Manifesta (20th Anniversary Edition, Revised and Updated With A New Preface)
Young Women, Feminism And The Future

By Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
Macmillan, 2020

“Manifesta is another step toward the empowerment of women. If caring about women matters, this book matters.”
—Andrea Dworkin

The twentieth anniversary release of a groundbreaking feminist text: a powerful indictment of the current state of feminism, and a passionate call to arms.

Today, people of all genders strive to uphold the goals of feminism and proudly embrace the term, but the movement itself is often beset with confusion and questions. Does personal empowerment happen at the expense of politics? Is feminism for the few—or does it speak to the many as they bump up against daily injustices? What does it mean to say "the future is female"?

In 2000, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’s Manifesta set out to chronicle the feminism of their generation. They brilliantly revealed the snags in various hubs of the movement—from antipathy to the term itself to the hyped hatred of feminism’s imperfect spokespeople—and showed that these snags had not imperiled the feminist cause. The book went on to inspire a new generation of readers and has become a classic of contemporary feminist literature.

In the decades since Manifesta was published, the world has changed in ways both promising and terrifying. This twentieth anniversary edition of Manifesta features an updated bibliography, timeline, and resources, as well as a new introduction by the authors. Expertly unpacking both early women’s history and the Third Wave feminism that seeded the active righteous intersectionality we see today, Manifesta remains an urgent and necessary tool to make sense of our past, present, and future.

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Praise for Manifesta

“With wit and honesty, Manifesta shows us the building blocks of the future of this longest revolution.”—Gloria Steinem

“Great news from the front—feminism lives! Bold, independent, generous, and cautionary, Manifesta leaves no doubt that for a new generation of women the F-word is not only speakable but shoutable and singable.”—Alix Kates Shulman

“Manifesta is an exciting and important contribution to the growing body of Third Wave literature. Richards and Baumgardner speak the language of a new generation of feminists, proving once again that young women are committed to continuing to work passionately for social justice.”

—Rebecca Walker, editor of To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism

“Richards and Baumgardner have spent years as participants in and observers of the feminist movement, and now they have their say, asking new questions and coming up with provocative answers. They do it with wit, confidence, and superior insight. Manifesta will reinvigorate armchair feminists and recharge activists of all ages.”—Barbara Findlen, editor of Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation