Paper Summary:

This paper examines the wave theory in feminism. The paper points out that some scholars and activists argue that this metaphor aptly describes the historical progression of feminist theory, while others explain it as a historical progression through the use of waves. This paper argues that the wave theory, because it is essentially a generational paradigm, deceptively suggests that the challenges and struggles of an earlier generation do not apply to those that succeed it. The paper then analyzes a seminal issue, from each of the three waves, that continues to reverberate today: black women and poverty, negative feminist stereotypes, and the continued demotion of a black woman's status and word.

From the Paper:

"Most historians delimit the years of the first wave as those between the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. The women that formed this generation of feminists (even though they never used that rather modern word) were concerned, above all else, with de jure political inequalities like the withholding of suffrage. However, these same women were integrally involved in the anti-slavery movement, and much of their activism aimed to alleviate the situation of African-American women in the southern states. Slavery, of course, ended after the Union's victory in the civil war, but that sad chapter in American history still reverberates loudly today, and it would not be an exaggeration to write that the trauma of that experience trickled down through the generations and is directly responsible for the social and economic predicaments that so many African-Americans find themselves facing today."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Walker Alice. In Search of our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: Brace, 1988
• Walker Rebecca. "Borrowing the Third Wave." Women: Images and Realities. Ed. Amy Kesselman. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. 570-672.

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