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The impulse to construct history in generational terms, to identify oneself and one's politics with a particular generation, is evident in the recent debates taking place in feminism concerning the relation between secondand third-wave feminisms. Constructing a third wave sets up a particular kind of historical narrative for feminism that implies both the end of the second wave (and the completion of its project) and the beginning of a third wave that is distinctly different to its predecessor. While third-wave feminism signals its indebtedness to second-wave feminism (there could not be a third without a second), at the same time it often constructs itself in generational terms as the more progressive daughter of its second-wave mother. The introduction to Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford's Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration usefully maps out the competing definitions of the third wave as it has been constructed in the past decade. For instance, in Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards define the third wave as "women who were reared in the wake of the women's liberation movement" (15). Barbara Findlen's Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation makes explicit in its title the notion that a new generation of feminists are replacing an old one, and Rene Denfeld's The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order is a more populist and overt dismissal of the second wave as no longer relevant to contemporary politics. The assumption being made here is that third wavers have enjoyed the benefits of their metaphorical mothers' heroic efforts and come to feminism as more knowing subjects, as subjects acutely aware of the dangers of the cruder versions of liberal and radical feminism. The critical discourse that has developed as a way of explaining feminism's history often describes it in generational terms as being a family affair. Tensions and conflicts within feminism are understood as those that occur between mothers and daughters; they are the "natural" consequences of generational change. Naturally bound to each other, these feminisms are related and thus the daughter bears a resemblance to the mother, but, at the same time, she offers a new and implicitly more progressive alternative to her second-wave predecessor.
A number of...