Well, in my personal opinion, the women's rights movement of both the 19th and 20th centuries owes huge debts to the Civil Rights movement. Women got involved in that struggle early on and began to think, "It's time for us to have rights." I was involved in the Civil Rights movement in graduate school--I marched with King when he came to Chicago in 1966, and I got started working with black organizations on the South Side of Chicago.

The first women's meeting I went to was a group of graduate students who wanted to form a local chapter of the National Organization for Women, and the meeting was run by a man, because his wife didn't think she could run a meeting. For the first 45 minutes no one spoke--that sort of tells you what things were like. But then the women took off and said, "This is not right." We formed the Chicago International Women's Rights Organization. At that point in time, the movement was divided into political/radical feminists and the cultural feminists.

What was the difference?

It had to do with analyses and also strategies. The political people held Marxist socialist views about the importance of capitalism, race, class, etc. The cultural feminists were more interested in constructing women's cultures: feminist science fiction, women's music.

Which would you consider yourself?

Oh, I'm a Marxist. My focus recently is on international feminism, and I always come back to that question of the '70s: Why is it that always, everywhere, women lose? One of the most powerful things I've encountered is the UN Report on Women and Development, which begins with the words, "Women work two-thirds of the hours in the world, for which they earn 10 percent of the wages. They own one percent of the property." And there are still many countries in which women are not legally able to own property.

Do you think this international awareness isn't as prevalent in Third Wavers? We still seem to be dealing with the trickle down from postmodernism, with what divides us...

Looking at a global scale, what interests me are the commonalities. I think that the postmodern thing, and Foucault... oh, I have so many things to say.

Where to begin?

Yes, where.... There was a really interesting meeting of the National Organization for Women in 1981, where issues of race were central to the agenda. What they did was assign every person who attended... and unfortunately I couldn't go that year... to a consciousness-raising group. When the group for minority women got into a room together, they looked at one another and asked, "What do we have in common?" The process of how they came up with a common identity as women of color was a watershed in terms of thinking about difference.

As I see it, that was the point at which, in women's studies at least, issues of postmodernism got a lot more complicated. There is this lack of certainty that goes with postmodernism, and I think that's really a healthy thing, particularly in the dominant groups. It opens them up to other views. White middle-class feminists always knew there were race and class issues--I think there's been some revisionist history implying they didn't--but they didn't always know how to deal with them.

So is postmodernism a tool for dealing with them?

I don't think that postmodernism is exactly the appropriate response to what women have been saying... well, it is and it isn't. It's appropriate that white feminists should say, "We've been overconfident that we knew what was needed." But I don't think that means we don't need anything, or we don't have anything in common. I've even had classes say to me, "It's really difficult to say 'we.' Who are 'we'?" We are part of the many we's, but no one knows at any point what part we may be. At that point, collective action becomes impossible.

So what do you do?

I think that what people who are oppressed in various ways have in common is not simply a wealth of uncertainty. But there are things that can be seen if you aren't part of the dominant group that are, in a word that's really unfashionable, really "there." We're familiar with the fact that women know things about men that men don't know. There's a wonderful piece by bell hooks about whiteness, where she talks about the fact that black people know a lot more about what whiteness is. Ruth Frankenberg interviewed a bunch of white women about race and asked, "What is whiteness?" And they couldn't tell her. bell hooks writes that whiteness is about danger, about creating fear... the point is, to the dominant group, whiteness was invisible. It takes subordinate groups to say what's really happening. If we pay attention to what the subordinate group is saying, we'll learn a lot more about the world we inhabit.

There are different visions of this world that we have. The vision of the dominant group is made "real" for everyone. We all live in a straight-male-dominant world, and we all have to live by their categories. To find an alternative view is a struggle. The newspapers and television all tell us what is "real," and even though we know in our gut it's not true, what choice do we have? We can say, "Our world is not like this." Part of doing that is standing together. If one person says it, it can be dismissed.

How do you counter charges of essentialism, of grouping everyone into one overgeneralized category?

Because of pieces I've written, I have been accused of essentialism, but I agree there is no essence of women. "Woman" is a historical construction.

What do you see as the differences between the Second and Third Waves?

When did the Third Wave start?

It gets defined as people who were born between, like, 1970 and 1975....

Oh, born then. Well, I think the Third Wave is much more women who have grown up without some of the more overt forms of discrimination, without the employment pages being divided into men and women. In some ways, discrimination is more subtle. I also think there has been space for Third Wave feminists to develop different goals--it's no longer the basic stuff. The second generation of feminists faced really fundamental things. For example, after I got married, in 1965, I applied three times for a credit card, and each time they "lost" my application. I finally talked to someone who said they didn't issue credit to married women, but they would give my husband a card based on my credit rating. I was a (presumably responsible) college professor! He could've been a deadbeat, for God's sake! When we tried to apply for a mortage to buy a house, no bank would count my income....

Third Wave feminism has different problems to respond to. And thank goodness. In some sense it's progress.

But the enemy is also not so easy to name now. The Third Wave seems to require different tools, and it seems postmodernism could supply some of the tools....

I think that a lot of Foucault's work is quite wonderful; I have more problems with the theoretical than the epistemological--but I've been very influenced by Marx, and I really do like to see the world in systemic terms. I find the category of capitalism, for example, useful. Interestingly, Foucault was a student of a great French Marxist theorist. But because there has been so little of the Marxist tradition in the U.S., that piece of Foucault has dropped away. Foucault has been read as a libertarian--we're all just doing our own thing, and the best thing we can do is doing what we want--which is a very bad reading of Foucault.

A second thing is his notion that power is everywhere. The problem I have with that is that if power is everywhere, it's really nowhere. In some sense you can't attack it; you can't say, "This is where we have to change things; this is where we have to push." That seems to me to be a real difference between Second and Third Wave feminists: Third Wavers have more of a sense that you can push anywhere and that the goal is not so much a transformation, as it was for Second Wave feminists, but subversion.