Women's March Washington DC. Photo by Elly Clarke and taken from Flickr under CC License BY-NC 2.0.
The Women’s March on Washington brought together more than half a million women and allies to the United States capital on Jan. 21 in defense of women’s rights and in response to Donald Trump's inauguration as U.S. president. The movement inspired hundreds of “sister marches” all over the world, including one in Los Angeles that attracted at least 650,000 people.
The march’s unifying principles included ending violence and supporting reproductive rights, the rights of workers, people with disabilities, and sexual and gender minorities, civil rights, freedom of religion, immigration, and environmental justice. Its message was meant to challenge a presidential election marked by racism, Islamophobia, and sexism, as well as other hateful rhetoric.
Almost as soon as Trump won the U.S. Electoral College, the idea for the Women's March started taking shape. On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the election, a woman named Teresa Shook created a Facebook event and invited people to march on Washington to protest Trump’s election. Other women created similar events, gradually deciding to consolidate their efforts for the Women’s March on Washington.
Eventually, the head of campaign operations brought on African-American civil rights leader Tamika D. Mallory, Mexican-American activist Carmen Perez, and Muslim Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour to serve as co-chairs. This effort was to ensure that the march included women of color—a U.S. term commonly used to represent non-white women in the context of resistance to systemic racism and exclusion—in its leadership.
National co-chair Carmen Perez is the executive director of The Gathering for Justice, a New-York-based organization that seeks to end child incarceration and racial inequalities in the local criminal justice system. Perez is a longtime activist and graduate from UC Santa Cruz who founded youth-of-color organizations like R.E.A.L. (Reforming Education, Advocating for Leadership) and The Girls Task Force.
We will always STAND TOGETHER because our liberation is bound in one anothers! #IMarchWithLinda #Sisterhood #WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/BL6ptNY4Qh
— Carmen Perez (@msladyjustice1) January 23, 2017
A Chicana born in Oxnard, a small town in Southern California, Perez recently spoke with the Latinx website Mitu and explained her reasons for getting involved in the march:
I felt a responsibility to my community, particularly being Mexican-American, my mother being from Mexico and my father being from California and Chicano. This president used racist rhetoric targeting my community. I felt it important to be front and center of this march.
When speaking about her hopes for the march, Perez added:
I want it to reflect that when women come together in solidarity we can actually create opportunities for other women and also make sure that we are intentional and intersectional about the issues that we care about.
While many have recognized the women of color in the march's leadership, reactions to the march from women of color and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) community reflect disagreements about what some perceive as a predominately white feminist movement.
Ahead of the march, writers and activists of color published articles criticizing the movement's lack of accountability for historic violence against women of color. Because of the initial absence of women of color in the march's leadership, concerns that the original name, “The Million Women March,” tried to coopt a protest organized by black women against racist and sexist oppression in 1997, and the perceived lack of anti-racist critiques coming from participants, many women of color skipped the Jan. 21 march on Washington.
The trans community also made important critiques. Many participants at the marches wore pink “pussy hats” and held up signs in defense of their vaginas and reproductive organs. Transwomen have argued that centering vaginas as symbols of womanhood is transphobic. They have called on heterosexual women to make their struggle for reproductive rights more inclusive. The use of ovaries and the uterus as symbols of protest harks back to the reproductive rights movement, and the use of the “pussy” in the women's marches was also a response to comments Trump made about his aggressive sexual tactics with women: “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Trump was filmed when he made these derogatory remarks to a television personality in the US while on the set of a show, but they were publicly revealed in October 2016 when he was campaigning.
Nevertheless, a commitment to intersectional feminism — the concept that women are often members of other marginalized groups, creating experiences that also influence their lives — was evident among many of the people who joined the women's marches this month.
Under the #WhyIMarch hashtag, many women and members of the LGBTQIA community shared their reasons for participating. From reassuring their commitment to self-defense and protecting reproductive health rights to defending gay marriage, hundreds of women of color wrote on social media about why they demonstrated:
Can I live? #WhyIMarch #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/F3IVhPTeyI
— Blair Imani (@BlairImani) January 21, 2017
#whyIMarch because immigrants are here to stay and they are what make this country great. #WomansMarch pic.twitter.com/cdAZgM4kBB
— Wendy <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/72x72/1f451.png" alt="