Lisa Maria Hogeland (Essay Date Spring 2001)

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 explores disagreements between older feminists and third-wave feminists, asserting that their differences are political, not generational.

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 will argue, the rhetoric of generational...