CHAPTER 5

On the Third Wave

From Washington State to Washington, D.C., women were inspired, involved, and, in many cases, enraged. Then, in a matter of months, there was a surge. And on April 5, 1992, between 500,000 and 750,000 pro-choice supporters attended the March for Women’s Lives, one of the largest protests in the nation’s capital in twenty years.

The previous fall, a young black law professor named Anita Hill had made headlines when she told a Senate committee—all white and all male—about a pattern of sexual harassment by her former superior, Clarence Thomas. The jurist, who was being vetted for a seat on the Supreme Court, would dismiss Hill’s allegations, and would go on to narrowly win confirmation. Angry and driven and politicized, women would mobilize: running for public office in record numbers, joining the ranks of national and local women’s organizations, and preparing for a showdown. Thomas and his fellow justices would soon meet and decide, in a key case, whether to uphold, modify, or strike down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed a woman’s legal right to an abortion. It was time for feminists to reclaim the national stage.

Amid the sea of women on the Mall that day, every one of the Democrats running for president—including Bill Clinton—arrived to express his support. But as author Sara Marcus would recount in her book Girls to the Front, “None of the candidates was given a turn at the microphone during the rally. Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW [the National Organization for Women], addressed the crowd. ‘We are tired of begging for our rights from men in power,’ she intoned. ‘We are going to take power.’”

And so they did.

The women’s movement came in waves. There was the first wave, which started with the first formal women’s rights gathering in the United States (in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848) and culminated in the 1920s as women secured the right to vote. There was the second wave: the “women’s liberation” movement of the late ’60s and ’70s that sought to educate and politically organize women to combat sex discrimination and social and cultural inequities. Then, in the early ’90s, came third-wave feminism.

That wave directed a fresh focus on vital issues across classes, races, and backgrounds. It built on the advances achieved by the previous generation’s feminists and yet it forged something indie and indigenous. It gained much of its momentum from the punk, grunge, and hip-hop scenes, and from the bottom-up, homegrown networks that were then animating the infant Web. It was more about individual self-discovery and less a unified crusade. “We have inherited strategies… from the Second Wave [to take on] modern problems of our own,” Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards would point out in 2000 in their influential book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. “Prominent Third Wave issues include equal access to the Internet and technology, HIV/AIDS awareness, child sexual abuse, self-mutilation, globalization, eating disorders, and body image.”

And yet the accomplishments attributed to third-wave activists were not solely the product of a coterie of twenty-somethings. Many of the changes, according to historian Kirsten Swinth, were driven by second-wave originators who by the 1990s were “maturing into positions of continued political and social influence” and had joined forces with their younger counterparts. Despite what sometimes appeared as a generational split, the women of this double wave would help spearhead new policies in the workplace regarding maternity and medical leave; recommendations for ways to promote corporate advancement; and a system of redress for incidents of sexual harassment and misconduct. While the movement continued to concentrate on reproductive choice, the struggle was also directed at proper access to health care, childcare, and education; the drive to register female voters; the rights of the LGBT community; a new surge in breast cancer awareness and research advocacy; and the achievement of full legal equality for women. It decried the objectification of women by the media, advertising, and popular culture, as well as the creation of an idealized body type, which had contributed to the prevalence of anorexia and bulimia.

But this was a movement that lacked a cohesive message, and many young women were questioning whether the very term “feminist” was even viable anymore. In 1998, Newsweek would cite a respected New York Times poll indicating that “the number of American women who think the word ‘feminist’ is a compliment has halved since 1992.… Current discussions of women’s issues tend to emphasize individualism over collectivism, and personal success over political action.”1

One of the most animating issues of the period involved attempts to clearly define sexual assault. In response to campus incidents of date rape, Antioch College, in a highly controversial decree, set up a binding sexual-offense code that governed students’ after-hours behavior. Among the provisions: “Do not take silence as consent; it isn’t” and “You must still ask each and every time.” Critics reacted forcefully, with journalist and author Katie Roiphe declaring in a 1991 column entitled “Date Rape Hysteria,” “This so-called feminist movement peddles an image of gender relations that denies female desire and infantilizes women.”² Newsweek’s Sarah Crichton, in a cover story titled “Sexual Correctness: Have We Gone Too Far?,” spoke for many in rejecting such stringent guidelines. “We are not creating a society of Angry Young Women [but] Scared Little Girls,” she insisted. While acknowledging grievous incidents such as the Navy’s Tailhook scandal,³ Crichton found dangerous repercussions in rules that further victimized females and demonized males. “It is polarizing men and women… rather than encouraging them to work together, to trust one another.”

