Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2010)

In 1996, right before I started college, I went to see the exhibition ‘Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History’, curated by Amelia Jones at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I attended the exhibition with my excited feminist mother, who historicized Chicago’s seminal 1974–9 installation for me. I had spent my high-school years making profane feminist ’zines and attending Riot Grrrl shows, and, as I examined the ceramic place-settings, which open like vaginal/floral arrangements above the lilting cursive names of Sojourner Truth and Virginia Woolf, Dinner Party (though tellingly, not the women it celebrates) seemed more than two decades away from my feminist experience; it seemed to connote a different world entirely.

Just four years later, in 2000, it was this generational, political and aesthetic dissonance that two young feminist activists, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, would explore in their political tract, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. Though the book was nominally for the third-wave generation (discussing benchmarks like the Riot Grrrl movement and Sassy, the hip and ill-fated magazine for teens), it was hailed by second-wave grand dames Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin. Now, a decade on, the book has been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition, with a new introduction and background information.

Tellingly, Manifesta also begins with Dinner Party, which the writers take as inspiration for a dinner of their own, during which 13 young feminists discuss their issues, which the authors then politicize. Though the quotes about men being ‘emotionally retarded’ can be wince-inducing, Manifesta picks up steam as the authors drop the chatty first-person accounts and attempt to delineate specific goals – that in order for the feminist movement to evolve and thrive, its history must be taught and passed on; that the second and third waves need to work in tandem; and that the then-recent ‘Girlie’ movement (that reclaimed stereotypically feminine activities) and the ‘Girls’ movement (which began to focus the welfare and victimization of girls) were instructive but in no way a replacement for real feminist activism that furthers goals of equality.

Both authors are alumni of Ms. magazine, and their most cogent critiques are aimed at the media’s distortion and minimization of the feminist movement, as well as feminist tomes themselves. While they deftly diagnose the pitfalls of Ms. – which lacked a real voice because it attempted to speak for everyone – Manifesta can fall into the same trap. Its intended audience seems to fluctuate between the very young and the more informed. I think I would have found the book mind-blowing when I was 16; however, I imagine my 21-year-old self quickly putting it down in favour of works by Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler or Angela Davis. But if Manifesta’s topicality was a weakness, it is also, now, ten years later, a strength. The book is an account of a thrilling moment in recent feminist history, the ’90s era, when little girls had Sassy, not Seventeen; were inspired by Kathleen Hanna, Rebecca Walker and Susan Faludi; and feminism was as au courant as you could get.

Quinn Latimer