As the Women's Resource Center's "Visionary in Residence," feminist writer and lecturer Rebecca Walker spent three days last week meeting with students and faculty to discuss her work as an activist and author.
On Friday she was awarded the "2000 Women's Resource Visionary Award" by the Resource Center, an honor that is given -- in the words of Giovanna Munafo, the Center's Director -- "to someone more challenging than simply an 'artist or writer in residence,' someone who builds new paradigms."
"It is very rare for me to find students as engaged and intelligent and as beautiful as you are," Walker told a nearly full 105 Dartmouth Hall on Friday. "Thank you."
In her talk Friday, entitled "Being Real: Young Women and Men Tell the Truth and Change the Face of Feminism," Walker focused on the ideology and development of her semi-eponymous self-edited first book, "To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism," a collection of personal essays by feminists.
She published the book in 1995, only four years out of Yale University and already tallying numerous honors for her work as a feminist leader. Walker received the Feminist of the Year Award from the Fund for the Feminist Majority, and one of Time magazine's 50 Future Leaders of America nominations.
As a political and social activist at Yale in the late 1980s, Rebecca Walker surrounded herself with peers who shared her drive to "change the world." Upon leaving college they found themselves in the midst of a tumultuous political climate ripe for that sort of change, yet they also found themselves without a suitable outlet.
"I felt that the NAACP and other large organizations were monolithic and inorganic," said Walker. "This was before private, non-profit groups became popular, and there was little opportunity for real grass-roots activism."
In response, she and her friends started the Third Wave Foundation in 1992, a small not-for-profit devoted to intensive grass-roots work. Third Wave's unique approach to political action is evidenced by their first project -- a voter-registration drive in which they rented a bus, filled it with an eclectic bunch of people " from prep-school cheerleaders to devout Buddhists " and toured the country encouraging people to vote.
"The emphasis was on diversity," Walker explained to a largely female audience on Friday. "Not just ethnic diversity but ideological diversity."
This diversity is the theme of her book "To Be Real," which she read from at length during the lecture. Demonstrating Walker's ambition to create a "third wave of feminism," the essays ranged from a man who threw a bachelor party for his best friend where they discussed their conceptions of sexuality instead of hiring a stripper, to a woman championing feminist violence.
Apart from the reading, Walker lectured on the ideas of "To Be Real" in a relaxed and anecdotal style, peppering her theoretical notions with humor and animation. She emphasized bridging the gap between the old school of feminism, which she characterized as strict and somewhat stifling, and the new "third wave," which is free of the stereotypes and rigidity of the older feminist generation.
"I wanted to push at our notions of what feminism can include." She explained. "With 'To Be Real' I was trying to show that ideological diversities and contradictions are present in the [feminist] movement, and that we're not all man-hating, hairy-legged, fatigue-wearing women. We're not even all women."
She related her ideas and experience to the struggles of feminists on the Dartmouth campus, encouraging students to work with the Third Wave Foundation. Except for a frustrated moment when she scolded the audience for fidgeting Rebecca Walker shared her vision with warmth.
Daughter of novelist and poet Alice Walker, Rebecca is a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine and co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation -- an organization dedicated to inspiring social activism and consciousness among young women.
Though she lives in Brooklyn, Walker visits more than 30 college campuses each year, organizing colloquiums on such issues as multi-racial identity, bi/homosexuality and abortion.
