F.4.a. The Third Wave of the 1990s-2000s

In the 1990s and at the turn of the millenium many young women in countries where they enjoyed full access to education, formal equal rights at work and personal freedom seemed to turn against the feminism of the second wave. Some who still believed feminism was important reassessed its relevance to their times and articulated a set of ideas usually labelled ‘third wave feminism’. This was primarily a theoretical tendency, influenced by postmodernism, arguing that ‘women’ could not be understood as a single category and stressing the diverse identities and experiences of women. The third wave also rejected what it saw as the sexual puritanism of the ‘second wave’, engaged with popular culture, including its projections of ‘strong’ women, and tended to prioritise narratives of personal experience. This theoretical strand did reflect a real trend for diverse groups to organize under the banner of feminism – for example African American women in the USA, and some writings explored the position of lesbians and transgenders. But third wave feminism was not primarily a call to action, unlike the ‘fourth’ wave of activism, embracing a new generation of young women, that came to the fore by the second decade of the 21st century.