I had a fascinating discussion this morning with my 22-year-old daughter on second and third wave feminism. Like most good things in the world, feminism is always only one generation away from extinction, I think, because for each small gain we tend to believe the world has changed. It hasn’t, and it will revert to type quickly through neglect if we fail to pass on our stories to the next generation of women.

We’ve got a whole crop of newly grown women who mistakenly believe they have Arrived; that being “liberated” means flashing their breasts on Girls Gone Wild and being able to hold as much liquor as a fraternity boy, that they’ll never have to fight for access in the workplace or for the right to choose when or if to exercise their fertility. They think that sexual harrassment is a dead issue, and even worse, that the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Through political and personal apathy, they could easily wind up in the exact same place women my age and older fought to get out of. The Equal Rights Amendment died, and the only thing standing to protect the rights of women is a patchwork of laws and court rulings that can be undone in a heartbeat.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we had a word for what we do now by blogging–we called in herstory. History deconstructs into his story; events and people “important” to the grand scheme of things, and seldom includes women. So through diaries, poetry, quilts, storytelling, we tried to capture the lives of women, often overlooked and neglected from official accounts– her stories which mattered, too. We tried to put a face on the anonymous Women who lived and died to build this world, and who suffered from the injustices of it.

That was how we fought for the rights of rape victims; by standing up and saying “it happened to me, it happened to women with names and faces and lives, your mother, your sister, your next door neighbor.” And that was how we fought for the right to legal abortion; by standing up and telling the stories of backstreet butchers, by saying “I did what I had to do, I couldn’t see any other way. Don’t let this happen to someone else.”

We have to do that again, with every issue. We have to remember what it was like, and we have to tell what it was like, before easy access to birth control, before sexual harassment in the workplace laws, before legal abortions, before domestic violence programs. We are the living testiment to what can be accomplished when women refuse to go away quietly, and when we stop telling these stories to the next generation the stories fade away, and with them, the rights we fought for. No one will do it for us. Not the schools, the churches and certainly not the goverment. Only we can perserve it, by talking and by writing.

While the debate rages over whether bloggers are journalists or not, I’ll quietly watch from the sidelines. I consider myself a commentator at most; at best, I’d like to think of myself as a herstorian to my own daughters and all the other daughters I’ll never meet. Because I remember. And if I do it right, our daughters will remember, too.