TO CONTACT GIRLDRIVE, WRITE TO:
girldrivebook@gmail.com
What do twentysomething women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it? These are the burning questions that photographer Emma Bee Bernstein and I sought to answer when we hit the road on October 15, 2007, determined to discover how our peers viewed their lives as women. For several months, through dozens of cities, we drove across America in a Chevy Cavalier, photographing young women and finding out what was important to them. Remembering our feminist moms’ legacy, Emma and I also tracked down feminist pioneers like Erica Jong and Michele Wallace, as well as younger veterans like Jennifer Baumgardner and Kathleen Hanna, and asked them—where do you see our generation headed?
We chronicled our adventures on this blog, Girldrive, which has spurred a tight-knit network of complex, smart, ambivalent, and strong women across the United States. Our book of the same name, slated for publication in Fall 2009, will include such diverse voices as a sex shop clerk, a bible college student, a witch, a future nun, a former Air Force worker, and an anarchist. Yet, these hundreds of women share commonalities we never would have suspected.
Girldrive tracks a conversation between the next generation, telling its story through photos, profiles, and diary entries. It allows gutsy young women across the American cityscape to be seen and heard. It evaluates, through an intergenerational conversation, the current state of feminism and its many definitions. It’s about the past and the present, and it glimmers on the future. It’s about the promise of the open road. It’s about how young women grapple with the concepts of freedom, equality, joy, ambition, sex, and love—whether they call it “feminism” or not.
--Nona Willis Aronowitz
