by Coco Das
One year ago, a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, more than four million people participated in women’s marches around the world. This outpouring was a righteous reaction to a pussy grabber in chief and his Christian fascist wing man (Mike Pence) rising to the highest levels of government. The 2017 women’s marches were the largest protests in U.S. history, a flood of grief, fear, anger, and determination against the blatant re-assertion of traditional patriarchy and women’s oppression.
There was some question as to how big the anniversary marches were going to be this year. The women’s march leadership has made a concerted effort to channel the energy of the first women’s march toward the midterm elections, changing the slogan “Power to the People” to “Power to the Polls.” The marches themselves were organized by a number of groups, not necessarily affiliated with the national organization, and many of the marches were marked by errors, divisions, boycotts by “leftists” and other social justice groups, and even – outrageously – rumors of immigration checkpoints near the women’s marches.
But more than 1.5 million people did come out. 500,000 in Los Angeles. 300,000 in Chicago. 200,000 in New York. 100,000 in San Francisco. In Austin, women dressed as handmaids led the procession from an impeachment rally at City Hall to the celebration of Roe v. Wade at the Capitol. In Seattle, the rally and march was led by a contingent of indigenous women. 7,000 people marched in Cleveland. Overall, more than 400 rallies and marches took place, mainly in cities and towns across the country with a few more across the globe.
It is significant that hundreds of thousands of people answered a culture of rape and sexual predation, attacks on abortion and birth control, and the related assertion of violence and repression against LGBTQ people with collective, visible outrage in the streets. It shows that the window has not closed on the people’s willingness to protest, even after a certain amount of normalization has set in. After a year of the Trump/Pence regime, many of the signs and sentiments at the women’s marches were broader and sharper, calling for impeachment, turning the number 45 into a swastika, calling Trump the actual “shithole,” and expressing solidarity with the many groups targeted by this program, especially immigrants. It shows, once again, that there is still a basis to drive out this regime with a sustained, mass protest movement that actually raises the demand that Trump and Pence must go!
To list all the horrible things the Trump/Pence Regime has escalated even in the days since the women’s marches would take several pages, so here I will highlight one that has not gotten enough attention and is a direct affront to everything we were in the streets last week standing up for. This week, the Senate is pushing a vote on a federal 20-week abortion ban. This horrifying legislation would ban abortion at 20 weeks, with few exceptions, and criminalize abortion providers. We should not, for a moment, forget that Trump was the first president to speak at the so-called “March for Life” on January 19th, and this weekend, thousands of people participated in anti-abortion marches across the country. Trump’s speech to the March for Life clearly outlines what his regime has done and intends to do to advance a fascist, theocratic rule over women, taking away their fundamental right to control their own bodies and reproduction. As long as Trump and Pence remain in power, leading a fascist movement that is hellbent on reducing women to sexual objects and breeders, there can be no liberation or equality for women.
We still have a lot of work to do, and the hour is late. There is an aching need for broader and deeper unity among the groups that are in a position to lead people toward a sustained mass movement against this regime. A prevailing message from march organizers and speakers across the country was, “now that we’ve marched, the serious work is to get more Democrats elected.” This message continually diminishes the transformative power of meeting in the streets to raise our demands, and hides the reality that the Democrats have not and will not put up the needed opposition without a massive, sustained social protest movement. Imagine if a million people from the women’s marches were to stay in the streets, day after day, disrupting business as usual and creating a political crisis that could force this regime out of power? This is possible, and something we must throw in together and work toward, for women’s lives around the world, and for all humanity.