In two days, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President. The day after that, hundreds of thousands of women plan to meet at the Capitol and demonstrate against a new regime that has already, during its transition to power, shown itself to be plutocratic and friendly to various forms of discrimination. Like the idea of a female President, the idea of this protest, called the Women’s March on Washington, seems quite reasonable. And to many it feels welcome, inevitable, even obligatory. But, as with that notion of a female President, the Women’s March on Washington has proved, well before it has actually come to pass, to be a source of persistent and often unexpected conflict. The march has produced fracture as well as inspiration, evincing the same crises of confidence and solidarity that the march aims to resist, if not resolve.
The idea for the march is credited to Teresa Shook, a retired attorney and grandmother of four who lives in Hawaii. The night after the election, she created a Facebook page suggesting a protest. By the time she went to bed, there were forty R.S.V.P.s; when she woke up, there were more than ten thousand. That same night, a fashion designer in Brooklyn named Bob Bland also proposed, on Facebook, a women’s protest. (Bland had accrued a few thousand politically minded Facebook followers during the election, after she created T-shirts that said “Nasty Woman” and sold them to raise money for Planned Parenthood.) She and Shook combined their events; a few other women volunteered as organizers; word spread.
And then came the disputes, sprouting like daisies in Facebook’s horrifically fertile soil. First, there was the question of race. As Bland wrote later, in a sort of statement of purpose on diversity, “The reality is that the women who initially started organizing were almost all white.” Shook had called her event the Million Woman March—a name originally claimed by the enormous protest for black women’s unity and self-determination held in Philadelphia, in 1997. “I will not even consider supporting this until the organizers are intersectional, original and come up with a different name,” one person wrote on the newly planned demonstration’s Facebook page.
So the organizers changed the name to the Women’s March on Washington—a name that still evokes black activism, but deliberately this time. They brought the veteran nonwhite activists Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez into the fold. “These women are not tokens; they are dynamic and powerful leaders who have been organizing intersectional mobilizations for their entire careers,” Bland wrote in that diversity statement, adding that “voices including Asian and Pacific Islanders, Trans Women, Native Americans, disabled women, men, children, and many others, can be centered in the evolving expression of this grassroots movement.” She asked white women participating to “understand their privilege, and acknowledge the struggle that women of color face.”
The response to this was predictably mixed. “Every woman in our culture is a 2nd class citizen period,” one white woman replied. “Whatever your race. You're no better than trump voters with that statement.” “Fuck You is my immediate reaction,” another white woman wrote. At the same time, many women of color retained doubts that the demonstration would be truly inclusive. On Medium, a woman named Rosie Campos, who had volunteered to organize a Pennsylvania chapter, wrote, “What will this organization do when all eyes are on them? Will they continue to tread the well-worn path of white feminism to the exclusion of others?” Campos titled her post “Dear White Women: This is not about us,” and she resigned from her volunteer post, citing concerns about the way the demonstration was being organized.
Meanwhile, other small storms were brewing. The organizers had hoped to begin the march at the Lincoln Memorial, but they hadn’t acquired permits; when the National Park Service reserved that space for Trump’s camp, a post on Daily Kos claimed, somewhat incorrectly, that the Women’s March was being deliberately suppressed. The organizers insisted that the protest was not anti-Trump but, rather, pro-woman, producing a different sort of confusion. And there were, at this point, no official demands. It seemed true, as Christina Cauterucci had written at Slate, in late November, that major, women-centric activist organizations would have been more effective in planning a demonstration than a “random smattering of Facebook-event creators.” On January 2nd, Shikha Dalmia, writing for The Week, proclaimed that the march had “already failed,” arguing that it would be a “feel-good exercise in search of a cause.”
The march’s iconography, meanwhile, has become a tad overdetermined: one poster features three hands of different skin colors holding up (or clutching at) a black fist, out of which emerges a flame—and then, atop the flame, a small, white, bemused-looking bird. On January 5th, the Washington Post Express saddled the Women’s March with a particularly unfortunate cover illustration: a petal-pink background, against which tiny figures formed an enormous gender symbol—the gender symbol for male. “We made a mistake on our cover this morning and we’re very embarrassed,” the Express tweeted. The New York Post ran a dismissive editorial: “The Women’s March on Washington is becoming a joke.”
As if more exhaustion were called for, journalists began arguing on Twitter about the essential perspective of men. The Women’s March invites “all defenders of human rights” to attend, according to its mission statement, but men have been slow to organize their own support—a Washington Post piece asked if the event was “unmasculine.” (A lot of things in this world are “unmasculine,” of course, including, for instance, the experience of being pregnant, possibly against one’s will.) After a series of tweets questioning the “branding” of the event as “a march for women,” the New York magazine political writer Jonathan Chait affirmed his dissatisfaction by declaring, “For men misinformed by its poorly-chosen name, the Women's March is for ALL anti-Trump Americans. Please attend!”
It seems likely to me that many women have taken this march as a rare opportunity to devote no thought whatsoever to what men might, or might not, decide to do. It’s also interesting to see a relative lack of male enthusiasm interpreted as a problem that falls on women. Women have spent centuries being coerced and socialized into showing support for “men’s issues”—thus, directly to our detriment, the election of soon-to-be-President Trump.
And there’s been a strong hint of gendered Schadenfreude in the coverage of the march’s organizational problems—as if a group of girlfriends who had failed to elect a female President were trying to organize the most anti-fascist bachelorette party in the world. This has obscured the fact that activism is internally contentious by nature. Organization is always tedious, and that’s just fine. What’s more, the Women’s March has provided a case study in the unlimited potential for critical exhaustion provided by the Internet. It is unfortunate that Facebook is both the best place to reach people and the worst place to conduct political discussion. Imagine any major protest in the twentieth century promoted via Facebook; there would have been no shortage of “infighting” enshrined on social media for everyone to see.
At a base level, though, one gets the sense that all the questions that dogged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are being relitigated—inevitably, if regrettably, through an event that has given so many women a glimmer of hope. There is so much overriding confusion about any woman-forward phenomenon. Depending on whom you ask, the conflict over the march either proves its necessity or does the opposite. Perhaps we don’t need a women’s march, or a woman as President—or perhaps we need those things so badly that we can’t even decide which women should get what first. The significant portion of white women who voted for Trump have sown doubts about the possibility of a true coalition. There is a reasonable suspicion that the alliances, rights, and prospects that women have hoped for and counted on are blown away far too easily—by men, by our own divisions, by conflict and contempt.
But this is precisely why the Women’s March feels vital. Of course it’s difficult to pull together an enormous group of women who may have nothing in common other than the conviction that a country led by Trump endangers their own freedoms and the freedoms of those they love. That conviction is nonetheless the beginning of the resistance that those planning to attend the march hope to constitute. The march has lately taken firmer positions: the organizers have booted a pro-life group from their list of partners, and released a firmly progressive three-page policy statement that advocates for reproductive freedom and economic justice for women, as well as immigration reform, police accountability, and union rights for all. Conflict, unsurprisingly, continues to intrude, even with the demonstration looming: on Tuesday, the Women's March edited a statement of support for sex workers’ rights out of, and then back into, its platform. Still, at a time of emotional paralysis and civic dissolution, the reminder that radical change is even possible is reason enough to bring people to their feet. As the poet Eduardo Galeano wrote, utopia is illusory: “No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her.” But the idea of a future marked by equality and respect will make hundreds of thousands walk.
