Keeping the Third Wave Afloat : Authors: Outraged by a discounting of feminism in her generation, Rebecca Walker is carrying the banner--and spreading the word in a new book.

You’ll forgive Rebecca Walker for taking it personally back in 1992 when the popular wisdom held that the younger generation had turned its back on feminism.

Walker--a 22-year-old Yale student, a contributing editor to Ms. magazine and goddaughter to Gloria Steinem, no less--begged to differ.

The idea disturbed her so much, particularly after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, that she wrote an article for Ms., proclaiming that “I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”

It was a plea to all women, especially her peers, who were unwilling to take a stand in the name of feminism.

“The fight is far from over,” Walker wrote. “Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power.”

Following her own advice, Walker joined forces with 1992 Harvard graduate Shannon Liss and formed the Third Wave Direct Action Corp. The nonprofit organization brings together young women and introduces them to activism through voter registration drives, literacy projects and an online venture.

The people she encountered through these efforts and in lecturing at colleges inspired Walker to document the evolution of feminism in this new era. The result is the recently published anthology, “To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism” (Anchor / Doubleday).

Unlike other anthologies, “To Be Real” is not a compilation of published works. It is Walker’s own vision. She commissioned dozens of essays, then selected which to include. Each of the book’s 21 essays is a tribute to the personal empowerment of its author. The foreword and afterword were written by two visionaries who led their own generation into activism: Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, respectively.

The anthology, Walker is quick to point out, is not about making a clean break from Second Wave ideologies. It is the fluid motion of dialogue, a way for young women and men to use the tools of yesteryear’s progress to scratch the surface of the semantics and, hopefully, reveal the substance of their own existence and perhaps even their own complacency.

Denzy Senna’s title essay, “To Be Real,” dares to tear at the seams of multiculturalism with its immediate disclosure that “Being the daughter of both feminist and integrationist movements, a white socialist mother and a black intellectual father, it seemed that everyone and everything had come together for my conception, only to break apart in time for my birth.”

Jason Schultz, in “Getting Off on Women,” gives readers an inside look at a bachelor party he once threw that was not a typical “anti-women, homophobic male-bonding thing.’

One of the most shocking essays is “Giving It Up,” in which Donna Minkowitz traces the roots of the sexual arousal she receives from accounts of violence (i.e. prison rape and physical cavity searches to childhood beatings). Minkowitz’s larger conclusion is that, “From childhood we are made to understand that other people will try to control our bodies and that many will succeed.”

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The daughter of Alice Walker, the acclaimed African American writer, and Mel Levanthal, a prominent Jewish civil rights attorney, Rebecca Walker is the product of the marriage between literature and activism.

When the elder Walker was in Jackson, Miss., researching black women’s lives and beginning her first novel, “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” she met Levanthal, who was working on school desegregation cases for the NAACP’s legal defense fund. Even though it was the late ‘60s, in the middle of the civil rights movement, the miscegenation laws in Mississippi were still being fully enforced. In defiance, the couple went to New York, married, then returned to Mississippi to continue their work. In 1969, Rebecca Walker was born amid what she refers to as “a lot of turmoil, a lot of hostility and a lot of love of the movement.”

With that lineage, it would seem quite natural for Rebecca Walker to want to adopt the movement as her own.

“I’ve had many doors opened for me, and I’ve opened a lot myself. But . . . there’s the private part of your life which all the privilege in the world doesn’t transform. I mean, you’re still the little girl whose Mom went to the country and worked and you’re still the little girl whose parents divorced at 8 and you still have all of the same psychological issues that we all have.”

Walker is no stranger to the battles involved in claiming self and one’s own personal space. After her parents divorced she spent most of her adolescence shuttling between coasts and cultures. Prior to the success of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple,” Rebecca Walker straddled an artisan’s existence with her mother in San Francisco and a primarily upper-middle-class existence with her father in the suburbs of Westchester, N.Y.

“I kind of had to constantly negotiate these different places that I struggled to call home and constantly negotiate my own identity.”

It is this balancing act that she feels brings her closer to other young women, who feel as confused by the conflict between their personal prospects and the rigid requirements of feminism as Walker once did.

“A year before I started this book,” she admits in her introduction, “my life was like a feminist ghetto. Every decision I made, person I spent time with, word I uttered, had to measure up to an image I had in my mind of what was morally and politically right according to my vision of female empowerment. Everything had a gendered explanation, and what didn’t fit into my concept of feminist was ‘bad, patriarchal and problematic.’ ”

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All this said, however, the question that still remains is: Does feminism, as defined by the core issue of equal opportunity, really need a face lift?

It is a question Steinem addresses in her eloquent foreword to “To Be Real.”

“I confess that there are moments in these pages when I--and perhaps other readers over 35--feel like a sitting dog being told to sit. . . . Imagine how frustrating it is to be held responsible for some of the very divisions you’ve been fighting against, and you’ll know how feminists of the 1980s and earlier may feel as they read some of these pages. But just when I think my frustration is peaking, I begin to notice that these essays are talking to one another.”

This fact is one Rebecca Walker hopes all readers will be able to notice.

“I think every [generation] has its response, has its rhythm. . . . It’s so easy for people to want to make it sexy and juicy by turning it into this kind of Greek tragedy of daughter against mother and matricide and all that. And that’s not really what it is at all. It’s about trying to strengthen the relationships between mothers and daughters by allowing the difference and respecting the difference and really working through that difference.”

That mother-daughter difference is one Walker has dealt with in her private life. She sees no need, though, to distance herself from her mother’s fame or to respond to the assumptions people might make about why she became an activist, a writer, a feminist, or why at the age of 17 she decided to make a matrilineal claim and changed her surname from Levanthal to Walker.

To her, the people who choose to see her as nothing more--or less--than Alice Walker’s daughter will never understand her reasons. All others, who opt to accept her on the basis of the work she is doing, will not need any justification.

“I grew up around some very strong and strong-willed and intellectually powered women and I think that part of what feminism meant for them was a kind of reclaiming of womanhood, a reclaiming of the space of women. . . . And so coming up for me, trying to figure out what I was going to embody as an empowered Rebecca was difficult to formulate while living under the sway of the kind of cultural and personal power that they held.

“And so the struggle has been to figure out what my generation’s journey will be as we move toward our own models of womanhood in this time.”

And as far as Rebecca Walker is concerned, the most effective ways to do that are by standing up, speaking up and being real.