Last night, 200 people, mostly women, settled in at the 92nd Street Y for a panel discussion with five female writers—
Patricia Bosworth, Judith Warner, Joanna Smith Rakoff, Emily Gould and moderator Sheila Weller—each of whom came of age during a different era.

The panel opened with each woman’s take on her generation’s female culture. Bosworth, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, transported us to the ’50s (“Sex was hidden. I knew nothing about sex”); Weller, author of Girls Like Us, the ’60s–’70s (“The most, most humiliating thing a girl could be called in those days was uptight”); Warner, author of Perfect Madness, the ’70s–’80s (mothers’ obsession with purity was “a carryover of the body-control obsessions that had been so prevalent in us”); Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age, the ’90s (“We came to distrust The Man—capital T, capital M”); and Gould, former coeditor of Gawker, the aughts (“Our identities are fragmented and inconsistent and full of contradictions”). These soundbites gave way to a discussion among the women, then to a Q&A. But the event ended with an unsettling vibe, as an audience member took issue with Weller’s earlier claim that “feminism is launched.” Maybe it is for the upper-middle-class, white, American audience, she pointed out, but for much of the world, the battle has hardly begun.—Jessica Gross