User:Madison.palos/History of feminism

Critiques of the Wave Metaphor
In the 1960s, feminists described their movements as the "second wave" of feminism. As the second wave emerges, the importance of this new wave was to revisit that the current women's right had a venerable past. This wave focused on the idea that these movements were a long tradition of activism and during the second wave, feminists began to rewrite U.S. history through recognizing that the suffrage movement was part of the nineteenth century movement around women's issues. Presently, many contributions about the Second Wave Feminism was correlated with "hegemonic feminism". This feminism views sexism as the main oppression and it was mainly led by white individuals who "marginalized the activism and world views of women of color". Women of color and white antiracist women clarify the rise of multiracial feminism through telling the history of the Second Wave feminism. One of the earlier feminist organizations of the Second Wave was a Chicana group named Hijas de Cuauntemoc (1971) which was named after an underground newspaper written by women during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Multiple other feminist organizations that were created in the early 1970s with Black, Asian, Latina, and Native American women have created a nationalist tradition of sending out a message that there is a need for people of color-led, independent organizations.

During the 1990s, the United States feminist activity that was present in the 1960s through the 1980s was no longer expressed. The wave metaphor for the Second Wave showed the 1960s movement as anything other than a historical situation, and showed that the nineteenth century movement was a bigger deal and had more impact on history than what was taught. As many pondered on what state was feminism presently in, one idea emerged in the early 1990s as the "third wave". As emerging from the Second Wave and onto the Third Wave, the wave metaphor has reached its usefulness. Individuals are more aware of the significance the nineteenth century had on women's movement and are more aware of the emergence the 1960s had from their long struggle regarding women's issues.

BOLDED IS EDITS
The second wave of feminism is often accused of being elitist, predominately white, middle class, cisgender women who ignore groups such as women of color and transgender women. Third wave feminists questioned the beliefs of their predecessors and began to apply feminist theory to a wider variety of women, who had not been previously included in feminist activity. The Third Wave feminists looked back on the Second Wave as historically significant and would soon be incorporating more diversity into the community.

Amy Richards defined the feminist culture for the third wave as "third wave because it's an expression of having grown up with feminism". Second-wave feminists grew up where the politics intertwined within the culture, such as "Kennedy, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women's rights". In contrast, the third wave sprang from a culture of "punk-rock, hip-hop, 'zines, products, consumerism and the Internet". In an essay entitled "Generations, Academic Feminists in dialogue" Diane Elam wrote:"This problem manifests itself when senior feminists insist that junior feminists be good daughters, defending the same kind of feminism their mothers advocated. Questions and criticisms are allowed, but only if they proceed from the approved brand of feminism. Daughters are not allowed to invent new ways of thinking and doing feminism for themselves; feminists' politics should take the same shape that it has always assumed."Rebecca Walker, in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), wrote about her fear of rejection by her mother (Alice Walker) and her godmother (Gloria Steinem) for challenging their views:

Young Women feminists find themselves watching their speech and tone in their works so as not to upset their elder feminist mothers. There is a definite gap among feminists who consider themselves to be second-wave and those who would label themselves as third-wave. Although, the age criteria for second-wave feminists and third-wave feminists is murky, younger feminists definitely have a hard time proving themselves worthy as feminist scholars and activists.