Defending our Dreams: Global Feminist Voices For A New Generation,’ a fascinating collection of essays by young feminists from a dozen countries (including a man), and from which the above excerpt is taken, grew out of the cross-continental friendship established by the three young women editors of the book after they met at an international conference on gender justice in South Africa in 1998.

That was, ironically, the year the US edition of Time published a provocative cover asking ‘Is Feminism Dead?’ and placing the fictional television character, Ally McBeal, next to real-life activist-icons Susan B.Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Not surprisingly, both the cover and the stories inside kicked up a minor storm among American women. Commenting on the controversy, Janelle Brown then wrote in Salon, ‘The rapid responses prove that feminism isn’t dead – it’s just changing.’

The ongoing change is evident in India, too. Take, for example, Ultra Violet, a blog initiated last year by young feminists across the country wishing to express themselves on a wide range of ‘issues, challenges, and triumphs’ relating to women today.
According to them, ‘Ultra Violet provides a place to explore and understand the ways in which young women in India are challenging, negotiating and transforming unequal power struc–tures. It is also a space to celebrate women’s histories, wisdom, creativity, laughter and love for life.’ (http://youngfeminists.word press.com for interested readers).

The feisty young women make it very clear that theirs is a feminist blog and not ‘just another space for women.’ ‘Feminism is a much misunderstood and maligned word,’ they explain. ‘Over the years, its true meaning — the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of sexual equality — has been distorted and defiled by many. This blog is both a reclaiming of the term and a clarification of what it means to us, today.’
The fact that women coming of age in the new millennium wish to reclaim feminism and make it their own is, I think, a fairly clear sign that it is alive, kicking and, more importantly, evolving. It certainly contradicts the common assumption that young women have no time or use for feminism.

A surprisingly significant number directly and effectively challenge the popular notion that feminism is passé. Many more – including those who may not specifically identify themselves as feminist – make use of the innumerable, innovative ideas and terms introduced to the world by feminist thinkers and activists, not to mention the laws, policies and practices that have come into being thanks to over three decades of feminist activism, both within the country and across the globe. As novelist Shashi Deshpande says, it is heartening that the younger generation is working things out in practice even if the majority lack a real understanding of the movement that has made it all possible.

In their introduction to Defending our Dreams... the editors observe, ‘Young women today do face different realities from those faced by previous generations, while at the same time benefiting from the gains of earlier feminist struggles. In this new global order, feminism provides a critical framework, a political lens, through which to analyse and develop visions and strategies for a just world...’

So much for the ‘post-feminist age’ apparently inaugurated by The New York Times magazine in 1982 with a story headlined ‘Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation.’ As American comm–unications professor Susan J. Douglas put it in a 2002 article, the perpetuation of the post-feminism myth requires the constant, consistent manufacturing of consent by a huge and highly successful industry she christened Postfeminism Inc.!
Men constitute another group assumed to be understandably opposed to feminism, especially since popular misrepre–sentations of feminism have traditionally cast the male of the species in stereotypical roles as villains or victims. But a growing constituency of men has obviously seen through the ‘battle of the sexes’ hoax.