If you listen to enough Twitter activists, you’ll be convinced feminism is dead. To many, the fight for women’s rights is too old-school, too mired in outdated concepts of the gender binary, and too tied in with the ruling classes’ interests a la corporate feminism and trans-exclusionary radical feminism.
Even those who still identify as feminists have trouble explaining whether we are in the fourth wave of feminism or the fifth—and this confusion amid growing calls for anti-racism, queer and trans rights and anti-capitalism has justifiably turned some young people away from the label in the last half of the last decade.
Critics have always overlooked, whether willfully or ignorantly, feminism’s intersectional nature. While it’s true that the first and second waves of feminism were often marred by the racial interests of wealthy white women, the third and fourth have taken it upon themselves to include all women within their sisterhood, providing activist spaces not just for wealthy white cisgender women, but also for Black women and other women of color, trans women, nonbinary people and undocumented women.
Today, Generation Z (or “Zoomer”) feminists need not identify as women or use she/her pronouns to think of themselves as feminists. They recognize that the struggle for gender equality doesn’t just mean fighting for the rights of one type of woman, but for all gendered minorities.
Whether we’re at the end of the fourth wave of feminism or the beginning of the fifth, there’s no denying that the feminists of tomorrow are showing older generations how to do it—and making the world better in the process. Here are few young feminists to keep an eye on.
Aaliyah Belk
Like many involved in feminism throughout the ages, UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Aaliyah Belk’s path to feminism came through reproductive rights—though that wasn’t the first place she’d ever heard the term.
“I think I heard the term as a junior in high school, but I also grew up with a mom that was feminist,” Belk told Teen Vogue last summer. “She very much instilled in me to be a woman who speaks her mind and speaks out for other people.”
She’s chosen one of the most well-tread paths to feminism, too—the ivory tower, in the UNC system specifically, where Belk recently completed her undergraduate degree in social sciences at UNC Greensboro before moving on to health equity, social justice and human rights at Chapel Hill.
In her Teen Vogue interview, Belk expressed frustration with “performative” activism that many of her ilk, young and old alike, share.
“My goal is to create a space for younger women to get involved in their community," she said, "and expand the idea of activism beyond the performative, [like] going to marches or posting on social media.”
Em Odesser
Like Gloria Steinem before her, feminist Em Odesser has chosen to bring her message to the masses via media. The founder of Teen Eye Magazine, “an international online magazine created entirely by teens, for teens,” Odesser’s feminism focuses on technology—and particularly on the ways digital media contributes to the oppression of marginalized women.
In an interview with All My Friends zine, another activist-oriented, online-only magazine, Odesser decried the many ways governments and tech giants have hurt sex workers through supposed anti-sex-trafficking policies that ended up doing much more harm than good.
“Anyone interested in talking about anything sex-related on the internet,” she said, “should be listening to the sex workers getting hit the hardest by algorithmic biases.” She added that “Instagram’s new terms of service,” which were rolled out in late December 2020, “are very worrying for the future of the internet.”
Sarah Michal Hamid
With so much of feminism’s past being overly centered on white women, it’s no surprise that young women who embody the intersections of modern society are at the forefront of Gen Z’s activism.
Take Sarah Michal Hamid, for example. She identified in Teen Vogue as “a Punjabi Ashkenazi Jewish Muslim queer woman settler living in Hawai’i,” and works as an organizer and co-coordinator with the Hawai’i chapter of the anti-imperialist transnational feminist organization AF3IRM.
Such intersections came naturally to Hamid, who told Teen Vogue that she hadn’t even yet started high school when she began identifying as a feminist. She recalled being in classes “talking about colonialism, British colonialism, the occupation of South Asia… how all of these exploitative systems harmed my people, specifically my ancestors.”
Academic feminism in the 1970s gave rise to feminist standpoint theory, which posited that each woman’s life and lived experience was the root of her knowledge of the world and the theories she gleaned from it. This seems especially true for Hamid, who told Teen Vogue that “being proud of your resilient heritage is not something that is often taught, living in the West.”
“It took a while for me to even recognize that there was power in being able to identify myself as who I am,” she said.
Bronwen Brenner
Before there was a word for feminism, there were feminist poets. Whether it was Sappho’s queer verse or Emily Dickinson’s lonely, longing works, feminism and poetry have always gone hand-in-hand. Just ask Bronwen Brenner, a teen feminist who has already won awards and whose work is featured in tons of digital and print publications.
Poetry has always been political, too, and Brenner is not one to shy away from politics.
“There's this narrative that first-wave feminists fought for the right to vote, second-wave feminists fought for the right to birth control, and all contemporary feminists do is whine and nitpick,” she said in a 2019 interview. “This is so wrong.”
Those politics are evident in her poetry, too. In “Canary Girl (Munitionette),” Brenner wrote that “people like you make me fear/my body will be identified by the teeth/by the jutting stone fruit pits or shellfish”—an obvious allusion to gendered violence.
