Intergenerational dialogue in the age of post-feminism

MW: In the final chapter of the second edition of Anne Summers’ landmark Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia ([1975], 1994), ‘Letter to the Next Generation’, Summers recounts that in the 1980s she was ‘mortified’ to realise that many younger women considered feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, and feminism more generally, as irrelevant to their contemporary lives. Summers suggests that this may in some ways be because feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had not adequately explained themselves to future generations. Emily Maguire was born a year after Damned Whores and God’s Police was first published. Influenced by Summers’ book, her recently published Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power and Identity (2008) is a fascinating account of women born after the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This contemporary generation understand themselves as ‘people not genders’, yet the lived experience of their 20s and 30s has collided with the myth of a post-feminist world to provide a new generation of what Maguire refers to as ‘accidental feminists’