Date rape, however, remained no minor matter, and the testimonies of young women across the country amounted to a national wake-up call. On college campuses, Take Back the Night marches served to underscore the gravity of the situation—and to galvanize a generation of undergraduates. The subject began to take center stage in courts of law and in counselors’, deans’, and therapists’ offices, over the clamor of the popular press, which often sensationalized legitimate concerns or mischaracterized the matter. (Many believed that applying the phrase “hysteria” to date rape, for instance, was needlessly reviving a term that for four millennia had been ascribed to disorders of “the female temperament.”) Americans young and old were recognizing that peer-to-peer sexual assault was an ingrained and grave problem to be minimized at one’s peril.

Third-wave feminism had another unique and contentious aspect, which some referred to as sex-positive feminism.4 Others called it pro-sex or sexual-empowerment feminism—in marked contrast to the antiporn activism that had been championed in the previous decade by Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and others. Esquire ran a 1994 story with a button-pushing cover line: “The Rise of ‘Do Me’ Feminism.” But in reality, the issue was more significant and nuanced than Esquire implied—and it hardly warranted a snide label from a magazine that, from its 1933 inception, had aimed to be “the common denominator of masculine interests.”⁵ Many feminists were boldly expressing their sex appeal; giving space to an active erotic life; and “thinking through the meaning of the sexualization of women’s bodies,” says Swinth, the social and cultural historian, “re-examin[ing] how to be physically sexy without being objectified.” While the movement for decades had emphasized the importance and wonder of female desire, the ’90s feminist was stating unequivocally that men—and the larger culture—did not define a woman’s sexuality. Only women did.

Among the most provocative commentators on this score was the humanities professor Camille Paglia, who would cause fits in some circles when she declared that women and men needed to acknowledge and accept the darker, complex, and sometimes dangerous truths and consequences that had forever defined the erotic. Male lust, in her view, “was the animating factor in culture.” At the same time, Paglia stated, it was women who held the upper hand, sexually speaking. They created life. They were mysterious. (“Woman,” she wrote, “remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness.”) And they were the ancient keepers of “the elemental power of sex.” Paglia’s was one of the rare voices to announce, “The problem with America is that there’s too little sex, not too much.”

Beyond all of these stateside concerns, the third wave also sought a reaffirmation of solidarity among women worldwide. The larger fight was not just economic or social or legal, but a fight for human rights. It addressed a woman’s status in many countries as a second-class citizen; widespread malnourishment, illiteracy, and insufficient health care for girls and women; unhealthy environmental conditions where women labored and lived; sexual slavery and prostitution; community- and state-sanctioned maiming, stoning, or burning; genital mutilation; forced sterilization; and rape being used from the Balkans to Rwanda to Indonesia as a weapon of war. This was a struggle involving matters of life and death.

Glass ceilings were shattering. Women were becoming political heavyweights in Washington, serving in key posts as attorney general (Janet Reno), head of the EPA (Carol Browner), and press secretary (Dee Dee Myers), as well as secretaries of state (Madeleine Albright), energy (Hazel O’Leary), and health and human services (Donna Shalala). At various times in the 1990s, women served as the U.S. trade representative, director of the Office of Management and Budget, chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers, and chief of the Small Business Administration.

In the armed forces, Defense Secretary Les Aspin opened up previously restricted positions to women. In the judiciary, the president named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court and, as the New York Times would point out, appointed “a record proportion of women… to the Federal bench.” In the legislature, the incoming congressional class, elected in 1992—in what would come to be called the Year of the Woman—doubled female representation in the Senate, while women in the House ranks swelled to forty-seven members. (After the GOP took over two years later, however, that progress would stall and then level out. “I really felt that we were paving the way for a huge number of women,” said Iowa state senator Jean Lloyd-Jones, twenty years later, “but the promise of 1992 was never realized.”)

