Background to the Research: The future is female (is it?)

Young interviewees in my ‘equality biographies’ research project, Carina and Verity, assert their belief in gender equality. They do this in the face of an older generation of feminists telling them otherwise: ‘our lit teacher, Mrs Lake’ and Verity's mother, Jane, an academic who has taught women's studies. As another young woman writes in her questionnaire:

The research project that yielded these comments was framed in the mid-1990s. At the time, a ‘generation debate’ raged between so-called ‘second wave’ (women's liberationist or baby-boomer) feminists and their putative daughters, or ‘third wave’ ‘Gen X’ feminists. Young third wave feminists celebrated a diversity of glamorous, sexy, powerful women as opposed to the ‘dowdy’ ‘politically correct’ ‘fully down-for-the-feminist-cause’ second wavers (Walker 1995: xxxi). Echoed by Carina and Verity, young feminists advocated ‘power feminism’ to counter what they saw as second wave ‘victim feminism’.