living.”^22 This point is echoed by Shelby Knox, a white feminist activist and blogger born two decades
after Kinser, in 1986, and the focus of the 2005 documentary The Education of Shelby Knox about her
fight for comprehensive sex education in her conservative Lubbock, Texas, high school. Describing how
she came to identify with the experience of second-wave feminists, Knox says that Gloria Steinem “had
experiences that mirrored mine. She found feminism and felt like she saved herself—it was something
new to her. I felt that way. I had never heard the word ‘feminism’ growing up—not in a bad way, not in a
good way; it just didn’t exist. So when I discovered it, it validated my humanity and experiences and I
understood it was the ‘world split open,’ which is the Second Wave phrase.”^23 Knox was born two
decades after the National Organization for Women was founded, yet in many ways her experience was
more similar to that of second-wave feminists like Steinem than it was to that of her generational peers,
those who grew up with feminism “in the water” all around them.
For many younger feminists of color the pathway to feminist identity involved both finding feminism
outside the home and then retroactively realizing that it was always present within the home in the
examples of strong women role models. Kristina Gray is an African American feminist activist who was
born in 1979. As the senior program coordinator at the Young Women’s Project, she worked with teen
girls lacking economic and family resources, training them to become women leaders. She described her
own path to feminism this way: “Growing up in a black household, I never heard the F-word [feminism]
used too much . . . most black women in my life saw feminism as a white thing. It wasn’t meant for us and
it didn’t include us.” Yet she also argued that women in her family offered her a kind of “proto-feminism”
as they “led by example, showing me how to defiantly make my way in a world that told black women we
didn’t matter.”^24 Rather than writing off feminism as “a white thing,” Gray, like many other young women
of color in the post-1990 period, instead challenged the idea that feminism is the exclusive property of
white women by both claiming the feminism she learned outside the home and reclaiming the feminism
that she had been taught within it.
A new generation of men also began to call themselves feminists during this period. Many of these
men had—like their sisters and female cousins—grown up in families in which feminism was all around
them: they lived with moms who worked outside the home and had dads who played an active role in
their upbringing. Some of them were raised by single mothers who provided a clear example of strength
and determination; they grew up knowing how difficult it was to make ends meet and how much sexist
discrimination there still was in the workplace. Others became radicalized when they saw their sisters or
female friends being harassed or assaulted. Many men could relate to the experience of Jason Schultz, a
founder of Men Acting for Change at Duke University, who strongly identified with the women in his life:
“I grew up with female friends who were as ambitious, smart, achieving, and confident as I thought I was
—on a good day. . . . When I got to college, these same women began calling themselves feminists. When
I heard men call women ‘dumb chicks’ I knew something was wrong.”^25 From that moment on, Schultz
identified as a feminist.
These different examples reveal multiple pathways into feminist identification. For some, feminism
was always a part of how they saw themselves; for others, it was something they had to seek out and fight
for. While feminism may have been “in the water,” feminist identity—like any political identity—still had
to be claimed. In contrast to their second-wave predecessors, this group did not experience a feminist
“click” where a new perspective suddenly opened up, like a camera shutter; rather, they more often
experienced a “surfacing” in which they began to “identify how feminist ideas have shaped an
individual’s life course, and then through a process of gradual, and sometimes unconscious,
transformation, adopt[ed] a feminist identity.”^26 Yet even those Generation Xers and Millennials who did