SOURCE: Hogeland, Lisa Maria. “Against Generational Thinking, or, Some Things That ‘Third Wave’ Feminism Isn't.” Women's Studies in Communication 24, no. 1 (spring 2001): 107-21.

In the following essay, Hogeland identifies three distinct phases of feminist writing from the 1960s to the present, noting that the different generations of feminists suffer more from an evasion of dialogue than overt disagreement.

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminists began to worry about “the next generation” of feminism. In 1983, Ms. Magazine published a “Special Issue on Young Feminists,” and the first of the several books and anthologies asserting a “third wave” of U.S. feminism uniquely the province of young women appeared in 1991 (Kamen, 1991; Wolf, 1993; Findlen, 1995; Walker, 1995; Heywood & Drake, 1997; Baumgardner & Richards 2000). In this essay, I offer two stories about my own history with generational rhetoric in order to illuminate some of the ways that it can be inflammatory and divisive. More importantly, as I...