Third wave feminism

Rebecca Walker’s article is making the rounds so I’m thinking about third wave feminism. Every time I look at Wikipedia’s definition of third wave feminism (I’m geeky like that) I wonder if anyone else is because it doesn’t look anything like current mainstream feminism.

What happened?

I had high hopes when Walker started Third Wave Foundation in May 1992 because most of the board members were young women of color.

The third wave grew out of a civil rights case:

In response to the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill scandal, Rebecca Walker published an article in a 1992 issue of Ms. titled “Becoming the Third Wave” in which she stated, “I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third wave.” Hill and Thomas’ case brought attention to the ongoing presence of sexual harassment in the workplace and reinstated a sense of concern and awareness in many people who assumed that sexual harassment and other second wave issues had been resolved. Walker’s article generated several hundred letters of response, most from women under 30, inspiring Walker and activist Shannon Liss to found the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation (now known as Third Wave Foundation). This activist organization was founded to support and mobilize the power of young women to resist various manifestations of injustice.

The definition of third wave feminism doesn’t look like mainstream feminism:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s “essentialist” definitions of femininity, which (according to the third wave) often assumed a universal female identity and over-emphasized the experiences of upper middle class white women. A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to much of third wave ideology. This accounts for the heightened emphasis on the discursive power and fundamental ambiguity inherent in all gender terms and categories. Third-wave theory usually encompasses queer theory, women of color consciousness, womanism, post-colonial theory, critical theory, transnationalism, ecofeminism, and new feminist theory.

The roots of third wave feminism don’t look like mainstream feminism either:

The roots of the Third Wave began, however, in the mid 1980s. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave like Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many other feminists of color, called for a new subjectivity in feminist voice. They sought to negotiate prominent space within feminist thought for consideration of race related subjectivities.

Even second wave founder Gloria Steinem’s first published feminist article piggybacked on the Civil Rights Movement. Her article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation (.pdf),” published in New York magazine even won an award:

Her first openly feminist essay was published in April, 1969, in New York and was titled, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” In the article, Steinem observed that many women who had fought for civil rights for blacks and against the Vietnam War were beginning to fight for political causes such as equality and opportunity for women. For this article she won the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award.

Where’s the respect?

Then in 1995, Walker wrote To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. In 1997, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake wrote Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. In 2000, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote Manifesta. Baumgardner and Richards became the face of third wave feminism. People were so used to seeing white, middle-class women lead the first and second waves, they assumed white, middle-class women would lead the third wave.

We should heed the book title of third wave founder Walker:

To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism

and make feminism for everyone.