complaints filed with the EEOC more than doubled after the hearings, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in
1996.^17
The Thomas hearings occurred at the end of more than a decade of anti-feminist rollbacks that began
in the late 1970s. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 signaled that the liberalism of the
1960s and ’70s was officially under attack, as progressive issues such as abortion rights, affirmative
action, and the gay and lesbian movement were all targeted by the Right. In an uncanny repetition of past
history, the so-called postfeminist generation of the 1980s made many of the same arguments put forward
by young women in the 1920s after women won the vote: arguing that women and men were now equal
and any obstacles in a woman’s path could be solved by individual, rather than political, solutions. The
1980s ushered in “a powerful counterassault on women’s rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the
handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women,” as
Susan Faludi described this period in her bestselling book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women.^18 When Walker and others called for a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s, they
were thus challenging this backlash against feminism and the postfeminist belief that feminism was
obsolete because gender equality had been achieved.
Articulation of a New Feminist Sensibility
In their book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, white activists Jennifer Baumgardner
and Amy Richards, both born in 1970, write: “For anyone born after the early 1960s, the presence of
feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely
notice that we have it—it’s simply in the water.”^19 For members of the post-baby-boomer generation, this
“fluoride feminism” was present both in the private sphere of their homes, families, and relationships and
in the public sphere of education, work, politics, and the media. Baumgardner and Richards represented
the experience of many in their generation, those raised by self-identified feminist mothers—and
sometimes fathers—who instilled in their daughters a “girls can do anything boys can do” attitude. As
children, they sang along to the title track of Free to Be . . . You and Me, the bestselling record of feminist
children’s stories and songs released in 1972, and they absorbed egalitarian principles—with mothers
working alongside fathers for income outside the home and fathers cooking dinner alongside mothers
inside the home. As one such feminist would write, “We are the first generation for whom feminism has
been entwined in the fabric of our lives.”^20 In other words, what made this generation unique was that it
had grown up after the feminist movement had already made significant gains, changing the way that girls
and women saw themselves and their place in the world. As one commentator noted, all women born after
1960, “whether they embrace or reject feminism, are the daughters of feminism, heir to its struggles,
failures, and successes.”^21
Yet, unlike Rebecca Walker, many other women of this generation did not grow up with self-identified
feminist mothers; instead they were raised in families where the feminist revolution had not made an
impact, families where sexism and patriarchal values still dominated and where gender roles remained
relatively unchanged after decades of feminist activism. As white feminist scholar Amber Kinser, born in
1963, describes her journey to feminism, even though it was present in the world, it still had to be worked
for: “There may have been a second-wave revolution happening out there when I was growing up in the
’60s and ’70s, but there was little that was revolutionary happening in my house. Any feminism I learned
was by working relentlessly to move away from my conservative upbringing and find some other mode of