Comments Elsewhere

Well, Debbie Stoller and Bust magazine deserve mention, even if I infinitely prefer Bitch and the late, lamented HUES.

I still just don’t get the demand for declaring a “Third Wave” though. I mean, quite independently of the worries about “waves” to begin with, if you take those historical categories perfectly seriously, it just hasn’t been long enough. The “First Wave” as conventionally dated refers to at least three generations of feminists who had lots of internal differences and some pitched fights over tactics, organization, goals, class, race, sexuality, ideology, etc., and those conflicts often took the form of intergenerational conflicts between the older leaders and young upcoming activists. Whenever the “Third Wave” language gets brought out I always just wonder why we can’t at least put a good 72 years of work into the Second Wave before we declare a new one.