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Initially, this project took the form of a conference we organized in 2000 at the University of Northumbria. The conference invited delegates to think beyond the crude and limited oppositions distinguishing "secondwave" from "third-wave" feminism. More specifically, we were troubled by media representations of second-wave feminism as being worn out, effete. The term effete seemed particularly appropriate given its etymology, one that refers back to the non-reproductive body. The media's portrayal of the second wave as being politically unfashionable at best, irrelevant at worst was implicitly linked to the image of an aging female body, a reductive and essentializing strategy that collapsed the politics of the second wave into the bodies of second-wave feminists. In contrast to this aging and decrepit body was the vigorous and rather youthful body of what was described by Natasha Walters in her book of that name as the New Feminism. Walters in Britain and Naomi Wolf in the United States embodied a media friendly feminism that offered a glamorous and glossy image of feminism for the new millennium.1
This was the point at which discussions about generations and the difference of age began to emerge anticipating, as we now realize, a debate within feminism that has since broadened and gained critical attention. The seven intervening years between the conference and this volume of The Studies in the Literary Imagination have seen a whole range of publications attempting to define feminism as new, third-wave, or post.2 What emerged out of the debates hosted at the Northumbria conference, however, was less a concern with defining something new and more a concern with the old: feminism's histories and the relation between age and gender.
It was the idea of generational difference that encouraged us to think about the ageism embedded within feminism itself. In the first instance, the difference of age seemed to separate us as feminists; some of us are second wave and some of us are third wave. We wondered what difference that difference made to our theoretical and political perspectives. Simply looking at the constitution of our small research group and discussing in a very anecdotal fashion the nature of our experiences as women in the late twentieth century was, in second-wave argot, a consciousness-raising exercise. We felt a...