Did the ‘90s Kill Feminism?
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Despite everyone’s nostalgic feelings for the ‘90’s, it was undoubtedly a complicated time for women.
Feminism was alive and well at the start of the decade, but author Sophie Gilbert explains how the movement’s energy collapsed into a problematic media storm that still lingers today.
She chronicles the decline through the ‘90s pop culture that shaped women from the Riot Grrrl movement, to the Spice Girls, and beyond in her book 'Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.’
“At the beginning of the '90s, third wave feminism was very much alive. Anita Hill was testifying in Congress, it was the ‘Year of the Woman.’ You had Riot Grrrl, you had all this energy and this momentum behind trying to make things better for women,” Sophie explains. “And then over the course of the decade, it just kind of flatlined.”
Sophie talks to Sam about her book, how feminism is more fractured than ever, and how the extreme caricatures of women we see today aren’t that different from the tropes of women in the ‘90s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey y'all, Sam here. |
| 0:07.3 | Thank you so much for checking out my show with KCRW. |
| 0:11.1 | So last week, I saw something online that made my elder millennial heart flutter. |
| 0:17.5 | Victoria Beckham, the artist formerly known as Posh Spice, she released a throwback 90s early 2000s playlist that she made with the Gap. |
| 0:28.6 | She also launched a collection with The Gap, but I am more concerned with the playlist because the playlist sounded like this. |
| 0:52.6 | It was this perfect trifecta of nostalgia, a spice girl, vintage hip hop and R&B, and the Gap, |
| 0:55.9 | which is perhaps more 90s than the 90s themselves. |
| 1:04.2 | All of this is part of this big wave of 90s nostalgia that we're all living through right now, |
| 1:06.7 | a way that I have referenced on this show before. |
| 1:11.8 | My guest, this episode, her take on the 90s and our nostalgia for it, |
| 1:15.2 | is a lot less happy-go-lucky than that Gap playlist. |
| 1:20.8 | Sophie Gilbert argues that the 90s was a decade in which feminism changed for the worst. |
| 1:28.1 | And she says a lot of that change can be traced through the rise of Victoria Beckham and the Spice Girls. |
| 1:32.4 | Sophie Gilbert just released the paperback edition of her book, |
| 1:37.5 | Girl on Girl, how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves. |
| 1:42.6 | And she says to understand how that decade changed the way that we all see women, |
| 1:45.8 | you have to start with the Sp spice girls and the phrase girl power. |
| 1:51.4 | When I set out to write this book, I knew it was going to focus on the 2000s and I didn't |
| 1:56.7 | initially intend to think about the 90s, but there was so much that happened in the 90s |
| 2:01.3 | that was so crucial to what exactly happened in the 2000s that I had to go back and do this |
| 2:05.6 | whole other chapter because there were all these shifts that were taking place. |
| 2:09.0 | And I think a lot of the nostalgia is for the fact that this was really the last offline |
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