After nearly two decades of so-called postfeminism, protest is back, big time. We are witnessing a resurgence of feminist activism and argument. According to Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman: "It feels as though there's a greater energy to the feminist movement now than I've experienced before in my adult life; there's a critical mass of women who just won't shut up about the things they care about."
Over the past few years there has been a rapid growth of feminist grassroots groups in the UK. The newer organisations – among them, Object ("challenging the sexual objectification of women"), Women for Refugee Women, End Violence Against Women, Everyday Sexism (a Twitter campaign that chronicles daily harassment), No More Page Three and Expert Women – have joined long-standing organisations such as the Fawcett Society to field a strong media and political presence.
In common with second wave feminism – the political and cultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s – this new wave is being largely led by young, educated women. What's most striking, however, is how cultural the concerns are: how issues of representation of women – or the lack of representation or the grossly distorted representation – have taken top billing, with violence against women coming a close, and connected, second.
But how does this new, fourth wave energy connect with more material concerns? We know from the Fawcett Society and others that women have suffered a "triple whammy" as a result of austerity and recession, losing jobs at a faster rate than men, suffering stagnant wages and taking the hit from welfare cuts.
But deeper shifts, on a global scale, also pose new challenges and possibilities. While a small but significant percentage of women have joined the professional and managerial elite, they have also pulled away from less skilled women in dramatic fashion, tripling the income gap between graduate and non-graduate women.
Some argue that this gap reduces the chance for cross-gender solidarity, instead offering ambitious young women a chance to join the elite through competitive and supposedly meritocratic educational systems. From this perspective, the relative lack of earning and public power of the majority of women can be seen not as the result of discrimination but of good old nature (women choosing to do less paid work), or a simple lack of personal or career oomph.
But for those who reject this analysis, what are the possibilities for reviving campaigns on more material questions? Several developments are encouraging. First, not all of the new feminism is concerned solely with issues of representation or sexualisation. The campaigning group UK Feminista has taken up the cause of the living wage. Young feminist journalists such as Laurie Penny and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett write powerfully on class and care issues.
Second, the impetus for change may come from unexpected sources, including those high-flying corporate women, some of whom are beginning to show promising signs of rebellion. Yes, Google chief's Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In could be read merely as a bible of corporate individualist feminism, but it also contains a sharp recognition of how hostile modern capitalism is to private and family life. Similar arguments have been put forward by a prominent US policy adviser and academic, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Such is Slaughter's passion that she reproduced, in capitals, the demand that we "make school schedules match work schedules". When corporate feminism starts to sound like 1970s socialist feminism, something is afoot, and we need to build on it.
Austerity and recession offer potential openings for creative new thinking. Is it really progress for a group of top women to live the alienated, work-all-hours lives that their fathers lived? Might this group push for a more rational and human distribution of working hours and pay, and a greater integration of work and personal life?
Third, Sandberg and Slaughter's work, which is explicitly addressed to younger women, is just one example of a new intergenerational conversation. Alliances are springing up everywhere and could be a real force for change. At this year's Labour party women's conference – a refreshingly militant event, itself emboldened by the new feminism – Harriet Harman identified a cohort of older women (in their 50s and 60s) who have been plugging away through the postfeminist decades to promote political and institutional change in a variety of unglamorous ways, and remain keen to improve the lives of our collective daughters.
There are a number of issues that could be tackled by the new alliances. Warwick University's impressive Future Track study, examining the experiences of the 2006-2009 university generation, has confirmed that employers still appoint young men to higher starting salaries than similarly qualified young women. A campaign against this example of gender discrimination could lead to useful debates on pay transparency – or the lack of it.
Similarly, the campaign against lads' mags could join forces with Living Wage groups to say: "We don't want distorted representations of women in supermarkets; we do want the women who work in these shops paid properly."
My instinct is that most fourth wave feminism would be open to such campaigns. The technology is there to link Twitter to street protests, thinktank reports to parliamentary procedures. An alchemy of long-established expertise and the energy, wit and flair of the newer rebels could present a popular and serious challenge to the more entrenched – and superficially less exciting – forms of inequality.
