Hours
before the start of the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, every
Metro car leading to the National Mall was packed so tight that it could
take on no more riders. At station after station, the train doors would
open, and the passengers would look out on throngs of fellow protesters
— women, men, children, babies, the occasional dog — waiting on the
platform. As people emerged from underground into the morning air, it
was hard to tell where to go, so they found their way by gauging the
human density, moving until they reached a spot so full of people that
they could no longer move at all. There was an enormous rally happening
somewhere in there — activists and celebrities speaking into microphones
— but much of the crowd couldn’t see or hear anything except rumbling
waves of cheers. By the time they were meant to march, the crowd was so
large that it already stretched across the entire route, from the rally
site near the Capitol to the Ellipse near the White House.
The
signs they carried spoke to any number of issues: immigration,
abortion, race, the environment, inequality, the new president. REFUGEES
WELCOME, KEEP YOUR LAWS OUT OF MY VAGINA, BLACK LIVES MATTER, SCIENCE
IS REAL, FLINT NEEDS CLEAN WATER, NOBODY LIKES YOU. The handmade pink
“pussyhats” that many marchers wore — a reference to Donald Trump’s
caught-on-tape boasts about grabbing unsuspecting women by the genitals —
had been sneered at in the days before the march. They were called
corny, girlie, a waste of time. Seen from above, though, on thousands of
marchers, their wave of color created a powerful image.
It
was, somewhat unexpectedly, one of the largest mass demonstrations in
American history. Millions of protesters — estimates range from three to
five million — took to the streets of Washington, Los Angeles, New
York, Palm Beach, Fla., Boise, Idaho, even Fargo, N.D. Sister
demonstrations were held in Thailand, in Malawi, in Antarctica. The
energy of almost every group alarmed or incensed by Trump’s election
seemed to have poured into a single demonstration. That it happened on
the day after his inauguration was not surprising. What was striking was
that all these people had come together under the auspices of a march
for women.
Just
two months earlier, the left did not appear to be a unified front. The
polls had barely closed before the infighting began. Some blamed Hillary
Clinton for ignoring Wisconsin, or the Democratic National Committee
for boxing other candidates out of the primary field. Some blamed
identity politics, which made working-class white voters “feel
excluded,” according to Prof. Mark Lilla of Columbia. Others blamed
white people, particularly the coastal ones who couldn’t get their
heartland relatives on their side.
But
a crew of bummed-out, angry women was still aiming its ire at Trump. In
the hours after his victory on Nov. 8, Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer
in Hawaii, posted to Facebook, suggesting a march on Washington. Some
women on the East Coast had the same idea. At first, these suggestions
were so impulsive that they seemed almost metaphorical. But within days,
tens of thousands of women had pledged to join in. Over the course of
two months, the idea became something far bigger than initially
imagined. Eventually, an entire organizing team would have permits,
T-shirts, fleets of buses, portable toilets, celebrity sponsors and
support from Gloria Steinem. Men meekly asked their female family
members and Twitter followers: “Are we allowed to join?” By the middle
of January, with the event shaping up to be the anti-Trump
demonstration, the New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait worried that
“Women’s March” was too niche an organizing principle — it was a “bad
name,” he tweeted, a divisive “brand.”
Continue reading the main story
The
opposite turned out to be true: Women led the resistance, and everyone
followed. A march for women managed to crowd a broad opposition force
onto its platform. In the weeks since the march, that energy has only
spread. After Trump’s executive order halting travel from seven
Muslim-majority countries, the march’s striking proof of concept — hit
the streets, and a surprising number of others will join you — fueled
more spontaneous actions in unexpected places: outside courthouses,
Trump hotels, airport terminals, the offices of Senator Mitch McConnell.
At each protest, you were likely to see a few pink cat ears poking out
of the crowd, a reminder of the opposition’s first gathering. It seems
unlikely that any other kind of march would have turned out quite this
way. In this moment, it happened that “women” was the one tent large
enough to contain almost every major strain of protest against Trump.
