Fearless journalism is more important than ever. When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters β and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital.
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists. Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now? Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing? Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore? And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism.
Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism. The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.
And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.
The MeToo generation gap is a myth. Why women are worried about MeToo. Video: women are not as divided on MeToo as it may seem. But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed.
