Anybody takes pics they want to share, email jpgs to me or TaMara and we’ll front-page them. I’m guessing BettyC will have some shots of her own to share, too!
Rebecca Traister, in NYMag, on “The Complicated, Controversial, Historic, Inspiring Women’s March“:
…[T]he media’s treatment of the march has been so fretful that you’d be forgiven for thinking that this grass-roots demonstration of hundreds of thousands on behalf of women’s rights is an example of feminism in crisis and disarray.
“From the beginning the only question the media wanted to ask us was whether we had a permit,” said Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American Muslim activist who is one of the four national co-chairs. It was almost funny, the fetishization of the question of whether thousands of angry women literally had permission to show up and protest. Sarsour felt it was indicative of a basic distrust of women as serious activists and organizers. “Logistics became the main focus,” she said. “As if women were not sophisticated enough to know how to obtain permits. I was like, ‘Can someone ask me about my principles and values?’”
The idea that this march is disorganized in some unique or particularly problematic way, Sarsour said, is particularly rich, given that there are about 30 women on the national steering committee, talking to around 400 organizers of marches around the country. “Many of us had never met before this march planning,” she said. “The idea that we were supposed to immediately and seamlessly bring strangers together in a kumbaya march team, when we’re from different backgrounds, have different experiences, religious backgrounds, are from inner cities and suburbs, is crazy. We’re organizing what is going to be the largest mass mobilization any administration has seen on its first day.”…
After the permits were obtained, Sarsour noted, the coverage turned to how contentious the dialogue among organizers and participants was. “As if this contentious dialogue in the women’s movement is by accident,” she laughed. “Contentious dialogue is by design.” To the organizers, the point is pushing hundreds of thousands of marchers to think harder about the connectedness of gender to race, to immigration, to criminal-justice reform and climate policy, to create dialogue among people who could and should be allies on many of these issues, to try to push feminism toward a transformational step…
The way the women’s movement is different from other social movements is in its size and the unwieldy scope of its mission: to represent not an oppressed minority, but a subjugated majority. To campaign on behalf of just over half the population is by definition to build an enterprise on conflicting interests and perspectives and experiences, to try to bind together people who come from divergent backgrounds, who sometimes resent and disagree with each other. And its immensity and diversity is used against it by those who fear its potential power. As Gloria Steinem, who has signed on as an honorary co-chair of the march, told me, “Because it’s a majority movement, it’s subject to the same divide-and-conquer tactics that colonial powers used on countries — turning races, classes, and generations against each other, the myth that women can’t get along and are our own worst enemies.”…
The women’s movement has survived not in spite of its cacophony, but because of it: Because those who have pushed the movement from inside to change and grow and be better — even when they don’t always agree on what better means — have helped us meet the shifting forms of inequity from era to era. The women’s movement has won women’s rights to self-determination, to economic and educational opportunity, to sexual freedom, to reproductive autonomy, to professional opportunity, to legal protection from violence, rape, assault, discrimination, and harassment. And on Saturday, today’s iteration of the women’s movement will give body and voice and form to those who resist this incoming president and his attempts to roll back the rights of women, people of color, and immigrants…
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What’s on the agenda for the day — March-related or otherwise?
Saturday Morning Open Thread: Best Wishes to All Marchers!Post + Comments (201)