While the feminist movement was sometimes downplayed by (and often at odds with) mass media, there was evidence nonetheless of a ripple effect throughout mainstream culture. So-called chick lit came on strong as a genre, thanks to titles such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Terry McMillan’s bestselling novel Waiting to Exhale (1992) presented female friendship as being as vital as oxygen. McMillan explored the lives of four Arizona friends—Savannah, Bernadine, Robin, and Gloria—chilling out in the steam room, smoking a cig outside the yogurt shop, or shuttling between board meetings for Black Women on the Move. “Let me ask you sistahs something,” Savannah inquires. “What is it we all have in common?” Gloria responds, “We’re black and female.” What Savannah means, she continues, is that “none of us have a man.” Bernadine chimes in, “I don’t want one, either.” This is precisely Savannah’s point, she says: one’s loyalty to one’s sisters takes precedence. “Don’t ever think a man would have that much power over me that I’d stop caring about my friends.” Or, as the Spice Girls pop group would advise potential suitors, “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” Self-help fare, meanwhile, climbed the bestseller lists, addressing everything from the differences between women and men (You Just Don’t Understand) to personal empowerment (Yesterday, I Cried) to menopause (The Silent Passage). Women Who Run with the Wolves offered ten General Wolf Rules for Life, the last five being “Cavil in the moonlight. Tune your ears. Attend to the bones. Make love. Howl often.”

There was a femme fatale renaissance on TV and in cinema, epitomized by bad-girl characters played by Shannen Doherty and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The movie Thelma & Louise—in which the protagonists, after one of them is sexually assaulted, go on a road-warrior rampage—was the ultimate outlaw chick flick, and it floored moviegoers upon its 1991 release. The film, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, was praised for its pitch-perfect exploration of female rage. It also took serious heat. Some critics considered it emasculating, others an invitation to vigilantism. Richard Johnson, gossip columnist at the time for the New York Daily News, would allege, “It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic drunken driving as exercises in consciousness raising.”

The chick flick, in fact, became a genuine ’90s genre. For her book Why Women Should Rule the World, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary Dee Dee Myers, now director of corporate communications at Warner Bros, interviewed Sherry Lansing, who was running Paramount Pictures and greenlighted the 1996 comedy The First Wives Club, about a trio of commiserating divorcées. Typically Lansing would finance films by partnering with other studios. But for this film she had no takers. “No one thought anyone would go see [it,]” she would recall. “That was the only movie I couldn’t get a partner on.… And it was a hit. People were shocked.” In Myers’s view, “the ‘female empowerment’ chick flick” was now on the map, thanks to the cult status of a succession of ’90s films (as distinctive as Go Fish and 10 Things I Hate About You) as well as the box-office success of many others (from Clueless to the screen version of Waiting to Exhale).

At the same time, formidable challenges remained, especially for girls,6 even as American society began recognizing gender inequity and trying to reach girls in need. Educators, for example, were heralding the success of girls’ schools, showing how all-female classes helped foster educational advancement, independence, and self-esteem. By the ’90s, as the writer and culture-wars arbiter Kay S. Hymowitz points out in her book Manning Up, girls were participating in team sports roughly as often as boys were—a consequence of Congress’s Title IX law that had demanded parity in how schools treated their athletic programs.7 When experts began to identify an epidemic in diminished self-confidence among adolescent girls, Gloria Steinem and Marie Wilson, the president of the Ms. Foundation, set up what would become, in 1993, the first nationwide Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The program would educate girls about the professional world and encourage them not to let gender hamper them as they pursued their education and career. The next year, Hymowitz recalls, “saw the passage of the Gender Equity in Education Act, which provided extra funds for educators to help girls succeed.” (Such initiatives, of course, often failed to address the persistent obstacles faced by a large percentage of girls, many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and neglected communities.)