Those
who know their feminist history might see a paradox here. The women’s
movement has not always been a site for unity. It has been marked just
as deeply by its fractures, failures and tensions. But more than a
century of internal turmoil has also forced the movement to reckon with
its divisions. Now, the question is whether it can bring even more
Americans into the fold.
Clinton’s loss on Nov. 8
was a pivotal, identity-shifting moment in the course of the American
women’s movement. In an evening, the would-be first female president was
shoved to the side by what a sizable chunk of the nation saw as that
classic historical figure: the male chauvinist pig. In parts of the
popular imagination, it wasn’t just a loss for Clinton or for the
Democratic Party. It was a repudiation of feminism itself.
But
Clinton has always been a wary avatar of feminism. In 2008, she didn’t
run for president as a “women’s candidate”; if anything, she campaigned
with her sex in the closet and the strategist Mark Penn advising her to
harden her image into an American Iron Lady. “They do not want someone
who would be the first mama,” he wrote in one memo. Years later, HBO’s
“Veep” would satirize that posture through its own fictional politician.
“I can’t identify myself as a woman!” she tells her staff. “People
can’t know that. Men hate that. And women who hate women hate that,
which I believe is most women.”
In
the eight years between Clinton’s first and second presidential
campaigns, though, something shifted: Feminism became fashionable. By
the start of the Obama era, incisive women’s blogs like Jezebel and
Feministing had already hit the web and started throwing popcorn at the
big screen of American culture, covering the same topics that women’s
magazines did — fashion, movies, sex — but taking on the women’s
magazines too. By Obama’s second term, this model had thrived and
multiplied so many times over that even a co-founder of the sports
website Bleacher Report started his own women’s site, Bustle. Soon
enough, no corner of culture was safe from a feminist critique, from
Christmas songs to “manspreading.” Pop stars — people like Lady Gaga,
Katy Perry and Taylor Swift — were asked if they were feminists, and if
they shied away from the label, outrage would greet them online.
Feminism
became increasingly popular, but in a very specific way — one attuned
to the concerns of people with office jobs and time to spend online. The
feminist priorities of this new media landscape tended to involve
topics that middle-class women would experience firsthand: reproductive
rights, catcalling, campus rape, professional opportunity, pop-culture
representation. The writers setting its tone tended to be young women
who were asked to produce large amounts of clickable copy, for not much
money, in very little time, exploring feminist issues not through
time-intensive reporting but through “takes” on the women already making
news: the work-life balance of Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer;
the pay gap between Jennifer Lawrence and her male co-stars. Some
content chased sexist slights down to the most passing personal
concerns, like an item from The Huffington Post that sighed: “There is no proper way for a woman to cut her hair, let alone do anything right in this world.”
It’s
not that women’s activist groups vanished or political organizing
stalled. But it did become possible for an American woman to cultivate a
relationship to feminism that was primarily consumerist: There were
feminist TV shows to watch, feminist celebrities to follow, feminist
clothes to buy. Unlike many other major social movements, women’s
liberation dovetails neatly with an important advertising demographic, a
lesson capitalism absorbed more than a century ago. In 1908, the
advertiser J.Walter Thompson hired suffragists to address the growing
women’s market. Over the next decades, the industry would slip women’s
rights messaging into ad copy. Old Dutch Cleanser offered “freedom from
household drudgery”; Shredded Wheat promised a “declaration of
independence” from cooking. These days, even our bath products have
achieved empowerment. Ads for Secret deodorant nudge us to ask for a
raise, and those for Always prompt us to challenge stereotypes about
girls. Dove wants us to feel beautiful at any size.
It’s
telling which strand of feminism these brands have deemed marketable:
the one that doubles as self-help. This is a vision of feminism in which
the primary thing that needs to change is a woman’s frame of mind.
Something similar happened to the pop stars who once hesitated to call
themselves feminists — they came around to feminism by redefining
feminism around themselves. To Lady Gaga, feminism was about protecting
“the integrity of women who are ambitious.” Taylor Swift realized, she
said, that she had “been taking a feminist stance without actually
saying so.” Feminism was being defined down to its most benign
interpretation. It was less a political platform than a brand identity.
