Wes: I grew up in the heyday of feminism, a movement so broad and indefinable that its opponents laid siege to it by labeling it the domain of man-hating lesbians on the march to destroy civil society. So effective was that counteroffensive that much of the generation born from the late 1970s to the late 1990s disavowed feminism, even though they couldn’t actually describe what it was.

Just 10 years ago, if one asked a teen or young adult woman whether she was a feminist, she’d generally look a little irritated or maybe scared, and offer a firm “no.” But when you asked whether she believed in equal rights, equal pay, equality in the job market, or whether a woman should be able to be an astronaut or the president, she’d stare at you with a puzzled look and say, “Of course,” unaware that these ideas, now ordinary, once represented a radical societal change.

Dr. Wes Crenshaw and Kyra Haas

I saw Betty Friedan (“The Feminine Mystique”) speak in 1990, surrounded by 5,500 other therapists, most of them women, their eyes wet with appreciation and excitement, waiting to absorb a piece of history from an early feminist luminary. I won’t go into detail, but her speech didn’t go well. As she lost track of her message and rambled well past her allotted time, the looks in the audience shifted to gloom and disappointment. Slowly, people began exiting, so when Friedan finally reached the end of her speech — or at least a stopping point — half of those in attendance were gone.

Over the years as I recalled that evening, I came to believe that perhaps feminism as a movement had lost its message, too, and with it a younger audience that could bring it into the twenty-first century. Or perhaps young women would simply keep benefitting from all the agitators who’d gone before them, never acknowledging what had been done to bring them where they are today.

I was wrong.

Today women outnumber men 3:2 in college graduation, and the CEOs of General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Archers Daniels Midland, PepsiCo, Lockheed Martin, DuPont, General Dynamics, and Xerox are all women. There is a good chance a woman will be president in 2016, though the parties differ on who that might be. Whatever their politics, these are the daughters of feminism, and over the last two or three years, their daughters have begun rediscovering it, as Kyra discusses below.

Kyra: This last semester, I served as secretary for my high school’s Young Feminists Club. While Lawrence High has had its YFC for a couple years, Free State’s started in January, and it started strong. Other schools around the region have started or are starting them, too.

Throughout the semester, we heard speakers from the GaDuGi Safe Center, Douglas County NOW and our high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. We also read feminist poetry and discussed feminism as it related to anything from politics to the workplace to the home. For me, these conversations were somewhat new in flavor and concept and widely varied, but I consistently agreed with their central themes: justice and equality.

I don’t remember when I started identifying as a feminist, but before high school I’ll admit Wes is right–I didn’t really know what the word meant. Some people still don’t. For the school paper this fall, reporters asked random students to define feminism and got answers like, “It’s something girls are that guys aren’t. It’s clean. Not dirty.”

However, while there’s still quite a journey ahead, in the last few years, the feminist movement has picked up steam. Part of this rejuvenated effort can be attributed to the movement’s trendiness on social media. Through Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and other sites, people can share their views on the movement through pictures, quotes, poetry and artwork. As with anything, extremists run largely unchecked, but the central messages about equal pay for equal work, autonomy, respect for gender and sexual identity, sexual assault, the importance of intersectionality in understanding oppression, and other themes based on true equality shine through.

Next week, we’ll discuss the feminist movement’s counter-movement of sorts, the Meninists, who essentially claim that straight white males should be allowed to call the shots without complaint from other, “lesser” groups.

Wes Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP, is author of “I Always Want to Be Where I’m Not: Successful Living with ADD & ADHD.” Learn about his writing and practice at dr-wes.com. Kyra Haas is a Free State High School senior who blogs at justfreakinghaasome.wordpress.com. Send your confidential 200-word question to ask@dr-wes.com. Double Take opinions and advice are not a substitute for psychological services.