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====== 4.11 Criticisms of the Wave Metaphor ======

The wave metaphor has been critiqued as inappropriate, limiting, and misleading by a number of feminist scholars.

While this metaphor was once useful for United States feminists in order to gain the attention required to make large-scale political changes, as was the case for the women’s suffrage movement of the 1940’s, it’s relevance may have not only run its course but its usage has been argued as completely inappropriate.  For example, the suffragettes did not use the term ‘feminism’ to describe themselves or their movement.  This critique is perhaps most famously shown through one early twentieth century feminist’s words: “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists”.

The wave metaphor has been described as misleading and even dangerous because it not only renders the periods of time in-between waves as silent and irrelevant, but it also contributes to the faulty conceptualization of a particular brand hegemonic feminism as the ultimate (and perhaps only) understanding of what feminism is.  These critiques advocate for the recognition of periods of mass social organizing rather than ‘waves’.  It is argued that the wave metaphor weakens the strength and relevance of feminist arguments, since waves necessarily must peak and then retreat, which is not an accurate picture of feminist progress in the United States or elsewhere.  Feminism does not retreat or disappear in-between ‘waves'. For example, after the explosion of mass social organizing in the 1960’s 70’s and 80’s, feminism was being worked into our institutions – a much less glamorous but just as important job that did not require such large-scale attention.  As a result, we have seen more and more women in more areas of the job force, higher education, and the installation and success of Women’s and Gender Studies programs across the United States, to name just a few examples of feminism’s continuous and very relevant presence in this time between the ‘waves’.

The wave metaphor has further been criticized for privileging not only particular races and classes of women in the United States, but for privileging the feminism of the United States in general over other locations in the world.  Amrita Basu argues for, “the politics and conditions of emergence,” instead of the wave metaphor, which does not allow for this privileging of particular people and nations but instead allows for the importance and understanding of any and all peoples in the world who have contributed to feminism and its many understandings and meanings.