Guardian 00b The former editor of Ms magazine was one of over 200 activists interviewed by Susan Brownmiller for In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, her account of the birth of second-wave feminism in America
Guardian 01a Sheila Rowbotham, a pioneer of second-wave feminism, has admitted that “none of it is as simple as we thought back then”
Guardian 03a The experience piqued my interest in speaking to people who had grown up with politicised mothers during the heady days of second-wave feminism
Guardian 06a The creeping silence on feminism matters - particularly for younger women who did not experience even third-wave, let alone second-wave, feminism
Guardian 06b As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women
Independent 00b All are rightly „lamented‟ for […] their recourse, often under the guise of irony,
to „retro–sexism‟ - as Whelehan calls nostalgia for gender relations before second-wave feminism
Independent 01a It‟s also true that second-wave feminism didn‟t risk focusing on childbirth and
motherhood because the emphasis had to be on competing in the workplace
Telegraph 08a […] she identified with the new idolatry of shiny careerism promulgated by the
second-wave feminism of the late 1960s […]
Telegraph 09c It may make you wonder what happened to the passion of second-wave feminism […]
Table 5.15: Occurrences of „second wave feminism‟
Telegraph 08a and Independent 00b place „second-wave feminism‟ in the past through different uses
of postmodifying phrases. The former packages up the historical connotations of this wave in the postmodifying prepositional phrase “of the late 1960s”, while the latter places it in the postmodification of the head noun “nostalgia”, again highlighting its historical nature. In Guardian 00b, the apposition of “her account of the birth of second-wave feminism in America” with the head noun “Memoir” also places the second-wave in the past. In other instances, the tense of representations of actions, events and states involving second-wave feminism historicise it, for example in “second-wave feminism didn‟t risk focusing on childbirth and motherhood” (Independent 01a). Uncertainty about what followed (or did not follow) the second-wave is also implied. For example, in Telegraph 09c, “it” refers cataphorically to “the gender debate”, which causes the senser in the subordinate mental process to
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wonder “what happened to the passion of second-wave feminism”. Here, the past tense of the wh- clause places the second-wave in the past, and the rhetorical question form flouts the maxim of manner (Grice, 1975), creating the implicature that this wave – and its associated “passion” – has disappeared, with no indication of what, if anything, has replaced it. In Guardian 01a, the glossing of the sayer, Sheila Rowbotham, as “a pioneer of second-wave feminism” through an appositive noun phrase gives the reader the contextual information for interpreting her verbiage, that “none of it is as simple as we thought back then”. This example demonstrates the extent to which ideas packaged up into noun phrases can enable readers to interpret propositions that may otherwise prove difficult: the information in the appositive noun phrase allows the reader to understand that the distal time deixis “then” refers to the time of the second-wave of feminism. Here, „feminism‟ is not only attached to the past, but is characterised as something too simple to apply today.
The third wave is not historicised in the same way. The one exception is from Guardian 06a, where the third-wave and the second-wave both occur in a relative clause that postmodifies “younger women”, who are the phenomenon in a process of not experiencing:
Publication Sentence
Guardian 05a This, says Stoller, is one of the fundamental issues on which third-wave feminism differs from its precursors
Guardian 05a This isn‟t to say that a new respect for craft is the beginning and end of
American third-wave feminism […]
Guardian 06a The creeping silence on feminism matters - particularly for younger women who did not experience even third-wave, let alone second-wave, feminism
Guardian 09a “Third-wave feminism is pluralistic, strives to be multi-ethnic, is pro-sex and
tolerant of other women‟s choices”, she said
Independent 06a Meg Sanders, 46, a writer from Stratford-upon-Avon, said a „third-wave feminism‟ was needed to follow the suffragette movement and the 1970s movement
Table 5.16: Occurrences of „third wave feminism‟
The other sentences here differentiate the third wave from the second and also define it as ambiguous. For example, in Independent 06a “a „third-wave‟ feminism” is the phenomenon in a mental process of needing, with the adverbial contextualising this need temporally – “to follow the suffragette movement and the 1970s movement”. The use of scare quotes to refer to the third-wave suggests that it is also hard to identify (although note that it appears in the verbiage of a verbalisation
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process, and so this may be reported speech). The Naomi Wolf quote from Guardian 09a uses a relational process to explicitly attribute the possibility of multiple meanings to the third wave: “third- wave feminism is pluralistic”. The relational process here also gives rise to an implicature about other waves of feminism through a flout of the maxim of quantity (Grice, 1975): the third-wave is pluralistic, but if this needs to be spelled out then previous waves must not have been. Differentiation from previous waves is more explicit in Guardian 05a, in which a quote from feminist magazine founder Debbie Stoller uses a relational process to note that “third-wave feminism differs from its precursors”. Here, the anaphoric “this” in the main clause refers back to Stoller‟s discussion of sexuality, thereby presenting the third and second waves as differing in terms of their treatment of this subject. This accords with Mendes‟ (2011a, p. 557) observation that the third-wave is defined by the way it responds to the second. Guardian 05a provides little in the way of a definition of third wave feminism, but seeks to defease possible assumptions about it. This is done through the negation of a verbalisation process which makes a proposition about the third wave, equating it with “a new respect for craft”. Again, an implied meaning arises from a flout of quantity (Grice, 1975): “new” emphasises that this respect for craft was not a feature of the second wave.