THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM
When the media takes a moment off from ponderously declaring feminism dead or irrelevant to have a look around at contemporary feminists, all it seems to find are third-wavers: If you’re under 40 and you’re a feminist, then you’re a third-wave feminist—regardless of your politics.
While the first wave of feminism (the campaign for women’s suffrage) spanned some 150 years, the second wave was allotted less than a quarter-century before being declared “over” by the mainstream media, most notably by Time’s 1989 cover story (careful readers will note that this one was a full nine years before their even more infamous 1998 “Is Feminism Dead?” cover). Thus, in 1989, when NOW president Patricia Ireland declared that, in response to increasing federal and state restrictions on abortion, a “third wave is coming,” she was acknowledging both the effect of the decade-long backlash (soon to be limned by Susan Faludi in her 1991 book of the same name) in dampening the public face of feminism and the growing activism by young, college-age women. In 1992, Rebecca Walker and Shannon Liss formed the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation (which became the Third Wave Foundation) to mobilize young people—especially young women—to become politically active; its commitment to a multiracial, multigender, and multiclass organizing effort is a hallmark of the best of third-wave activism.
The third-wave moniker has been applied to folks with a huge range of political beliefs, from the in-your-face, punk-rock tactics of riot grrrls to Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth/Fire with Fire power feminism to Jennifer Baum gardner and Amy Richards’s feminism-is-for-everybody activism to Bust’s (and Bitch’s) media-savvy 18-to-34-year-old demographic. From its first utterance, the notion of a third wave has generated controversy and concern that both the media and young women were (and are), in their own ways, flattening the powerful complexities and nuances of second-wave feminism into a man-hating, anti-lipstick stereotype, and setting up a generational antagonism.
Today, “third-wave feminism” is often used to describe a kind of companionable, man-friendly, pro-sex, pro–femininity-if-you-want-it feminism that reflects the successes of the second wave’s struggle for equal footing. Although third-wave feminists are engaged in a wide variety of grassroots political organizing (from voter-registration drives to campaigns to save abortion rights), much of the ink spilled on the third wave from both the mainstream press and feminist anthologies paints a picture of a generation that is more interested in self-determination and individual decisions than in understanding the political impact of them.
Girlie feminism
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards coined this term in their 2000 book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future to describe the pro-femininity line of young feminists, most notably expressed by Bust. The reclamation of makeup and other girly accoutrements, and the validation of traditionally female activities like cooking, crafting, and talking about sex, they concluded, is a valid way to express the desire for equality—valuing the inherently female aspects of life, rather than trying to erase them
Unfortunately, the tenets of girlie feminism—that women’s work is valuable; that crafts are a powerful link to female history; that sexual experimentation is a potent means of feminist expression—have been easily co-opted by market forces and, in many cases, diluted by the resulting slew of consumer products (emphasis mine).
See the rest at: http://bitchmagazine.org/article/everything-about-feminism
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