not imbibe feminism at home—and who, like Kinser and Knox, had to work to find it—had been raised in
a culture profoundly shaped by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The passage of Title IX in
1972 expanded the educational opportunities they received in school and the athletic experiences they
pursued after classes were over. They went into careers previously closed to women by sexist attitudes
and overt (and often legal) discrimination. Abortion was legal during their entire reproductive lives, and
effective forms of birth control widely available.
An important factor in the adoption of a feminist identity for this group of feminists has been the
academic field of women’s studies, which until the early 1970s essentially did not exist. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, as noted in chapter 2, feminist scholars working in a variety of academic disciplines—
especially in English, history, psychology, and sociology—began to construct an interdisciplinary field of
study around the new knowledge they were producing; they initially called this field women’s studies in
order to mark its focus on women, whose lives, creative talents, and histories had been virtually absent
from the curriculum of most academic fields up until that point. The number of undergraduate programs in
women’s studies more than tripled between 1970 and 2010, and universities throughout the United States
began offering both master’s and doctoral programs in the field; many of these programs would eventually
be renamed to indicate an expanded focus on gender and sexuality. By the time the generation examined
here went to college, they were likely to encounter courses that introduced them to the history of the
women’s movement and to the development of feminist thought. Because of the dramatic changes in U.S.
higher education made by the women’s movement, this generation was also provided with both female
and feminist professional role models. As AnnJanette Rosga, born in 1966, described her experience as
an undergraduate student: “I went to college from 1986 to 1990, during which time I believe I had a total
of three male professors. During both college and graduate school, my mentors and advisers were among
the leading feminist scholars in this country.”^27 Rosga’s experience provides a sharp contrast to that of
women pursuing higher education in earlier decades, for whom having a female, let alone a feminist,
professor was a rare occurrence.
Women’s studies courses and programs strengthened this generation’s feminist identity. Unlike the
earlier women’s rights activists described in chapters 1 and 2, many in the post-baby-boomer generation
initially learned about feminist activism from studying it in college rather than from participating in such
activism themselves. They learned about the history of the women’s movement as something that had
already taken place—and had been taking place for a long time—rather than as something they were
inventing anew. What they might have lacked in firsthand experience as activists was replaced by their in-
depth education of the history and theory of the earlier movements. But this history was not taught as
hagiography. Quite the opposite: this generation learned the history of feminism through a critique of its
past. Works like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women
Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies introduced
younger feminists to feminism through a critical assessment of white feminists’ singular focus on gender
and the use of middle-class white experience as the foundation of feminist analysis and action. This
generation developed their own feminist theory and activist strategies in the 1990s and 2000s, building on
these critiques and attempting to put forward a feminism grounded in intersectional analysis, in which
feminism has a broad social justice agenda. Such an agenda could be seen in anthologies like Colonize
This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2002), which articulated “a feminist way of looking
at la vida that linked the shit we got as women to the color of our skin, the languages we spoke and the zip
codes we knew as home.”^28 As Colonize This! coeditor Daisy Hernández said, “I wouldn’t have come to
call myself a feminist if racial justice wasn’t a key part of it.”^29