The Women’s Resource Center has scheduled nationally recognized feminist and best selling author Rebecca Walker for its fourth annual lecture in Third Wave, Emerging and International Feminisms.

Like her parents, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, Rebecca Walker has spent most of her life working for social change. Upon her graduation from Yale in 1992, she became co-founder of the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation – a national nonprofit organization that initiated an historic emergency youth drive, which registered over 20,000 new voters in inner cities across the United States.

From her organization, the idea of third wave feminism emerged. According to Susanne Dietzel, director of the women’s resource center, the idea of third wave feminism came about as a result of Walker and her peers feeling alienated that they didn’t necessarily have a place among earlier generations of second wave feminism.

“Third wave feminism deals with different issues affecting younger women, like body image, globalization and getting men involved in the movement,” Dietzel said.

Like her mother, Walker is also an accomplished writer. Among Walker’s body of work is the Paz y Justicia Award-winning bestseller “Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self” and two anthologies, 1995’s “To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism” and 2004’s “What Makes A Man: Twenty-Two Writers Imagine the Future.”

According to Dietzel, Walker’s lecture will focus mostly with third wave feminism and how it resonates with social justice as well as “What Makes A Man,” which discusses the defining traits of masculinity.

The Walker lecture has been in planning stages for quite some time now.

“We’ve been planning this for about a year,” Dietzel said, “but she’s been high on our list for years.”

The event will be held on Thursday, April 7 at 7 p.m. in Roussel Hall in the Communications/Music Complex. Admission is free to the public. -Chuck Alexander