How Millennials Support Feminism on Campus

Even while an undergraduate at Smith College, Alison Dahl Crossley noticed a gap in feminist research: Little had been written about collegegoing women’s attitudes toward feminism, and their experiences of it.

In Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution (New York University Press), Ms. Crossley, who is now the associate director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, sets out to fill in the missing perspectives.

She argues that popular depictions of the role of feminism in college students’ lives have often been incomplete and grudging. They have held, for example, that feminism’s influence has greatly waned because millennial women presume they will not experience gender inequality in their lives and careers. Even some earlier-generation feminists paint younger women as apathetic about gains made, she says.

“I think those stereotypes and narratives about feminism just haven’t been examined as much as they should have been,” she says, in an interview. One driver of stereotyping, she believes, is a dismissive attitude toward younger activists, of any kind — the notion that young adults will “learn better when they graduate” and “face the real world.” Another: Views of activism are too often gendered: The generic student activist is “oftentimes typed as a male student activist.”

In extensive surveying, interviewing, and participant observation at three institutions, she found, she says, that women “were very aware of inequalities that were going to come.” In many cases the students were already experiencing them, or long had — in workplaces, in families, and on campuses where they contend with sexual harassment or other forms of denigration.

Ms. Crossley found her informants, whose voices feature prominently in her book, among students, mostly women, at three varied institutions: Smith College, where she studied as an undergraduate; the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she completed master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology; and the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Activism took varied forms on the campuses. At Smith, a women’s college, feminism was so pervasive that it was almost taken for granted. At Santa Barbara, many female students were active across a variety of causes; for example, many Chicana students joined multicultural sororities to undertake such work as recruiting young minority women to campus.

Many activities on the three campuses carried forward the work of a century of feminist advocates, Ms. Crossley found. Often, current activists did not label their work as feminist because feminist ideals were diffused through many kinds of social-progress advocacy they were involved in, and their daily lives, too. Via social media, through older-style organizations like student government, and in other settings, the students Ms. Crossley studied advocated for causes that were sometimes overtly feminist and sometimes reflected feminist ideals, such as advocacy related to race and sexuality.

Ms. Crossley says she was not surprised to find such extensive activity, because she had seen it throughout and after her undergraduate and graduate-school years. In particular, she recalls the surge of feminist advocacy that followed the traumatic events of May 2014 when, near the UC Santa Barbara campus, a 22-year-old man, driven by a sense of sexual and social rejection, and hatred of women, killed six students and injured more than a dozen others. Such social organizing doesn’t materialize from thin air, she says. Rather, it occurs because feminism continues its march on campuses, often quietly, as when it takes place in classes in varied disciplines that are taught by feminists of earlier generations.

College feminists “are working their ideas out,” she says. “They’re learning frameworks to make sense of their own life experiences, and they desire, then, to create change.”

Correction (6/22/2017, 11:43 a.m.): The original version of this article misspelled the surname in the photo credit. The photographer’s name is Marcie Bianco, not Blanco. The error has been corrected.