Gabriella Borter, Stephanie Kelly and Allende Miglietta
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Caroline Waterman, a 59-year-old artist from Charlotte, North Carolina, joined her local Women’s March the day after Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration and found a political home, becoming a poll manager and taking charge of canvassing on behalf of local Democrats. .
Waterman said this year that she is so demoralized and ashamed of her fellow white women who voted for Trump that she can’t bring herself to join the planned anti-Trump march this Saturday.
“I feel like we’re constantly complaining, but there’s just nothing we can do,” she said. “I feel hopeless right now and I’m not sure the march is going to fix that.”
On January 21, 2017, millions of American women, angry at the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency, staged the largest one-day protest in US history, flooding Washington with hundreds of thousands of protesters and filling the streets of state capitals across the country.
While the Women’s March is coordinating another protest this Saturday, now called the People’s March, only 25,000 are expected in Washington, down from an estimated 500,000 in 2017. Dozens of cities across the country are also holding protests, but they are expected to be modest.
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem and musicians Madonna and Alicia Keys were among the stars of 2017, but the Washington People’s March has no big headliners. Steinem made the “difficult decision” not to attend because the 90-year-old has cut back on her travels, a rep said.
The stunning defeat of Kamala Harris, the second Democratic woman to challenge Donald Trump in the presidential election and lose, has exhausted liberal women and exposed racial divisions in the women’s rights movement that will take time to heal, more than a dozen activists and organizers said. Reuters.
Despite Trump’s role in restricting abortion rights and the court finding him liable for sexual assault, more white women voted for him in 2024 than in 2016, about 53% compared to 52%. Only 7% of black women voted for Trump.
Rachel Noerdlinger is a senior adviser at Win With Black Women, a group of thousands of black political advisers, fundraisers and strategists who invested money and organized to get Harris elected. She said the women’s movement was fractured: “We have difficult conversations ahead of us and we have to admit that we have common points and differences.”
PLANS OF THE PEOPLE’S MARCH
Organizers are announcing Saturday’s rally as a day of “joyful resistance,” with dozens of groups taking part in promoting causes including climate justice, Palestinian rights, immigrant rights and abortion rights.
“I would like to say that a women’s march, an effectively led march, could completely unite all women in the country. The truth is, it’s just not that simple,” said Rachel Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, who was not involved in organizing the 2017 protest. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to come and happen and replace the down and dirty, getting back to basics, organizing and mobilizing on the ground.”
Women’s March director Tamika Middleton said organizers are trying to use Saturday’s march as a way to recruit community activists for the long haul, focusing on sign-up tables and political skills training, and organizing a call for mass mobilization the week after the march.
Rona Kaufman, 49, a law professor who attended the 2017 Women’s March on Washington with her children, might give us some insight into how difficult it is to recruit some former female marchers. This time, she says, she voted for Trump, although she remains critical of his character, as she prefers Republican policies on Israel and parental rights, among other things. She noted that she also supported Democratic President Bill Clinton on political grounds, despite allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
“The reality is, unfortunately, in the world we live in, sexual abuse and sexual harassment and degradation of women and misogyny and sexism are always prevalent,” Kaufman said. “Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party both have plenty of sexist, misogynist rapists among their leaders. So I voted for policy, not character.”
THE DIVIDED ROOTS OF AMERICAN FEMINISM
Mainstream feminism in the US in particular has never benefited all women equally; The 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was ratified in 1920, but black women were not guaranteed that right until 1965.
In December, a group of activists organized by Rhonda Foxx, who led the Harris campaign’s women’s drive, met at Steinem’s Upper East Side home to try to figure out how liberal women could move forward together.
“The women’s coalition will persevere,” Foxx said, adding that the movement is ready to mobilize and organize in a new political era.
Women should talk to their neighbors and friends about the effects the Trump administration could have on women’s rights, said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits women to run for office. “I want a woman who has 80 followers on Instagram because that’s her family, her friends, her relatives,” Gholar said.
Researching politics at the local level, from talking to neighbors to attending school board meetings and writing to state legislators, may be the best hope for the women’s rights movement to rise above virtue signaling and finger-pointing, activists said.
Several black activists told Reuters they felt betrayed by white women.
“They need to examine why they tend to align themselves with patriarchy, why their allegiance to their race trumps their allegiance to their gender,” said Amara Enyia, interim co-executive director of the Movement for Black Lives Matter.
The era of the fun, symbolic “Women’s March” with its humorous posters and pink “kittens” is over, many activists said. A brief social media trend after the 2024 election of liberal white women wearing blue wristbands to signal that they voted for Harris quickly faded.
“We can’t walk out of systemic oppression with a pink hat and a blue wristband,” said Jordan Williams, a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and creator of black content. “This is not an arts and crafts project.”