Popular culture offered new (or revised) models too. Young girls looked up to strong female protagonists in Disney films such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, or superheroines such as Xena or Linda Hamilton (in Terminator 2), and the likes of the Powerpuff Girls, Sailor Moon, and Marvel’s Spider-Girl. Sarah Michelle Gellar battled vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. U.S. soccer star Brandi Chastain became a triumphant national icon in 1999 when, following her penalty kick that gave America the victory over China in the Women’s World Cup final, she tugged off her jersey, sank her knees into the green carpet of the Rose Bowl, and clenched her fists, revealing her black bra and ripped abs.

But the wider culture offered its own impediments to progress. In her signal book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994), clinical psychologist Mary Pipher would argue that even as the women’s movement had improved the lot of girls and adolescents, opening access to areas of life inconceivable in earlier generations, many girls upon reaching puberty would “crash into junk culture… a girl-poisoning culture [that is] more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated.” In the 1980s, the record increase in preteen suicide rates as well as physical violence and sexual assault against girls had set the stage. By the ’90s, as described in Reviving Ophelia, therapists, educators, and medical professionals were alarmed even further. There was a pattern of victimization by predatory boys, relatives, and stepparents; a steep rise in sexually transmitted diseases; a steep demand for counseling and intervention to address behaviors such as self-mutilation, anorexia, and bulimia; and a widespread contempt among many young girls toward their parents.

“Many of the pressures girls have always faced are intensified in the 1990s,” Pipher would write, citing contributing factors such as “more divorced families, chemical addictions, casual sex and violence against women.” But perhaps the most oppressive component of all, in her view, was the barrage of warped messages being projected on the ever-present scrim of pop culture. “Something new is happening,” she declared. “The protected place in space and time that we once called childhood has grown shorter.… One way to think about all the pain and pathology is to say that the culture is just too hard for most girls to understand and master at this point in their development. They become overwhelmed and symptomatic.”

For a time, a young, rebellious vanguard ruled. They were part of the Riot Grrrl wave, a ’90s feminist movement-within-the-movement that sought to rejuvenate feminism—and recast society—partly by shocking the system with punk-band power chords.

If the Riot Grrrl movement had a catalytic moment—a couple of transformational months when its full force erupted, pure and undiluted—it might very well have been in Washington, D.C., in June and July of 1991. The writer and musician Sara Marcus lays out a convincing argument in her study of the Riot Grrrl scene, Girls to the Front. That spring and summer, the “three-fourths female” punk band Bikini Kill, as Marcus tells the tale, had left its home in Olympia, Washington, to go on tour. Back home, their young audiences had often been too disengaged to wholly connect with their message. (“I’m a revolutionary feminist,” the band’s drummer, Tobi Vail, would put it, “[and] I won’t rest until sexism is obliterated.”) Many fans in the heartland, in fact, had already come to know them through their cassette tapes. “For a while,” writes Marcus, “no other music mattered [to me], just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, ‘Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!’”8

For the last concert of their tour, on June 27, Bikini Kill was pumped. Hanna, the lead singer, had been an abuse counselor, artist, spoken-word performer, creator of the zine Fuck Me Blind, and musician who’d fronted the bands Amy Carter and Viva Knievel. Tobi Vail was a fellow rocker and punk scholar of sorts, who’d started the zine Jigsaw and had dated Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.⁹ And as Bikini Kill powered through its set, the bandmates were floored by the reaction, as Marcus reports, when the audience literally rushed the stage. “It was almost like an earthquake, the reverberations that went out through the scene,” Mark Andersen of the activist punk collective Positive Force would tell Marcus some twenty years later.

The tremors foretold a groundswell. A week or two after that breakout show, Hanna joined a few compatriots (Molly Neuman, Jen Smith, and Allison Wolfe) and created the first issue of a weekly photocopied zine to distribute free at concerts. Its name: Riot Grrrl. Its first-edition cover grrrrl: Madonna, double fist-pumping. Then, by month’s end, the first Riot Grrrl meeting convened, in D.C., kicking off what Hanna, according to Marcus, would call a movement created around the problems of sexual and emotional abuse—“an angry girl movement.”

