ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, young women in the USA boldly proclaimed the onset of feminism’s ‘third wave’. Third-wave feminists embraced the ‘fun’, ‘sexy’ and ‘girly’, rejecting the (supposedly) strident, humourless feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, while also taking up the feminist mantle. They critiqued pop culture, identity politics and their feminist foremothers, all the while pushing social, sexual and generational boundaries with tongues in cheek. Now there is a substantial body of third-wave feminist literature in the USA. For many young women, third-wave feminism has an intuitive appeal. Gender-
awareness provides an entrée for understanding differentials in social, economic and political power, but it does not inevitably lead to marginalisation. If anything, a third-wave feminist’s embrace of all aspects of her personal identity functions as a claim of right to a place in the mainstream. The thirteen-point third-wave feminist ‘Manifesta’ is now required reading in some university women’s and gender-studies classes.1 That agenda makes several claims about the law, and yet third-wave feminism has had little or no impact on feminist legal theory. This is because third-wave feminist writing fails to grapple with gender equality or law writ large. Far from improving on the feminism of the past, third-wave feminists retreat, to women’s detriment, from their predecessors’ theoretical and methodological commitments. Nowhere is this clearer than in third-wave writings about fertility and motherhood. Much of third-wave feminist writing has taken the form of the first-person
narrative. In the 1990s and the first few years of the twenty-first century, there appeared several anthologies of collected essays by women (and some men), mostly in their twenties, writing about interning for political organisations, working as a nude dancer, consuming pornography or enjoying hip-hop music. Somewhat predictably, as third-wave feminists have aged, their subject matters have changed. For third-wave feminists now in their thirties and forties, the personal account of one’s ‘journey’ toward motherhood seems to have become the new rite of passage. Rebecca Walker’s Baby Love, Evelyn McDonnell’s Mama Rama and Peggy Orenstein’s Waiting for Daisy, are three representative examples of such milestone narratives.2
