their white second-wave predecessors, white privilege and racism within feminism have by no means
been eliminated. Ensuring that feminism truly represents women of all races, ethnicities, and
socioeconomic classes is an ongoing project, one that must continue with each generation.
The third principle—that feminism must be nondogmatic and acknowledge the complexities and
contradictions of lived experience—is a response to the perceived prescriptive agenda of second-wave
feminism, in which there was one right way to do feminism and one right way to be a feminist. Rebecca
Walker and her co-writers wanted to “embrac[e] their contradictions and complexities” by “being real”
and “telling the truth” about their lives, the implication being that this truth telling could pull back the
curtain on what an earlier generation of feminists had kept hidden so as to avoid uncomfortable truths.^56
As self-described hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan writes, “Only when we’ve told the truth about ourselves
—when we’ve faced the fact that we are often complicit in our oppression—will we be able to take full
responsibility for our lives.”^57 For Morgan and other writers, one truth that needed to be faced head-on
was that some feminists have no problem supporting traditional gender roles. In Morgan’s case, for
example, this involved recounting her love of strong, even domineering men and her wearing of high heels
—a way of loving and a way of dressing that she described as part of her attachment to traditional
femininity.
Although this third principle has ensured that contemporary feminists have not been torn apart by the
factionalism and self-policing that accompanied earlier forms of feminism, some have wondered whether
this embrace of contradictions and complexity is merely an excuse to avoid taking a critical look at
personal behavior. If so-called second-wave feminists may have made the personal too political—where
every aspect of one’s life was open to scrutiny—has this generation of feminists depoliticized the
personal so that all individual choices are to be accepted as long as a feminist is the one making those
choices? In the spirit of being nonjudgmental and open to all ways of living, this feminism runs the risk of
being merely an identity to claim without any political content.
These three core ideological principles developed as a response to—and in some cases a critique of
—earlier feminist ideas, but they also reflected the increased acceptance of human diversity and
difference that characterizes twenty-first-century life. While arguing that feminism must be welcoming and
open to all, this new movement has sometimes been criticized for advocating a feminism without much
content, a feminism so inclusive that it stands for everything—and therefore, perhaps, for nothing. While
younger feminists express their feminism in different ways than did feminists in the past, they share with
their predecessors “a belief in the full personhood of women and an agenda of eradicating all forms of
oppression that keep people from achieving their full humanity.”^58 By turning to the activist work being
pursued by members of this generation, we can see how their feminism is given content and put into
practice.
Activism
The political and activist work of this generation has taken many forms, focusing on traditional women’s
rights issues, such as reproductive rights and ending rape, to new issues that have emerged in the last few
decades, such as transgender rights and immigration reform. “Young feminists in large numbers—both
women and men—are doing social justice work all over the country. They are moved to action by social
and economic injustice, the growing divide between rich and poor, contemporary manifestations of
colonialism, the rapid growth of the prison industrial complex, and the deterioration of democracy.”^59