"You're writing an article about feminism? Ask me questions!" my mom yells into the phone.

I remind her that it's about young feminists. I can't interview her.

"Who does the dishes?" she says. "And who cleans the toilets? In the whole world!" My mom managed a grocery store for 20 years, only to end up disabled and working at a bank. Her co-workers, or as she refers to them, "the dumb bitches," don't fare much better. Life as a bank teller in Eastern Washington is loathsome, punctuated only by casual Friday, when the employees get to wear T-shirts. As Mom explains, "I like to work in the cage in the corner so I can make my jewelry when they aren't looking. I keep it in a little drawer." Some people plan for retirement; my mother dreams of being fired. "It will happen someday," she says optimistically, ending with her mantra: "You can't make me, you can't make me."

Now it's Dad's turn. "Your mom says you're writing a serious article." He coughs. "About feminism."

I change the subject to my stereo, the one thing my Dad and I agree about, politically. "It's crackling," I say. "I think it's the needle or the receiver or...." My dad is a cop, so he has no problem saying things like, "When you give someone CPR, they tend to puke into your mouth." Unlike secondhand vomit, feminism is embarrassing to him, not to mention serious. The call ends quickly, with a reminder to change the oil in the car my sister and I share.

It isn't just people near the Idaho border who fear talking about feminism. Try talking to women in their early 20s--at an age and in an environment when people have to either accept or deny the label. "The term gets the same response as a Nazi sympathizer these days," says Jena Cripe, a 23-year-old University of Washington graduate student. "To talk feminism is to meet blank, defiant stares, crotch scratchings, and potential gunfire." Although Jena took her requisite women's studies classes and jokingly professes to hate men, she's equally dissatisfied with institutionalized feminist discourse. "It was a lot of preachy posturing," she says, "and then, for the sake of pseudo-empowerment, we'd talk about famous figures and all their accomplishments."

"I have trouble with the structure to talk about feminism," says Ariel Federow, age 18. "[Saying that] men have power and women don't is awfully binary, and I'm anti-binary gender construction." Despite the word's limitations, Ariel identifies as a feminist and talks with her friends about "stupid shit that goes down and starting an art revolution and rewriting Guys and Dolls to place it in a separatist commune."

Ariel's and Jena's experiences of feminism have little in common. One is immediate and gratifying; the other, a vague system of rules: "Porn is bad"; "Women love nature." Whether you see feminism as occupation or lifestyle (or something else entirely), the controversial history of the word itself often overshadows the concept's potential to change lives. As Halla Attallah, age 24, says, "Neither of my grandmothers have been to school and probably couldn't read anything but the Qur'an, whereas I have an aunt who's a doctor." Halla talks about feminism with her friends and her mom. Her mom grew up in Saudi Arabia, "and she was able to step outside her norm and cultural beliefs to allow my sister and I more freedom." Which is more than Halla can say for many of her friends. "Some of them voted for George Dubya because their boyfriends did!" she says.

Like housework, feminism remains a woman's chore. Some women (and most men) feel no need to get their hands dirty, since they perceive no personal benefit.

At the other extreme are recreational feminists, "womyn" who think dying their hair purple and attending an Ani DiFranco show with their boyfriends is the ultimate "fuck you" to "The Man." Swimming somewhere in the middle are most chicks I know. Yoon Hong, 23, has no idea who Shulamith Firestone is, but she identifies as a feminist, and her role model is her 23-year-old best friend. "She believes that women are able to do anything they desire," says Yoon. "I admire her for that."

There are few generalizations you can make about young feminists, except that our feminism is likely to be idiosyncratic, even contradictory, and we prefer it that way. It isn't just irony and lipstick that separate us from Second Wavers: It's an entire continent. For those of us who didn't listen to "Free to Be You and Me" before shuffling off to prep school, old school feminism seems so, well, East Coast. You're as likely to see a self-proclaimed feminist walking around the streets of Seattle as you are to see freshly pressed khakis paired with a polo shirt, and both sights elicit suspicion. As Jena says of the "blond sorority babes" in her women's studies class: "I think everybody in there dreamed of being Gloria Steinem, but more for her pert breasts than for her brains." Second Wavers lament the scores of women who won't label themselves, while Third Wavers complain about feminists who wear the uniform but whose dedication to women's equality runs no deeper than a J. Crew advertisement.

The generation war is teaching us that left-brained categorizations, pie charts, and "global hegemony maps" are too limiting. Many women, both feminists and non-feminists, want change and equality, and they're willing to talk about it--on their own terms and in their own terminology. My friends may not be poster children for a feminist utopia; their goals tend toward the personal and creative rather than the institutional. They're more likely to write music and novels than dissertations. "I want to play the piano like Mozart," Halla says. "My hair will fling around and my collar will unbutton and fly off. Once I achieve that, then I can die." If politics can't unite women for equality, maybe creative expression can. Maybe my mom could even express her feminism, instead of rolling her eyes and saying: "Don't go there."