Third Wave Foundation

The Third Wave Foundation is an American feminist activist organization run by young women that emerged from the grassroots organizing work in the mid-1990s. Founded by Catherine Gund, Dawn Martin, Amy Richards, and Rebecca Walker in 1996, [Page 1209]it supports equity in race, and sexual identity as well as gender equity, and emphasizes empowering young women and transgender activists to move ahead with their personal visions of the future. Rebecca Walker, the daughter of artist and civil rights activist and self-proclaimed womanist, Alice Walker, is a self-identified biracial, bisexual, unmarried, working parent.

She continues to blur expectations and create sociocultural dissonance, and has come to signify the fundamental foci of the third wave of feminism: difference and multiplicity, or in other words, creating societal change through an acknowledgment and deployment of sociocultural complexity. Thus, the Third Wave Foundation evolved out of a personal and generational desire to address social problems through an engagement with the multiple variables—economic, social, geographical—that member believe constrain the lives of American women.

The slogan “I am protecting my right to self-determination” appears on the organization's Web page and is central to their work. In Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself (2008), Richards describes her realization that she had to take control of her own pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting experience, rather than overvaluing the often-conflicting advice offered by experts. She criticizes the media for oversimplifying women's choices and phrasing them in an either/or manner—for instance, to work or stay at home—and the feminist movement for prescribing a model of feminist motherhood.