With a readable, engaging style, Siegel takes feminist history, the good, the bad, and the vicious, and tells us what happened and why we should care. Her very careful, nuanced, play-by-play account of the early years and struggles of the second wave feminist movement, as well as documentation of the third wave's origins and modern incarnations, is vital in an era when women are constantly pitted against each other, whether it's young vs. old, stay at home moms vs. working moms, feminists vs. non-feminists, etc. Siegel doesn't shy away from the truly bitter divides that cropped up in the second wave (and, one could probably argue, were passed down from the first wave and its predecessors, though Siegel limits herself to the 1950's and beyond), and in doing so brings needed attention to the causes women were and are fighting for.
Her point is not that younger feminists should simply be more educated, or older feminists more tolerating, but that infighting is as old as feminism and is, perhaps, good for it in that it helps the movement grow, stretch, change, and evolve. Siegel also tackles why feminism is still important, even if "feminism" is becoming increasingly hard to define, for feminists and non-feminists. It's this very erasure and confusion over the word, its history, and its motives that Siegel unpacks so well. She doesn't necessarily want readers to identify with either the "mothers" or "daughters" here, but to gain a clearer picture of who is in each group and what their main gripes with each other are (as well as areas where they've bonded and interacted). The idea that "conflict has long been feminism's lifeblood," along with the need for the more radical and more mainstream strands of a social movement, are ideas that Siegel presents with scholarly yet accessible detail that revisits some of the high (and low) points of second wave feminism, and also explores the various strands of anti-feminism that have sprung up since then.
Some of her examples seem reaching; when she writes, "At the dawn of the new millennium, it was no longer simply a battle between feminists but between older and younger women more broadly," going on to cite The Devil Wears Prada, Chore Whore, and The Second Assistant, I'm not really sure how or where this fits in since these aren't books about feminism and if the idea is that women shouldn't criticize their female bosses or portray them as equally as heinous as male bosses, that seems like a reverse kind of chauvinism. (The example of Citizen Girl hits much closer to home.) To my reading, this is part of a larger conflation of pop culture and "feminism," whereby anything that happened on, say, Sex and the City, is The Truth For Women. While I think art and fiction and television do reflect reality, they are not exact replicas and should not be taken as such.
This leads me to my larger question, which is whether a book like this is speaking to or only trying to reach self-described feminists or a larger audience, the "I'm not a feminist but..." person or (gasp!) even men. I think a lot of what Siegel discusses re: the third wave is in fact about women who don't necessarily need or want labels (including, at times, the feminist one) and how they do or don't relate to "feminism," and though I would definitely call myself a feminist, I often feel that the label is often used as some sort of arbitrary litmus test flung about at random rather than anything concrete. It seems like anyone who publicly calls herself a feminist can, in an instant, be dismissed by other self-identified feminists with some form of "You think you're a feminist, but you're not." Which is precisely as old an argument as the ones Siegel describes, bringing us, again full circle.
Siegel's impassioned argument in favor of a "truce" between the mothers and daughters of feminism is worth reading even if you think you know the whole story. Even if (or especially if) you grew up reading Sisterhood is Powerful. Siegel delineates the various branches of feminism (then and now) and by getting down to the nitty gritty (accusations of feminists being sellouts or, conversely, too radical), she makes it okay to discuss these issues reasonably, rather than simply vociferously.
