Two new feminist magazines also began publishing in the 1990s—Bust (created in 1993) and Bitch
(created in 1996)—both of which took a decidedly “third wave” approach in their look and their content.
“Just as Ms. harnessed the vibrant pamphlet culture of women’s liberation, Bust and Bitch founders
tapped into the rich feminist ’zine culture associated with the Riot Grrrls movement,” which had
combined radical feminist politics with a punk rock, do-it-yourself aesthetic.^40 At the same time, a new
crop of feminists began publishing books that discussed the wide range of activist projects that younger
feminists were working on, including issues as varied as the environment, the prison industrial complex,
and media representations of women. As the 1990s progressed, young feminist scholars—many of whom
had been trained in women’s and gender studies and were now professors themselves—began publishing
books that took a more scholarly approach to this new feminism, tracing its history and its theories and
critically analyzing what exactly this new feminism was all about.
What these books all had in common was a central thesis: feminism is still relevant and vitally
needed. Whether they presented this point through autobiographical testimony, appeals to younger women
to recognize their innate feminism, or blueprints for how to do activism in the twenty-first century, these
books reached a broad audience and helped to bring about a renewed interest in feminism in the United
States. This writing did not come out of group meetings or collective visions of a feminist movement, but
it helped create and foster a feminist mindset among a wide range of younger women and men in the
United States, leading them to go out into the world and continue the feminist fight.
The development of the Internet, whose history parallels that of post-1980s feminism, created a new
form of collectivity and textual practices that would have been unheard of by prior generations. If
women’s liberation was “the last American movement to spread the word via mimeo machine,” then this
new group of feminists would be the first to spread the word via e-mail, text messages, and social media
like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.^41 (Facebook started in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in
2006.) This new technology allowed for previously unimagined speed and reach in disseminating feminist
ideas. The emergence of a vibrant feminist online culture—including widely read feminist blogs, a term
that emerged in the 1990s to mean a “Web log”—enabled feminists around the globe to respond
immediately to each other’s ideas and to create virtual communities that provided friendship and political
allies.
The events of September 11, 2001, were “a turning point in the blogging boom,” as blogs became a
way to quickly relay information and communicate with others during a time of national crisis.^42
According to recent studies, women are active members of the blogosphere, online at the same rate as, if
not slightly higher than, their male counterparts—leading to what some have described as the rise of the
“lady blogger” movement. Blogs and other forms of Internet publishing have thus helped to get women’s
voices heard in a way that more traditional forms of media have, so far, failed to do. For example,
according to the feminist OpEd Project, in 2012 women constituted only 20 percent of the authors featured
on the opinion pages of major newspapers, all of which are now also online. While some well-known
opinion writers of both sexes focus on feminist issues—for example, both Gail Collins and Nicholas
Kristof from the New York Times regularly write about gender inequality—in general, such concerns do
not make it into the front section of the paper. Feminist blogs have thus provided a much-needed service
in keeping feminist issues at the forefront of the national—and international—discussion. And such blogs
have become a major part of the blogosphere: a 2006 British study found that feminist blogs made up 6
percent of active blogs, or 240,000 of four million active blogs.^43 Feminists also used Twitter, Tumblr,
and other Web applications to analyze pop culture and share feminist ideas, such as in Feminist Disney
Tumblr, which deconstructs Disney movies. While the Web is not a utopian space in which sexism has