In
2013, “Lean In,” by Sheryl Sandberg, raised this pop-cultural subtext
to the level of text. Sandberg called the book “sort of a feminist
manifesto,” but it preached individual solutions to systemic problems,
encouraging women to focus on “internal obstacles” and “dismantle the
hurdles in ourselves.” This feminist mode, where personal success
becomes synonymous with social progress, can be plugged into any number
of political orientations. The latest model for the corporate-celebrity
feminist brand is Ivanka Trump, who has built a lifestyle company under
the hashtag #WomenWhoWork. A recent pitch neatly weds activist language
with shoppable solutions: “We’re committed to solving problems. If we
can’t find a solution, we’ll make it ourselves (case in point: the Soho
Tote, the ultimate work bag).”
By
the time the 2016 campaign rolled around, Clinton wasn’t just permitted
to run as a feminist — she was practically obligated to. Her messaging
shifted accordingly. Years of women’s debating the right way to be a
feminist had the side effect of forcing the first female major-party
candidate to the left. In 2008, she argued that she wanted abortion to
be “safe, legal and rare — and by rare I mean rare.” In last year’s
debates, she stopped qualifying her support. “I will defend Planned
Parenthood,” she said in one. “I will defend Roe v. Wade, and I will
defend women’s rights to make their own health care decisions.”
Meanwhile,
her campaign mimicked the aesthetics of the pop-cultural feminist mode.
The candidate affirmed her feminism in a video interview with Lena
Dunham, posed in a Kim Kardashian selfie and made a cameo on “Broad
City.” Her campaign posted a BuzzFeed-style listicle informing Latinos
that Clinton was “just like your abuela.” (With the Twitter
hashtag #NotMyAbuela, those voters begged to differ.) Her site sold
embroidered pillows that said “A Woman’s Place Is in the White House”
and a T-shirt with a big “YAAAS, HILLARY!” printed over her senior
portrait from high school. After Trump accused her of playing “the
woman’s card,” her campaign introduced a free hot-pink “Official Hillary
for America Woman Card” that drove more than $2 million in donations
within days. One young woman earnestly prodded her at an Iowa campaign
event: “If you could choose, would you rather be the president or
Beyoncé?”
Pop
feminism, having been washed of its political urgency, was now being
integrated back into politics at the highest level. The candidate who
once shrank from feminism was positioning herself as an icon of the
movement. Her image became closely aligned with two metaphors — the
pantsuit and the glass ceiling — that speak to a particular kind of
woman: a corporate careerist at the top of her field. A “secret”
Facebook group, Pantsuit Nation,
popped up to encourage Clinton supporters to wear pantsuits to the
polls. When she clinched the Democratic nomination for president last
June — the one she would formally accept the following month, dressed in
suffragist white — Clinton called back to the Seneca Falls convention
of 1848, where “a small but determined group of women, and men, came
together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.” The feminist
project started there, she implied — and she was going to finish it.
When
Clinton lost, pop feminism suffered a crisis. As everyone pored over
exit polls, some of the long-simmering fractures between different
groups of women exploded into view. Ninety-four percent of black women
voted for Clinton, but 53 percent of white women voted for Trump,
perhaps more likely to see themselves in his vision of the world than in
the pop feminism that fed Clinton’s campaign. Despite Trump’s palpable,
eminently bloggable disrespect for women — and that infamous tape — he
had successfully courted a faction of female voters. His win suggested
that Americans were more comfortable with misogyny than many had
thought, but it also burst the bubble of cheery pop feminism, which had
achieved its huge popularity at the expense of class consciousness and
racial solidarity.
In
some places, you could watch the mood turn in a matter of days. The
Pantsuit Nation Facebook group ceased its celebrations and became a site
for sharing stories of pain and resilience. But when the group’s
founder, a Maine educator named Libby Chamberlain, announced a plan to
channel the power of the group in real life, it wasn’t exactly a call to
activism — it was a coffee-table book. “You are a force, Pantsuit
Nation,” she wrote. “Let’s see if we can harness that force within the
pages of a book and see it on night stands and coffee tables all around
the world.” The idea brought on a revolt. “The N.R.A. with its five
million members has a stranglehold on Congress,” one commenter wrote.
