feminism’s history undoubtedly exacerbated generational tensions among feminists in the United States.
The term “third wave” seemed to stress that this new “wave”—or political generation—was an
improvement on the earlier, “second” wave. While indicating some continuity of feminism across the
waves, the numerical delineation of a new, “third” wave also relied on a notion of teleological progress,
in which each successive wave—because of its newness, because of its youth, because of its difference—
improves upon the last. In asserting themselves as the “third wave,” this next generation of activists had to
describe the previous generation in monolithic and even caricatured ways in order to present themselves
as the improved version of feminism. Younger feminists argued that the second wave was almost
exclusively white (ignoring second-wave feminists of color), overly puritanical when it came to sexuality
(ignoring diverse second-wave perspectives on sexuality), and prescriptive and overly dogmatic
(ignoring the multiplicity of second-wave feminisms, plural). In order to describe their own feminism as
focused on the intersections between gender, race, class, and sexuality, they ignored the century-long
history of intersectional, social justice feminism in the United States.
Misrepresentation of one feminist generation by another occurred in both directions. Older feminists
were quick to respond to how they were being characterized—and equally quick to critique the feminist
ideas advanced by this new generation. Some criticized the younger feminists for being nothing but “sex-
obsessed young thangs with a penchant for lip gloss and a disregard for recent history.”^35 When
intergenerational groups of feminists gathered at conferences and political meetings throughout the 1990s
and early 2000s, conversation often turned into debate. For example, at an April 2002 Veteran Feminists
of America conference held at Barnard College, a panel of well-known second-wave feminists began to
lament the lack of feminist consciousness among younger women, many of whom were in the audience,
arguing that younger feminists’ “individualist attitude” couldn’t change the world the way the “collectivist
drive” of their generation had. “We were action-oriented in a public, political context. We had to
challenge laws, change patterns, alter behavior. Being able to bare your midriff is fine as an expression,”
said second-wave writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin at the conference, “but it doesn’t mean things are going to
change.”^36 For Pogrebin, younger feminists were all style, no substance; all they had to offer was an
aesthetic sensibility rather than a political perspective. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, this
generational debate among feminists was frequently reported by the mainstream media, which seemed to
relish portraying feminism as a “cat fight” rather than as a political movement.
As the 2000s progressed, the wave metaphor increasingly came under attack by younger feminists—
members of the so-called third wave—who urged their contemporaries to move beyond its simplistic
division of feminists into generational, or age-based, groups. Lisa Jervis, the founding editor and
publisher of the third-wave magazine Bitch, argued in 2004: “We’ve reached the end of the wave
terminology’s usefulness. What was at first a handy-dandy way to refer to feminism’s history and its
present and future potential with a single metaphor has become a shorthand that invites intellectual
laziness, an escape hatch from the hard work of distinguishing between core beliefs and a cultural
moment.”^37 And yet, while the assertion of a new wave is inevitably fraught with problems—stressing
difference over continuity, creating a monolithic portrait of a generational cohort, conflating ideology with
age—something like the wave metaphor may be necessary in order for each successive generation to
claim feminism for itself and to enter the public stage. “Because feminism is not, and cannot be, some
form of received wisdom handed down across generations but is an active interpretation of the realities of
women’s own lives and struggles, the feminism of the future will continue to be reborn different in every
generation.”^38 Announcing the arrival of one’s political generation—as Walker did in her 1992
declaration “I am the Third Wave”—may have been required to energize the next generation into action.