”
or “next generation,” often took the form of anthologies of individual essays, almost exclusively written in
a first-person voice, which provided concrete examples of how young women (and some men) were
living feminism in a supposedly “postfeminist” era. These collections were joined by monographs which
also described feminism through an autobiographical voice, as well as books that sought to give young
people concrete examples of how to engage in everyday activism. More recent books have attempted to
reach even younger women—and girls—to encourage them to see why feminism is still vitally important.