“Pantsuit Nation has four million members and decides its main mission
is ‘storytelling’ and now, selling books. What a colossal waste.”
But
for some outside observers, this was a productive comeuppance. Rhon
Manigault-Bryant, an associate professor of Africana studies at Williams
College in Massachusetts, published “An Open Letter to White Liberal
Feminists,” on the website Black Perspectives,
expressing her disappointment that it had taken Donald Trump to shake
them into her reality. “I am delighted that you have received the
potential awakening of a lifetime, and that now you might actually get
what so many of us have been describing all along,” she wrote. “Welcome
to that deep perpetual angst. Embrace it, and allow it to motivate you
to a deeper form of action.”
In those same
November weeks, the nascent march-on-Washington project was navigating
its own identity crisis. Some of the early organizers had
romantic-comedy-type jobs — pastry chef, yoga instructor. One of the
women, Bob Bland, a fashion designer, had amassed a small online
following by designing “NASTY WOMAN” and “BAD HOMBRE” T-shirts and
selling them online. “I had this whole network of ‘nasty women’ and ‘bad
hombres,’ ” she told me. “After the election, they were looking to me
like, ‘What are we going to do next?’ ”
Disparate
organizers convened around a Facebook event announcing a Million Women
March. There was one major problem with this: In 1997, activists
organized a Million Woman March in Philadelphia to address the
particular concerns of black women. When this new march on Washington
unwittingly chose a very similar name, it crystallized the idea that the
nascent movement was being run by a handful of white women with no
organizing history. Comments began pouring in from all sides.
The
organizers had stumbled into a conflict that has dogged women’s
organizing from the very beginning: Of all the tensions that have
coursed through the women’s movement, none has ever been quite so
pronounced as the one between white and black women. Consider what
happened when Sojourner Truth showed up at a women’s rights convention
in Ohio in 1851. Frances Gage, the woman running the show, recalled the
scene 12 years later: “The leaders of the movement trembled on seeing a
tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted
with an uncouth sunbonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with
the air of a queen up the aisle and take her seat upon the pulpit
steps.” A “buzz of disapprobation” spread through the church. White
women in attendance complained that a black woman’s testimony would
distract from the convention’s focus. “Don’t let her speak, Mrs. Gage —
it will ruin us,” one said. “Every newspaper in the land will have our
cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly
denounced.”
Throughout
the convention, men arrived to speak out against women’s suffrage.
Women, they said, were too weak and helpless to be trusted with the
power of the vote. Because “there were very few women in those days who
dared to ‘speak in meeting,’ ” as Gage put it, their points went
unchallenged until Truth stepped forward. White women hissed, but
Truth’s very identity nullified the arguments coming from both men and
women in attendance. “That man over there says that women need to be
helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best
place everywhere,” she said. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or
over mud puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look
at me! Look at my arm!” She rolled up her sleeve to the shoulder. “I
have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head
me. And ain’t I a woman?”
In
that moment, Truth shattered an idea of white femininity that had been
used to both underpin and undermine the cause of suffrage. As a slave,
she had worked in the fields like a man; as a free black woman, she
could not rely on the offerings of white male gentility. Gage wrote that
Truth’s testimony compelled the white women in attendance to embrace
her “with streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude.”
But
two years later, Truth still drew jeers from white crowds when she
attended women’s meetings. A vision of whiteness was ingrained in the
leaders and the arguments of the mainstream movement. Even the
suffragists’ signature white clothes were deliberately chosen to signal
purity. This ideal of feminine virtue did not extend to black women, or
working-class ones. Some suffragists made their racism and classism
explicit. In 1894, a white woman at a meeting of the Brooklyn Woman
Suffrage Association complained that New York had become an “asylum for
the trash of all nations,” arguing that women’s suffrage ought to be
restricted. “Think what it means to give it to all women,” she said.
“Our criminal and pauper men have wives; there are thousands of female
operatives in tobacco factories and similar fields of labor; there are
probably two million Negro women in this country who are but little
uplifted above the plane of animals.”
One
curious point of this history is that so many suffragists came from the
antislavery movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
whose partnership would come to define the suffrage movement in the
United States, started their activist careers as abolitionists. But
after the Civil War, as black men and all women agitated for the right
to vote, a political battle broke out over who would be enfranchised
first. (Either way, black women would be last.) In 1865, Stanton
lamented having to “stand aside to see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom
first,” as she put it in The National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Over
time, these racial contours would harden into lasting institutions.
When women’s social clubs spread across the United States at the turn of
the century, two models emerged. Whites-only clubs leveraged
middle-class women’s leisure time to campaign for social reforms. Black
women, who largely worked outside the home, came together around urgent
needs. One of the first actions of the black Chicago Women’s Club was to
raise money to prosecute a police officer who killed a black man. The
main distinction between clubs, the black activist Fannie Barrier
Williams wrote, was that for black women, “it is not a fad.”
Black
women distinguished themselves not only as suffragists but also as
vocal critics of a movement that pushed one kind of justice aside in
pursuit of another. In 1913, when thousands of suffragists marched on
Washington to agitate for the vote, black women were instructed to march
in the back. Ida B. Wells defied the order and marched with the
delegation from Illinois, her home state. She wasn’t just protesting for
her right to vote. She was protesting the protest too.
This
dynamic is not only a thing of distant history: In the thick of
feminism’s second wave, women were often still divided along lines of
identity. In 1967, as the best-selling author Betty Friedan called the
first meeting of the New York chapter of the National Organization for
Women, she found herself at odds with a black activist and lawyer named
Flo Kennedy, who pushed the women around her to make common cause with
the antiwar and Black Power movements. Friedan and the meeting’s host —
Muriel Fox, the highest-ranking female executive at the world’s largest
public-relations agency — were not pleased. As Kennedy put it in her
memoirs, they “went bonkers.”
Friedan’s
1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique,” had been an awakening for a class
of white, married, middle-class women, and she pictured herself as the
leader of what she called a “mainstream” feminist movement. When women
at one 1970 march offered her a lavender armband to wear in solidarity
with a NOW member recently attacked for her bisexuality, Friedan dropped
it on the ground, furious at the attempt to add gay rights to her
program.
Kennedy
continually pushed in the opposite direction, trying to build bridges
between feminist groups and other movements. At one point, Friedan
admonished her to leave the feminist movement alone and “focus her
attention on matters of Black Power.” As the second wave matured, black
women found themselves continually calling on it to consider a new
approach, one that acknowledged the different needs of different women.
As the black feminist and leftist Barbara Smith told the National
Women’s Studies Association in 1979, any feminism that didn’t account
for the specific concerns of black women, poor women, disabled women,
lesbians and others was not really feminism — it was “merely female
self-aggrandizement.”
There has never
been one women’s movement. It’s difficult, for example, to say that the
American feminist project started in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848,
because black women were not invited to that convention. It’s hard to
say that electing a woman as president would have been feminism’s
crowning achievement, because the success of one woman does not
naturally trickle down to all. The history of the women’s movement is
one of warring factions and sharp self-criticism. But its 150 years of
navigating internal disputes put it in a position to lead what seemed,
at the end of last fall, like a highly divided left.
“It’s
embarrassing to me now to say it, but I didn’t know the term
‘intersectionality’ when we started,” Bob Bland, the Women’s March
co-chairwoman, told me. Now she deployed it often to emphasize the
growing diversity of the march. She told various reporters that she had
met women working “in so many different intersectionalities” and hoped
to reach a “a wide intersectionality of people” in a march that
reflected “all of the different intersections of human rights.”
