“. . . I am the Third Wave.”
This was the statement imparted by the daughter of Alice Walker—a prominent second-wave feminist. Her name is Rebecca Walker, and in saying this, she put forth new grounds for exploring the world through a feminist lens.
In 1991, Anita Hill, a lawyer and professor, testified against Clarence Thomas, a prospective Supreme Court associate justice. Hill stated that Thomas had sexually harassed her during the time that they worked together. The reactions to this testimony accumulated an increasing incentive for another feminist conversation. In Rebecca Walker’s article for a Magazine, Hill explained her thoughts on the matter and what she believed it meant for our society. Finally, she arrived at a point: the third wave.
Walker took a provocative stance and implied that the 1991 hearing(s) were not to discern whether or not Thomas had harassed Hill but rather to understand the extent of a woman’s power. She elucidates by asking: “Can a woman’s voice, a woman’s sense of self-worth and injustice, challenge a structure predicated upon the subjugation of our gender? Anita Hill’s testimony threatened to do that and more. For… [h]ow many men have not used their protected male privilege to thwart in some way the influence or ideas of a woman colleague, friend, or relative?”
The structure Walker is talking about is a form of patriarchy. The patriarchy relevant to us today is defined most concisely as “a society, system, or group in which men dominate women and have the power and authority.” Walker proposed that the men facilitating these hearings were testing the waters of the United States’s system of patriarchy and how powerful calls for justice about the well-being, respect, and value of women truly were. Still, these men proved their point well enough: women did not have power. After the hearings ceased, the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as an associate justice on October 15, 1991.
Third-wave feminism expanded since Walker’s proclamation but maintained its heart with intersectionality: seeing the lens of feminist problems through not only gender but also race, class, and more. There is another name for the feminism we fancy today—the fourth wave. But what’s the point of these ‘waves’?
The first wave of feminism emerged sometime in the 1840s, coming from other feminist uprisings and related movements predating it—such as the French Revolution, the Abolitionist movement, and more. This wave mainly accomplished the feat of allowing women to vote; the ratification of the 19th Amendment took place on August 18, 1920.
However, racial discrimination made it difficult for women of color to vote. Many of the most active and well-known feminists during this time were white women, and after the ratification in 1920, the first wave died, and the second wave did not enter the stage until the 60s. While all women could vote after the amendment’s ratification, women of color did not have equal voting rights until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These acts passed in the second wave, lessened barriers by outlawing literacy tests, appointing federal examiners, and abolishing the national origins quota system that reserved immigration primarily for Europeans.
The second wave of feminism is credited to many women, though two stand out: Simone DeBeauvoir and Betty Friedan. DeBeauvoir, a French existentialist philosopher, published her book The Second Sex in 1949, setting the foundation for the second wave. In her book, DeBeauvoir argues that society placed women as ‘Other’ and thereby ‘lack independence.’ She suggests that men oppress women historically but also uses her existentialist viewpoints to expand the conversation of gender. She states “that woman has no specific essence… woman is not bound by her sex to be the sort of object that man has made her.” Ultimately, in this book, DeBeauvoir provides several antidotes to the woman problem—the perils of sexism: “women being allowed to pursue the same creative projects as men . . . access to legal abortion and contraception, equal education, and the possibility of women being economically independent.”
Betty Friedan, in the U.S., fourteen years later, published the Feminine Mystique in which she explored the ‘problem that has no name’: housewives (*who were predominately white and middle to upper class) and their sense of unfulfillment, fatigue, and emptiness in their daily lives. She provided interviews and anecdotal experiences that illuminated the greater issue in America. At the end of her book, she calls on women to seek fulfillment in education, their careers, and pursuits outside the confines of their homes.
The legacy of these two women set the grounds for another spurt of feminism and accomplishments in this wave. In 1963, John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, prohibiting sex discrimination in pay. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibit[ed] discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” It was only later into the second wave, the 70s and so forth that Black and women of color authors and activists came into the limelight. Two notable ones are Angela Davis and Alice Walker.
Returning to the present, we must examine feminism through a contemporary lens. What are the issues plaguing our societies today, and what are our aims in this supposed ‘fourth wave’?
The fourth wave focuses on women’s rights like previous waves but puts an emphasis on sexual harassment, rape culture, body shaming, and other systemic and societal pressures placed on women; it uses the internet and social media as an integral part of its advocacy. Things like the #MeToo movement—a movement to combat and raise awareness about rape culture, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—are considered to be born out of this new wave. However, this wave is still on its journey and has much more to provide.
“Feminism matters today because it helps create more equal grounds for everyone and a more accepting society,” Said Wheaton High School sophomore Brianna. She added that “people not collaborating with others and trying to create equal opportunity for everybody—like thinking feminism is only for women when it’s not.”
Feminism is not friend nor foe; it is a remedy to the oppression of all in our patriarchal world.
Written by Aisosa Ighile of Paint Branch High School
Graphic Courtesy of Arpa Gomez of Springbrook High School