**Where Will the Women’s March Go From Here?**
At the end of Inauguration Day in Washington, D.C., people who weren’t dancing at the various balls around the city barely had enough energy left to stay up and watch TV, let alone wonder what the following day’s Women’s March on Washington held in store.
To reach for another Washington, Dinah: What a difference a day makes.
On Saturday, I walked down Lanier Place and saw a group of mostly young people moving down the street. Among them were two children and a dog. They wore pink “pussyhats” (referencing an infamous Trump quote) and they seemed buoyed by energy, holding signs, heading for the march. Somebody said, “Go get ‘em, guys,” and their eyes lit up and they cheered.
Maybe this wouldn’t be just another Saturday march.
It wasn’t. Washington was ground zero for a national and worldwide explosion of woman power that redefined the term and the gender and gave a major thumbs-up to the future.
It quickly became clear that something was afoot, bigger than anyone had imagined. If ever there existed the ingredients for a potentially powerful movement, here they were. Every city in the United States that had the right to call itself a city hosted a women’s march, from New York — in a jam-packed Times Square, not far from Trump Tower — to Austin to Boston to Detroit to Chicago to LA and many smaller places. The signs and the pink went up in, among other international locales: Mexico City, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Berlin and London (in the land of Brexit).
There were an estimated half a million marchers in Washington, and they were crowded in so thickly it seemed the world stood still. This was woman power, to be sure, but there were quite a few men, more children, dogs, workers and middle-class folks and educators and immigrants. It was not just about women’s rights, or abortion rights, but about other rights threatened by the new government and the new President Trump.
Savvy Democrats, who had just lost an election with a woman at the head of the ticket, looked around ruefully and wondered if this could be the basis for a movement of their own. “Let’s Tea Party them,” said Michael Moore, the provocateur and documentarian. Cher was there, and so were Steinem and Fonda and a glowing Alicia Keys singing “Girl on Fire.”
Trump at first ignored the march, then finally tweeted: “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don’t always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”
Trump couldn’t trump the march. There was a determination that perhaps all was not lost, that there was a new campaign to launch.
That’s the real question about the Women’s March. For a change, the real news today isn’t what President Trump is doing as we speak or write. It is what remains in the wake of the sea of pink and where it rolls and goes from here.
**‘PussyHATS’ Flood the Mall for Women’s Rights**
It was a sight both amazing and historic. Early Saturday morning, Jan. 21, the streets and public transportation of downtown Washington, D.C., began to fill with crowds of women of all ages and stages, headed for Capitol Hill. Most wore something pink, often the knitted pink hats with kitten ears that came to be known as “pussyhats.”
By 11 a.m., almost 100,000 rides had been recorded on Metro. By afternoon, hundreds of thousands of laughing, wahoo-ing, chanting women stood in gridlock from Capitol Hill (where the programmed events took place) along Independence Avenue all the way down the National Mall.
They had come for the Women’s March on Washington.
It began as a kind of flashmob idea, posted on Facebook by an appalled Clinton supporter in Hawaii on election night. Going viral on social media, it evolved into a worldwide gathering of decidedly liberal women to rally for what the New York Times called “rights they fear are at risk” — threatened, they believe, by the success of nationalist and protectionist movements like Brexit.
President Donald Trump’s speech on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, a continuation of his populist “America First” campaign rhetoric, only energized their fears.
The “marchers” stood and inched along the packed streets with thousands of male supporters and their children. They chanted and waved handmade signs with pithy political slogans: “Love Trumps Hate,” “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, Human Rights Are Women’s Rights,” “We’re Here For Bodily Integrity,” “We Have Pussy Power And We Will Use It.” “Women Rule” read one carried by a young man who trudged behind his sisters and mom on the way to the Dupont Circle Metro.
More than 50 famous and not so famous women speakers stood in line for the microphone at a hastily erected grandstand on Capitol Hill, where there were chants such as: “We will not go back to the ’50s.” “I am a Golden Oldie,” women’s rights icon Gloria Steinem, now 82 years old, said. “One of the advantages of a long life is I’ve seen when things were worse.” Now, she implied, they can get that way again if women do not actively resist.
Some of the speakers — Madonna, for instance — were loudly defiant, using unladylike language, to say the least. “Too vulgar for children in the crowd,” critics said later, and “too threatening” (the Material Girl announced that she had thought often after Trump’s election about “blowing up his White House”).
But few at the march heard the speeches. It was too crowded.
“The wonderful thing was to be here. To be part of the crowd. To walk and to have participated in the event if just for a few blocks,” a multigenerational group of women from Ohio wearing pussyhats told The Georgetowner. “To give voice to our issues.”
“We’re worried about the future of public schools,” said mother and daughter Norma and Monica Hanna. They had grown up in a middle-class African American community in Montgomery County, with good public schools that led to college educations. “Now we worry that Trump will deprive public schools of funds in favor of selective charter-school alternatives.”
“It’s been a fabulous day,” sighed one of the Ohio family members. “We had reserved flights months ago for Hillary’s inauguration. Then after the election we decided not to cancel but come for this instead. Yesterday [Inauguration Day], we cried and prayed. But today, we laughed and shouted. It’s been very cathartic. Very therapeutic.”
And tomorrow, what happens? she was asked.
“Tomorrow we go home and start organizing,” several family members said together. “It’s time now to stop grieving and start moving.”