That
magic word comes from a 1989 paper by the legal scholar Kimberlé
Crenshaw that was published in The University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Crenshaw had studied cases in which black women sued their employers for
what appeared to be “compound discrimination” — both racial and gender
biases. But they were often told they lacked legal standing: Laws
protected them from discrimination as African-Americans or as women, but
not specifically as black women. Crenshaw used a traffic metaphor to
describe the interlocking forms of oppression a person might face. Cars
flowed through an intersection in all directions; when an accident
happened, it could be caused by cars from any number of sides, or even
all sides.
That
metaphor would be plucked from Crenshaw’s paper and grow in resonance
over the next two decades, until “intersectionality” became a rallying
cry — the main point of rhetorical resistance against the tide of
single-issue feminist conversation. Even beneath the shiny surface of
Obama-era pop feminism, dissenters took countless shots at its racial
cluelessness, its lack of class-consciousness, its sometimes shallow
concerns. Women of color convened on Twitter under hashtags like
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen to detail their experiences of being
sidelined in feminist conversations, and many on the left criticized the
way a trickle-down, professional-oriented feminism was becoming popular
just as income inequality between women was ballooning. (It’s hard to
“lean in” to a job cleaning hotel rooms.) In recent years,
intersectionality even popped up in People.com, on Bustle and in a tweet
from Clinton.
Often
the criticism that lies behind this word is brushed off, met with
defensiveness, taken personally. (As the founder of Pantsuit Nation
wrote to critics of her book deal: “This is not the place for
divisiveness.”) Women turn to feminism because they want to stand up and
say something; it can be jarring for them be told to sit down and
listen to someone else. But the concept became a useful tool for the
march on Washington, which set about the task of uniting feminism’s
mainstream, popular arm and its dissenting factions — all in the space
of two months.
Soon
after the suggestion to march raced across the web, Vanessa Wruble — a
white producer and co-founder of the media company OkayAfrica — made a
pivotal intervention in its planning. “I thought the stakes were so
high,” she told me. “It needed to be an inclusive movement, or it was
going to be a total disaster. I felt that it could damage the country.”
At this critical moment, with the march quickly ballooning into
something bigger than the initial organizers could handle on their own,
Wruble reached out and urged them to drop the name Million Women March.
Then she linked them up with her network, and soon three seasoned
activists — Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory — got on
board. These women hadn’t necessarily supported Clinton, and they didn’t
necessarily identify as feminists. But they had experience organizing
in communities of color and saw the march as an opportunity to reach a
large new audience. When Sarsour got the call, she had just posted a
comment on the march’s Facebook page: “Can you include Muslim women and
Muslim communities in the list?”
The
three women — one Chicana Latina, one Palestinian-American, one black —
met through their involvement in Justice League NYC, a juvenile-justice
initiative. In 2015, they organized a nine-day march from New York to
Washington, ending in a rally at the Capitol that drew a small crowd.
Now hundreds of thousands of women whose previous interest in justice
may have been abstract at best were turning to them for leadership. The
question, Perez told me, was “How do we get them to understand that
their liberation is bound with ours?”
Meanwhile,
the three had some catching up to do with the mainstream feminist
perspective. “I don’t have a lot of what I would consider to be deep,
transformative relationships with white women,” Sarsour told me. “I’ve
been learning a lot,” she said, and working toward becoming “more
comfortable around this movement of feminism that I always felt didn’t
particularly include Muslim women.” The organizers appeared on the
hip-hop radio morning show “The Breakfast Club” and loaded their
Instagram page with black feminist heroes. But they also posed for
windswept photos in Vogue, and some dropped by the Wing, a private
Manhattan women’s club with a $2,250 annual membership fee. Their rally
put Angela Davis on the same stage as Scarlett Johansson.
When
I called Kimberlé Crenshaw in January, she had just returned home to
Los Angeles from the march on Washington, where she walked with a group
of women from the African American Policy Forum. Her group was so far
back in the crowd that they couldn’t hear the rally, and “I’m kind of
glad about it,” she told me. “We were in this sea of humanity.” Wading
through the crowd, she said, “I saw all the different issues and people
that had found their way under the banner of the Women’s March. It was
the embodiment of the intersectional sensibilities that a lot of us have
been working on for a very long time.”
