rights.
Walker’s activism in the early 1990s also demonstrated her complex relationship with the prior
generation’s feminism. In the summer of 1992, a few months after the publication of her Ms. article,
Walker graduated from Yale. After “trying to figure out how to organize the two hundred or so young
women from around the country who have written me passionate letters echoing my sentiments that ‘I am
not a post-feminist feminist, I am the third wave,’ ” she cofounded Third Wave Direct Action Corporation
with white 1990 Harvard graduate Shannon Liss.^10 The group’s first project, Freedom Summer ’92, drew
on “the tactics and ideals of the civil rights movement,” sending an interracial group of 120 young women
and men on a cross-country bus ride to register voters for the upcoming election; this action led to twenty
thousand new registered voters, “most of them low-income, young women of color.”^11 As Liss told a
reporter in 1992, “I grew up thinking that women’s problems had been solved,” but “I’m starting to see
now that women are actually moving backwards, particularly on the issue of abortion.”^12 The group was
committed to continuing the feminist fight of the past and bringing younger women into the process,
“cultivating young women’s leadership and activism in order to bring the power of young women to bear
on politics as usual,” said Walker.^13 Yet the group’s founders also saw themselves as doing something
different than had the feminists of the previous generation. Like its name, Third Wave Direct Action
Corporation was “a response to critiques of the Second Wave. It was important to us (the founders) that
Third Wave be, at its very core, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-issue, pan-sexual orientation, with
people and issues from all socio-economic backgrounds represented.”^14 The group’s mission statement
articulated a broad vision of feminism and an inclusive call for participants, framing this expanded vision
of feminism as a critique of where the second wave had fallen short.
After the 1992 elections, Third Wave Direct Action Corporation continued to work on young feminist
issues with the alumni of the Freedom Summer action—the word “corporation” in the group’s name yet
another sign that this generation’s approach to collective action was different than that of their feminist
predecessors’. Walker was recognized for her work with Third Wave when she was named Feminist of
the Year by the Fund for the Feminist Majority in 1992 and, later, as one of the fifty most influential
American leaders under the age of forty by Time magazine in 1994. In 1995, the group originally
envisioned by Walker and Liss refocused its energies on creating a foundation that could financially
support young women’s activism. In 1997, as the Third Wave Foundation, it became a grant-giving
organization led by a “multi-class, multi-gendered, multi-racial board comprised of 25 young people,”
that focused its financial support on “emergency funding for abortions, scholarships, building young-
women-led reproductive rights organizations, and providing general operating support for young-women-
led groups and projects.”^15
Walker’s actions paralleled other signs of a new feminist movement. In the aftermath of the Clarence
Thomas hearings, existing feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women saw a rise in
their membership rolls, and new organizations such as the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) emerged. As
the New York Times reported in its 1992 coverage of these new groups: “In a surge of feminism not seen
since the late 1970’s, thousands of women in New York City have started to embrace the radical tactics of
groups like ACT-UP . . . to press for undiminished abortion rights, improved women’s health care, pay
equity, artistic freedom and an end to violence against women.”^16 When in April 1992, six months after
the Thomas hearings, NOW held its March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., 750,000 people from
across the country participated, many wearing I BELIEVE ANITA T-shirts and buttons. The hearings also
had a major impact on the reporting of sexual harassment cases: the number of sexual harassment