Thus began what amounted to a Riot Grrrl crusade. A committed corps of antiestablishment women—first in tight, separatist communities and then across the country—were forging a broad coalition, using what amounted to rudimentary social media: public protest, art projects, and zines. Riot Grrrl gatherings, teach-ins, and even national chapters became as central to the scene as chat rooms were to the growing online community. And the background soundtrack was not male-dominated grunge (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden) but feminist punk rock, emanating from bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, L7, and (out of the U.K.) Huggy Bear.

Journalist Julianne Pepitone, who writes about the arts, business, and technology, summarizes the Riot Grrrl ethos. It embraced radical feminist values, pushed sexual boundaries, and never shied away from haranguing male-centric commercial culture. It delved into its participants’ own histories, which sometimes involved sexual assault, domestic abuse, rape, or abortion. “It became an underground subculture of the feminist movement,” she explains, “that embraced a DIY spirit of self-sufficiency, feminist theory, sexual power, art, and activism. Much like the gay population, which had reappropriated the term ‘queer,’ riot grrrl bands reclaimed words like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and turned them into battle armor.”

Rock, since its birth, had always been essentially sexual. (The phrase “rock and roll,” like “jazz” before it, had been a euphemism for intercourse.) But in the ’90s, rock clubs had ceased to be boys’ clubs. “The corporate music industry,” feminism scholar Rebecca Munford would observe, was no longer a “gendered relationship between (male) production and (female) consumption.” Indeed, the very feminists10 who were having their way on the stage and in the studio were just as hormonal as their male peers. Lisa Palac, the sex-positive feminist, editor, and writer, would observe in the 1990s, “In the world of rock, unprecedented numbers of female artists were going public with the power and pleasure of sexual desire. Wholesome-looking Liz Phair softly sang, ‘I want to be your blowjob queen.’ Courtney Love, in her babydoll dress and crooked lipstick, screamed ‘Suck my clit!’ during Hole performances before stage-diving into a sea of fans.… Women’s erotic awareness had reached critical mass.”¹¹

Much of the point was self-definition, according to Munford: “Riot Grrrl provides a response to dominant representations of patriarchal girlhood by forging spaces in which girls and young women are empowered to resist and, moreover, to produce their own self-representations.” Riot Grrrl, in a way, was about women finding their individual voices—and comprehending the economic and social forces behind their very personal struggles. It was also a movement that would make political and legal inroads while influencing everything from fashion to film to the Lilith Fair tour (the star-studded “Celebration of Women in Music” festival that would soon outshine Lollapalooza).

This new model of feminism would persist even as it has evolved to the present day. “Today feminism is more about personal identity,” Ann Friedman would note in New York magazine’s The Cut in 2016. “There are points of collective action, but mostly it’s a belief system that we adhere to individually, and in highly individualized ways.… Most of us… consider problems like racism and transphobia to be just as pernicious as sexism.” Friedman today recalls second-wave sessions at which the movement’s leaders would “decide which issues to prioritize and which candidates to support. In the past, that perceived unanimity gave feminism more political clout, but made it less inclusive. We just don’t work like that anymore.”

Looking back twenty years later, Bikini Kill’s Hanna would reveal to journalist Melena Ryzik the method to her (and her generation’s) radness: “I didn’t just hit the glass ceiling, I pressed my naked [breasts] up against it.”

Within the space of two years, February 1990 to October 1991, four new voices emerged in the women’s movement, in the form of three new books—and an accidental pioneer. Together, they hit like a series of tropical storms, amplifying the early impact of the third wave.

First, Camille Paglia, the aforementioned art historian and humanities professor, published Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Paglia—a thorn in the side of many fellow feminists—was one of the greatest hype-meisters to have ever come out of academia. The professor would brag that Sexual Personae, at seven-hundred-plus pages, “may be the longest book yet written by a woman, exceeding in this respect even George Eliot’s hefty Middlemarch.” She was also a media darling, dubbed “the intellectual pinup of the Nineties” by Newsday. She appeared, sword in hand, as a “Woman Warrior” for a New York magazine shoot, and was called out on the cover of the Advocate: “Attack of the 50-Foot Lesbian.”