The
women’s movement’s tendency toward a singular perspective is “not an
exceptional problem for feminism,” Crenshaw told me. “Patriarchy works
in such a way that these critiques never even surface in a lot of
movements led by men. This conversation isn’t always happening in other
spaces. And if the conversation leads to more robust ways of thinking
about women, feminism and social justice, it can be a very good thing.”
“The
million-dollar question is: Can these feminisms live together under an
anti-Trump banner?” Crenshaw said. “It happened for 24 hours all across
the world.”
When I made
my way back to my hotel after the march, the cheers of the crowd fading
into the distance, I opened my laptop and saw a different version of
what I had just seen in person. Now it was all filtered through my own
social-media bubble — that of a middle-class white woman who lives in
Brooklyn. Facebook’s trending topics, tailored to fulfill each user’s
particular online habits, served me up a pop-celebrity version of the
day’s events. It pointed me toward the speeches of Scarlett Johansson
and Madonna, and nobody else. As scenes of the march traveled through
the media and across the web, the story spun out in even more
directions. Twitter lit up with notes of internal dissent and snapshots
of signs from the march: DON’T FORGET: WHITE WOMEN VOTED FOR TRUMP and
BLACK WOMEN TRIED TO SAVE Y’ALL and I’LL SEE YOU NICE WHITE LADIES AT
THE NEXT #BLACKLIVESMATTER MARCH, RIGHT?
But
for the moment, at least, Trump appears to be the great uniter. In the
days and weeks since the march, its energy spilled into spontaneous
actions across the country, with protesters coming together on behalf of
Muslims and immigrants. Donations poured into Planned Parenthood and
the American Civil Liberties Union. Congressional switchboards were
inundated with calls. When The Washington Post polled Americans
post-march, it registered a huge shift in energy among Democrats,
especially Democratic women, 40 percent of whom said they planned to get
more involved in activism.
But
liberals are not the only ones drawing inspiration from the protests.
Flip to Fox News, click around conservative blogs or browse pro-Trump
Twitter, and you can watch the demonstrations fuel a different kind of
opposition narrative. After the march, Fox News set clips of rally
speeches to foreboding music. Breitbart published photos with the
headline “See what a massive, Hillary shaped bullet America just
dodged?” The right-wing Media Research Center aggregated the most “vile
and ridiculous signs.” Twitter exploded with anti-Muslim attacks on
Linda Sarsour, who was called a “terrorist” who “loves ISIS.” When the
annual March for Life hit the Mall to demonstrate against abortion
rights, The Blaze called it “the real women’s march.” (The Women’s March
did, at one point, remove the name of an anti-abortion group from its
list of partners, after an uproar.) According to Public Policy Polling,
48 percent of Trump voters think the protesters who convened at
airports to protest the travel ban were paid by George Soros. Trump
tweeted recently: “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters
are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE
AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
In
the first weeks of the Trump administration, the factions that split
over his election are deepening along the same lines. Each side seems
oddly confident in its political position. Trump supporters call
themselves “the silent majority,” while his critics identify as the
“popular vote.” When I called Eleanor Smeal, a co-founder of the
Feminist Majority Foundation, and asked her whether the organization had
any plans to reach out to the 53 percent of white women who voted for
Trump, her response was to question the margin of error in the polls.
“We don’t really know if we lost the majority or not, and I believe that
we did not,” she told me. “I think they’re with us.”
For
now, the factions of the left seem to have found an accord. But to
regain any power in Washington, they will need to sway the center too —
including some of those women who voted for Trump. The white women of
the left, many of whom are just now finding their footing as activists,
have been eager to dissociate from that group. Mention the 53 percent,
and they’re quick to tell you that they’re of the 47. But of all the
people who marched on Washington last month, they may be among the best
positioned to reach across that aisle. “I know of no other time when it
would be more important,” Barbara Smith, the black feminist and leftist,
told me. “That’s not my work to do, but somebody ought to do it.”
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