Abstract
Is Feminism dead? Definitely not! Do young women (and men) identify as feminist and engage in feminist organizations and mobilization? Most certainly! Alison Dahl Crossley presents us with a rich empirical study of millennial activists at three U.S. universities representing different environments for feminist activisms. Based on participant observation, survey data, and 75 in-depth interviews, Crossley disentangles the attitudes of young women and men toward feminism and their involvement in online and offline activism. Crossley thus provides a welcome and much needed empirically grounded assessment of young people’s attitudes toward feminism—or rather: feminisms.
Crossley takes issue with the notion that young women—and men for that matter—dismiss feminism and fail to take part in feminist activism. Her data clearly demonstrate that college students—whether they identify as feminist or not—support feminist positions. The participants were fully aware of persisting gender inequality and how it intersects with other aspects of privilege and discrimination such as race, class, and sexuality. Influenced by women’s studies courses, they engaged in a multiplicity of feminist and other student organizations, often engaged in coalitions. Thus, her respondents emphasized that it is not just gender that matters and were engaged in intersectional feminism. Moreover, Crossley demonstrates that regardless of significant commonalities across the three universities where she conducted her study, there are also remarkable differences.
Crossley admits that access to Smith College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California–Santa Barbara played a role for the selection of these research sites. But this choice is well justified as the three universities represent different “type[s] of institutions, geographic regions, student demographics and student activist and feminist culture” (p. 170) although no community college was included. Thus, Crossley is able to compare feminist student activism at private and public institutions, at the East and West Coast and the Mid-West, representing predominantly female and mixed-sex student bodies, mostly white as well as highly inclusive student populations, more or less progressive, and conservative student activism. These contexts shape the feminism at each university. Smith College represents institutionally oriented feminism that is integrated “in the classroom, in extracurricular activists and in social settings” (p. 100). In contrast, the University of Minnesota is characterized by oppositionally oriented feminism where feminist and other progressive groups represent a minority among the overall conservative student body. Finally, within the progressive community at the University of California–Santa Barbara hybrid feminism—which bridges multiple, intersecting causes—emerged.
These are not the only concepts that Crossley introduces to make sense of her rich data, she also discusses waveless feminism, online feminism, and everyday feminism as well as institutional, everyday and online abeyance structures. This abundance of concepts is exciting and inspiring, but I would have wished for a more in-depth discussion of these concepts and how they relate to each other.
Crossley’s findings echo scholarship of contemporary feminisms outside U.S. universities such as Evans’ (2015) comparative study The Politics of Third Wave Feminism which explores feminist activism in the United Kingdom (in London and Bristol) and the United States (in New York and Portland, Oregon) and a special issue of Social Movement Studies (2015, vol. 14, issue 4) edited and introduced by Jonathan Dean and Kristin Aune that maps contemporary feminist activisms in Europe, challenges the wave metaphor and assesses the role of online-activism for feminist mobilization. Furthermore, Crossley’s study of millennial activists resonates with scholarship that emphasizes the hybridity of online activism that is neither restricted to feminist movements nor to young(er) activists. Crossley’s discussion of online or facebook activism (she uses the terms interchangeably) overlooks that facebook is neither the only online platform, nor free (it requires access to hardware and to the Internet, which needs to be distinguished from the web and/or social media; moreover, the information facebook users share voluntarily is highly valuable). While Crossley is right to take online feminism seriously, this form of activism requires more attention to access and practices on the Internet, social media, and the world-wide-web.
The book is engagingly written and clearly organized. However, the bibliography includes about 80 works that are not cited, though if discussed might have given the development of the introduced concepts more depth. The appendix provides important information about the research design and data. The study was carefully conducted and the methodology clearly appropriate for the research question. Finding Feminism is accessible for a broad and varied audience and will equally appeal to undergraduate students (in particular in women’s, gender, and feminist studies courses) and senior scholars of contemporary social movements and intersectional activism.