Not My Mother’s Sister by Astrid Henry

Astrid Henry examines the generational framing of American feminism, from second-wave writers who both identified with and distanced themselves from their feminist 'foremothers' to third-wave writers who claimed the movement by rejecting the past. Younger feminists rejected the so-called victim feminism of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and celebrated women's right to pleasure, but Henry argues they oversimplified generational conflict and underestimated earlier feminists. She shows how queer and lesbian third-wave feminists portrayed 1970s lesbian feminism in terms strikingly like the straight third wave's puritanical image of feminism, and closes with the central role of feminists of color in the third wave.