Rebecca Walker, Writer
photo courtesy of David Fenton
https://www.rebeccawalker.com/
Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969, as Rebecca Leventhal) is an American writer, feminist, and activist who has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Since graduating from Yale, she has authored and edited seven bestselling books on subjects ranging from intergenerational feminism and multiracial identity to Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, and written dozens of articles on topics as varied as Barack Obama’s masculinity, the work of visual artist Ana Mendieta, and the changing configuration of the American family.
Born Rebecca Leventhal in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi, she is the daughter of Alice Walker, an African American writer whose work includes The Color Purple, and Melvyn R. Leventhal, a Jewish American civil rights lawyer. Her parents married in New York before going to Mississippi to work in civil rights. After her parents divorced in 1976, Walker spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father’s home in the largely Jewish Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City and her mother’s largely African American environment in San Francisco.
When she was 15, she decided to change her surname from Leventhal to Walker, her mother’s surname. After high school, she studied at Yale University, where she graduated cum laude in 1992. Rebecca first emerged as a prominent feminist in 1992 when she wrote an article for Ms. magazine titled “Becoming the Third Wave”. In her article, she detailed the need for a third wave of feminism in response to the misogyny she witnessed watching the Anita Hill hearings. The article addressed the oppression of the female voice and introduced the concept of Third-wave feminism, which Rebecca defined by saying “To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them.”
After graduating from Yale University Rebecca and Shannon Liss (now Shannon Liss-Riordan) co-founded the Third Wave Fund, a non-profit organization aimed at encouraging young women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. It also aspired to be far more inclusive of women of color than feminist movements of the past. In its first year, the organization initiated a campaign that registered more than 20,000 new voters across the United States. The fund was adapted as The Third Wave Foundation in 1997 and continues to support young women of color, queer, intersex, and trans individuals by providing tools and resources they need to be leaders in their communities through activism and philanthropy.
Rebecca has written, developed, and produced film and television projects with Warner Brothers, NBCUniversal, Amazon, HBO, and Paramount, and spoken at over four hundred universities and corporate campuses internationally, including Harvard, The Whitney Museum, and TEDx Lund. She does extensive writing and speaking about gender, racial, economic, and social justice, and views teaching as a way to give people the strength to speak the truth, to change perspectives, and empower people with the ability to change the world.
Rebecca has won many awards, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation and continues to teach her masterclass, The Art of Memoir, at gorgeous and inspiring places around the world.
Major Works:
- Women Talk Money
- What’s Your Story?: A Journal for Everyday Evolution, with Lily Diamon
- Ade: A Love Story
- Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, editor
- One Big,Happy Family, editor
- Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence, memoir
- Black White Jewish: Autobiography of A Shifting Self, memoir
- To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, editor