with feminism all around her; in her writing, she regularly described feminism as being like a kind of
“home.” It is worth noting that when she was eighteen she legally changed her last name from Leventhal—
from her father, white civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal—to Walker, in order to connect more to her
mother and her mother’s side of the family. Alice Walker’s prominence as a second-wave feminist,
Pulitzer Price–winning novelist, and occasional writer for Ms. magazine helped Rebecca to publish her
essay “Becoming the Third Wave.” The essay can be read as a sign of her entitlement and her sense of
responsibility: the daughter of feminism, both literally and figuratively, she saw feminism as her own, yet
as its inheritor she felt compelled to continue it by launching another wave. While Anita Hill was a
reluctant activist—coming forward to testify at the Senate hearings only after being strongly coaxed to do
so—Walker used the opening provided by Hill’s testimony to claim a central spot on the feminist stage. “I
am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health,
and healing of women,” she wrote, describing feminism as something that can be passed down from
mother to daughter but also something that must be claimed anew by each generation.^7
In her 1992 essay’s final declaration—“I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave”—
Walker made three rhetorical moves that would reverberate throughout the 1990s and be repeated by other
“next generation” feminists. First, in calling herself and, by extension, her generation the “third wave,”
she used feminism’s wave metaphor in order both to highlight the connections between the “second” and
“third” waves of the women’s movement and to distance herself from “postfeminism feminists.” The term
“third wave” thus signaled a shared feminist lineage and a rejection of postfeminism, or the idea that
feminism is no longer needed. Second, in calling herself “third wave” rather than merely “feminist,”
Walker stressed generational differences within feminism, arguing that the time had come for a new
movement led by young women. “From my experience talking with young women and being one myself, it
has become clear to me that young women are struggling with the feminist label,” she would later write.
“Young women coming of age today wrestle with the term because we have a very different vantage point
on the world than that of our foremothers.”^8 Finally, by naming herself—and, by extension, her generation
—as “third wave” from its very inception, Walker used feminism’s wave metaphor to brand the new
movement, a move that helped its launch into the public sphere but also demonstrated that this younger
group of activists did not necessarily share their predecessors’ antipathy to feminism being marketing like
a commodity.
Rebecca Walker’s writing therefore symbolized in a vivid way the daughter’s struggle with her
mother’s feminism. When her essay was published in Ms. in 1992, she described herself as following in
her mother’s footsteps in carrying the feminist movement forward; three years later, when she edited a
collection of essays entitled To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, she
directly challenged the feminism of her mother’s generation, arguing that the new generation was
impatient with inherited feminist orthodoxies. As she writes in To Be Real: “For many of us it seems that
to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way
of living that doesn’t allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories.”^9
Walker’s development as a writer and spokeswoman for feminists in Generation X exhibited an
increasing emphasis on intergenerational difference and conflict, focusing on the third wave’s rejection of
many of the tenets of the second-wave movement. She argued for a feminism committed to “being real,”
encouraging feminists of her generation to acknowledge the full complexity and contradictions of people’s
lives and to discard any form of feminist dogma. Finally, writing as a biracial and bisexual woman who
did not neatly fit into prescriptive categories—including feminism’s own categories—she challenged
feminism to broaden its focus to include a wide range of social justice issues beyond “just” women’s