My college classes (a year or two later than yours) engaged in similar debates. Many of the feminists on campus felt Dworkin in particular portrayed women as far weaker than they themselves felt. In Dworkin’s writing, women often seem incapable of taking any action to benefit themselves. Most of classmates responded negatively to that impression.

I will also say that my mother’s third waviness has always come out more in public, where “freedom” and “sexy” get coupled and celebrated in every sexist old-fashioned way–the contact high of attention reinforcing every last bit of it. But it is in private, when my mother feels the emotional tug of not being adequate, attractive, or god-forbid-”sexy” that she comes to my sister and I in tears and desperation. She is always comforted to hear that anything being “sexy” is as big a lie as women having smaller brains and the like.
Of course, she is back to old ways soon enough.

I’m very much with Gail Dines who asserts third wave feminism is about “capitulation.”
Indeed.

The best sentences of the book, then, are those at the end, where Henry leaves open the foresighted if back-glancing possibilities of conflict led by third wavers. Here’s the way she leaves us:

Conflict within feminism, even when posited as generational, should not be avoided. Some of feminism’s current struggles may very well be among women themselves and thus vitally necessary for feminists to examine in more detail. Unlike Roof, then, I do not think the solution to our current generational impasse is to sidestep the problem of generations in order to move on. Rather, we must continue to examine our generational differences and alliances in order to understand their psychological power for feminists.

Where I am in agreement with [Judith] Roof, however, is that the attention on generational differences has dramatically shifted feminism’s focus from external enemies to internal ones. If feminism is indeed like a family, it would be wise of us not to forget its absent father.

While not confined to generational waves, I think there is “bad” feminism. The problem of fathers is key. So here’s a blog post on that (with mention of mothers).

I think there are also other fracture points then the ones you mention, although they’re pretty submerged–I’m a huge critic of “choice feminist” (or as I like to call it, iFeminism), and I still had a lot of irritation and anger with older feminists when I attended a NOW conference in college. In my case, I’d say a lot more of it has to do with tactics, and perhaps a more nuanced view of power/oppression on the part of younger feminists. As an example–I was very, very irritated that roughly 50% of the NOW conference I attended was about abortion. I’m hugely pro-choice, but I think that’s an issue that for a lot of reasons doesn’t necessarily inspire a lot of activism in younger women. The entire session on “reaching younger feminists on campus” was about how to tell these ignorant younger feminists that Roe could be overturned ANY DAY NOW, SERIOUSLY. I mean, clearly the problem was that we just failed to grasp the importance of the issue. As opposed to younger women having an opinion–gained after seeing what 30 years of wrangling with the courts had achieved–that while the legal system was important, it could never substitute for attitude change.

Incidentally, this is was also a point of contention between younger volunteers and older staffers at the domestic violence/sexual assault hotline I worked at–younger women were more likely to talk about the importance of reaching out to men, talking about positive models of consent, and not focusing solely on “lock ‘em up!”. Because while the ability to get relief through the legal system is important, it’s not enough to end domestic violence or sexual assault.