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Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism

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Astrid Henry has written a terrific book on the central debates within and between feminism and queer theory. Specifically, Henry interogates the mother-daughter trope too often used to behead second wave feminists (women active in the 1970s and 1980) by third wavers and queer feminists. Such tropes, Henry pleads, are not helpful, given that they misrepresent the complexity of 70s feminist sexual thought and the careful reading done by many third (and fourth?) wavers of the work that preceeded them. If mother/daughter or generational approaches are not helpful, Henry's mapping out of the divides, rhetorical and lived, are. Henry has given us a road map through key third wave and queer feminst texts since the feminist sex wars and the demise of the anti-pornography movement. She shows us just how worn out are the notions that feminists are anti-sex and lesbians are anti-male. Now, if feminists-- whatever generation or type-- could stop demanding their own originality (thus killing off their mothers or daughters as the case may be) and embrace history, a history of rich feminist debate, we could, as Henry suggests, think past some old unproductive divides.

Smart and jargon-free.

I have recently been reading a wide range of books in women's studies broadly conceived for a project whose details I won't go into. Of all the books that I have read so far, in many ways I have found this one to be both the most informative and the most illuminative. Although the main purpose of the book is to explore the generational conflict between second and third wave feminism, it in fact manages to do much more than explore merely that issue. Astrid Henry is an ideal person to undertake this study. Agewise she belongs to the third wave of feminism, while at the same time holding the second wave in much higher regard than the bulk of those feminists comprising the third wave. "Second wave" refers, of course, to the reemergence of the women's movement in the sixties and seventies in America. The "first wave" is considered to be the feminists of the last half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, the years between the passing of universal suffrage and the revival of the women's movement in the sixties and seventies considered a period in which the women's movement was largely nonexistent (historian William H. Chafe has written an interesting book on what happened during these decades when supposedly nothing happened, THE AMERICAN WOMAN: HER CHANGING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL ROLES 1920-1970). The second wave was comprised by a large number of women, but Henry is concerned with the way that the third wave has narrowed and misunderstood the second wave. She writes as one perplexed at her own generation.

The image of feminism that the third wave is rebelling against is a common one; one could almost say that it has become the stock image of a radical feminist. These women are perceived to be frumpy, lacking joy, asexual, anti-heterosexual, and ruthless in imposing a feminist orthodoxy that no one can transgress. The main figures associated with this image are Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Certainly, anyone who engaged with feminists during the height of the second wave realizes that there is some truth to this stereotype. I remember vividly being told that I could not be a male feminist because men were "invaders" of women's bodies. I was told by someone else that I couldn't listen to the Rolling Stones because of the way women were portrayed in their songs, especially "Under My Thumb" (nevermind that Mick Jagger himself became uneasy with the song in the seventies and stopped performing it for largely political reasons). In one of the more surreal moments, one feminist told me that another feminist couldn't be a "real" feminist because she shaved her legs, while the other declared her accuser to be a fake feminist because she wore nail polish.

The problem is, as Henry shows so well, that the second wave embraced so much more than the MacKinnon-Dworkin feminist puritans. Although in the popular imagination second wave feminists were anti-sex, the fact is that the sex wars fought between the censorship and victimization crowd and the pro-sex crowd was won decisively by the pro-sex advocates, far in advance of the emergences of the third wave. Moreover, especially among black feminists like bell hooks and Alice Walker, as well as S&M lesbian feminists like Pat Califia were articulating many of the same ideas that would later be espoused by the third wave.

What interests Henry is why the third wave has been so indebted to a greatly truncated vision of what the second wave espoused. Her assessment leads to the understanding that much of the difference between the second and third wave amounts to the need of the younger feminists to have a movement against which they can rebel. But since what they actually want to hold is similar to what many within the second wave held, they have to create something of a straw woman. In many ways the third wave cherry picks the ideas that they imagine belong to all second wave feminists and rebel against not the actual second wave but a constructed second wave that excludes a hold of writers and thinkers who contradict the caricature they has been constructed. The result is basically a mother-daughter conflict, with younger feminists battling against what they perceive to be the sins of the mothers, while the mothers are perplexed at the way they have been rejected.

Though Henry does not map out a plan of reconciliation between the mothers and daughters, she does point to one possible source, and that is the recognition of the decisive though underappreciated connection between race and feminism. The first wave feminists started off as abolitionists so that the movement literally was created in the struggle against slavery. The second wave was largely inspired by the civil rights movement and many of its canonical figures were black feminists. The third wave has had a host of black, Asian, and Hispanic feminists involved. In fact, the first declaration of the existence of a third wave was made by Alice Walker's biracial daughter Rebecca. Henry points out that attention to the black feminists of each generation gives the lie to the distorted, abridged version that many in the third wave work with.

So, from my description here one can easily imagine that the book serves as an excellent introduction to both the second and third waves of feminism. But it also provides a superb literature survey, giving one interested in reading further a host of titles from all periods of feminism to read. Almost the entire book proceeds by discussing various books and essays contained in anthologies. It also does a great job of explaining the role that race plays in feminist thought, even if feminism itself doesn't always acknowledge it. To be sure, feminism is all too often thought to be a product by and for white women. Henry tries to act as a corrective to this misunderstanding.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough to anyone interested in issues within women's studies. One will find few books that cover so many issues within feminism so well nor any book that discusses the central conflict within feminism with such understanding and sympathy for both sides of the issue.