Tag Archive for "Generational Analysis"

Posts Tagged Generational Analysis

Do It Anyway

I’m usually a bit reticent about seeming too self-promotional, but in this case, I’m confident that everyone in the Feministing community deserves to know about the work of the activists in my new book, just released today, called Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

In it, I profile eight diverse people 35 and under–from a 7th grade teacher in the Bronx, to a social issues filmmaker, to a radical philanthropist living in Philly, to a famous actor and advocate who has traveled from a squat in the Lower East Side to the most elite spaces of Hollywood. I’m advocating abandoning the empty “save the world” rhetoric that so many of us were raised on and getting real about ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Sometimes women are just assholes, OR resisting generalizations in intergenerational discourse

As many of you know, I’ve been known to think a lot about intergenerational issues, particularly when it comes to feminism. As I’ve stepped into the role of mentor in the last few years, it’s pushed me to reflect more on my own expectations and experiences of the older women who stepped into my life and helped me become who I wanted to be in the world.
One of the things that I’m pretty clear about now, that I was totally fuzzy about back in the day, is that too often women take one bad experience with someone of a different generation and then globalize it. I remember having a particularly disappointing interaction with someone that I really looked up ...

By Lori Adelman • 13 years ago

In [Partial] Defense of the Hipster Generation

All this talk about youth in the pro-choice movement and the legacy of baby boomer activists, including civil rights leaders, has got me thinking about what my own generation’s legacy will be. And, surprisingly, scarily, tellingly, I’ve come up with this one word, a word that inspires fear, disgust, and admiration simultaneously; a ubiquitous word, an over-used and under-examined word, a foul word, depending on what circles you run in: HIPSTER.

Ah, yes, the “hipster generation.” How I both love and despise thee. No other movement can do what you do- you make me laugh, you make me cringe, and then you make me laugh again. You entertain me and shame me. You occupy my weekends, ...

All this talk about youth in the pro-choice movement and the legacy of baby boomer activists, including civil rights leaders, has got me thinking about what my own generation’s legacy will be. ...

By Chloe Angyal • 14 years ago

Young women are the future of feminism

On Wednesday night, I attended a panel at 92Y Tribeca called “Young Women, Feminism and the Future: Third Wavers Then and Now.” It was convened to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the publication of Manifesta, by Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, which the pair wrote together to draw attention to the ways that feminism was being done by a generation of women who had grown up with feminism “in the water.” Richards and Baumgardner were joined on the by Debbie Stoller, the editor in chief and co-founder of BUST magazine, and by Allison Wolfe, a musician, teacher and one of the founders of the Riot Grrl movement. Veronica Chambers, author of Kickboxing Geisha, was scheduled to speak ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Girl Scouts’ good intentions

Seventy-nine percent of today’s youth say that would express an opinion even if it weren’t popular.
That’s according to a new report, Good Intentions: The Beliefs and Values of Teens and Tweens Today, by the Girl Scout Research Institute. They surveyed over 3,000 3rd through 12th grade boys and girls, painting a picture of a generation that, contrary to the media doomsday hype, is “civic minded and responsible to themselves and others, and even more committed to these values than their predecessors were 20 years ago.”
Other interesting findings:

72% feel pushed “a lot” to prepare for the future (compared to 63% in 1989) 13% of youth do what God or scripture tells them to do 27% would lie to a principal 7% of ...

By Chloe Angyal • 14 years ago

The Feministing Five: Sinclair Sexsmith

Sinclair Sexmith is a sex blogger who writes the Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Sex, Gender and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top. She’s been blogging about sex and gender for several years now, and at Sugarbutch she blogs about everything from getting past old heartbreaks to sex with her current girlfriend to her own evolving masculine identity. When I asked her about how she manages writing for a public audience about such private things, she said, “the sex is actually easier to write about than the emotional complications.” When I asked if she adheres to any ground rules for she discloses about her sex life, she said “there are no hard and fast rules,” at which ...

By Rose • 14 years ago

“Generational tension” rhetoric hurts repro rights

Another one of these came out again. While the setup of the oft-reported generational divide in the feminist movement is unmistakably familiar, let’s break this article down. Elder feminist offers “back in the day” testimony about the lack of access to abortion rights. Then comes quote after divisive quote from presumably elder feminists that affirm the sentiment that young women “take for granted” the rights they fought for, that our sense of urgency is non-existent. And of course, we will have a young woman speak out against her own.
We’ll have the sensational modifiers. One even comes complete with an aside about the motivations behind the last name Freewomyn. Yet, the run-of-the-mill feminist, the Jane Does in a full ...

By Chloe Angyal • 14 years ago

The Feministing Five: Jehmu Greene

Jehmu Greene is the new President of the Women’s Media Center. The WMC was founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, whose goal was to make women visible and powerful in the media. As readers of Feministing know all too well, women and people of color are drastically underrepresented in the media, and the WMC aims to change that by campaigning for just and accurate reporting of gender issues, and by teaching women how to find and use their own voices. Jehmu is a graduate of their Progressive Women’s Voices program, a year-long media training of which our own Courtney Martin is also a graduate.
Greene, who grew up in Austin, began ...

Jehmu Greene is the new President of the Women’s Media Center. The WMC was founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, whose goal was to make women visible and powerful ...