On its surface, Sexual Personae was a survey of erotic representation in art. Deeper inside, Paglia attacked PC academics who wanted to do away with the Western canon and PC feminists who wanted to do away with naughty sex. While she was at it, Paglia went after ’60s liberals (who’d gone too far with their excesses) and conservative prudes everywhere. She urged readers to get in tune with their outer Apollo (the taming force that guaranteed social order and traditional measures of achievement) and their inner Dionysus (“The amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over”).

Paglia saw in our obsession with pop culture—especially with rock music and Hollywood’s “Imperial” star system—the signs of a healthy return to humanity’s pagan roots. She lauded contemporary attachments to drag, to façades, to the “malleable but elastic” self, to personae, as she would write in her preface,12 which she considered “the hidden masks of our ancestors and heirs.” She deplored modern society’s dismissal of the brutish Male, insisting that men were largely responsible for Western progress (“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts”). At the same time, Paglia would affirm the secret force of the Female, her life-giving power, her “intuition,” her ability to collude with her sisters in “a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones.” And in a rash of contrarian op-ed pieces, interviews, and talks, she trashed the notion that there was a date-rape epidemic; defended sex-trade workers as empowered beings; and pegged liberal feminism as having created a culture of victimization. A humanities scholar, of all people, was stirring up gale-force headwinds.

Into those winds swept another bright sail. In 1991, Susan Faludi published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. (That same year she would win the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on labor issues.) The book argued that even though women had succeeded in making substantive, real-world gains, society had shifted in an attempt to undermine their advances and return to the male status quo. After the breakthroughs of the second wave, Faludi stated, well-organized conservatives had been conveniently standing in the wings. Energized by their new status as a declining minority, leaders on the far right were soon buoyed by a backlash, reasserting their power in more exaggerated fashion and thriving by having been recast as the underdog.

Despite this pushback, the 1980s had ultimately strengthened women, according to Faludi: “The backlash decade produced one long, painful, and unremitting campaign to thwart women’s progress. And yet, for all the… blistering denunciations from the New Right, the legal setbacks of the Reagan years, the powerful resistance of corporate America… women never really surrendered.” Instead, she contended, “At the start of the ’90s, some forecasters… began declaring that the next ten years was going to be ‘the Decade of Women.’”13

Faludi’s book became a feminist landmark. And it was often read alongside another title published that spring, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. Wolf, who would go on to informally advise the Clinton reelection campaign and to serve as a Gore campaign consultant on women’s issues and messaging, offered a powerful thesis. She argued that even as women were progressing on various fronts, their traditional roles—and the straitjackets applied by capitalism, marketing, pop culture, and male institutions—held them in perpetual check. American women, in a close reading of Wolf, were forever being treated as subordinates in a manner similar to the way the ruling class treated the underclass, immigrants, and minorities.

The Beauty Myth was a wholesale indictment. Wolf squared off against the economic system, the power elite, Hollywood, the advertising community, the porn business (“during the past five years… [it has become] the main media category”), and the cosmetics and fashion industries. Although the ’60s’ “sexual revolution [had] promoted the discovery of female sexuality,” she claimed, “‘beauty pornography’… invaded the mainstream to undermine women’s new and vulnerable sense of sexual self-worth.” Although feminism in the ’70s and ’80s “gave us laws against job discrimination based on gender,” she wrote, “immediately case law evolved in Britain and the United States that institutionalized job discrimination based on women’s appearances.” Despite the pervasive advances women had enjoyed in recent years, society was still rigged to screw them.

The beauty myth, as Wolf defined it, held that “strong men battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful. Women’s beauty must correlate to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless. None of this is true.” Instead, she argued, “there is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.… The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.”14 Gloria Steinem would insist that “every woman should read” Wolf’s book. Fay Weldon called the author a ’90s heroine, describing the volume as “essential reading for the New Woman.” Germaine Greer endorsed it as “the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch”—her own 1970 classic.

The books of Paglia, Faludi, and Wolf would be taught for decades and their exploration of ’90s feminist paradigms would echo long after. But right in their midst, in the autumn of 1991, another voice spoke to the nation with a force that was even more immediate. That voice was unwavering and indignant—and its message would touch every American worker. It was the voice of a stoic thirty-five-year-old law professor named Anita Hill.