From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Powerpuff Girls, everywhere you look girl culture is on the rise. So why has the women's movement sometimes seemed so stalled? Feminism is undeniably at a generational crossroads, with many young women declining to even call themselves feminists.

MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future is the first book that positions what a new generation of feminism—Third Wave feminism—is all about. If the First Wave comprised women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the Second Wave gave us Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Shirley Chisholm, then the Third Wave includes young women who've grown up with the ideas of feminism but who are trying to define what it means for them now.

Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner were both born in 1970 and met working at Ms. with the stars and heroes of Second Wave feminism. They are typical of their generation's enthusiasm and confidence—they love alternative music, vintage hip-huggers, and late night bonding sessions with their friends over drinks. Both are driven by a politically conscious desire to make the world better for women, but at Ms. and elsewhere, they experienced what they felt as a generation gap in the women's movement that too often led to miscommunication and tension. Young women today, raised with Title IX and Free to Be like it was fluoride in the water, took certain aspects of liberation for granted, giving them confidence without necessarily a political consciousness. Baumgardner and Richards wanted to bridge the gap between their generation's confidence in the rights they think they have, and the activism necessary to secure what they truly don't have.

Encouraging young women to embrace both "girlie culture" and political activism, MANIFESTA is a call to arms and a defense of the "I'm not a feminist, but" mentality. Feminism can include Helen Gurley Brown and Susan Faludi, the Spice Girls and Ani DiFranco. Young women don't have to discard their M.A.C. cosmetics and hip-hop records in order to call themselves feminists, the authors contend, but feminism can empower their lives by raising their consciousness, listening to their lives, and giving them the means to make a contribution.



Read an excerpt from Chapter One, "The Dinner Party"