[Lightman]

WASHINGTON — The day after what many had assumed would be the inauguration of the first female president, hundreds of thousands of women flooded the streets of Washington, and many more marched in cities across the country, in defiant, jubilant rallies against the man who defeated her.

Protesters jammed the streets near the Capitol for the main demonstration, packed so tightly at times that they could barely move. In Chicago, the size of a rally so quickly outgrew early estimates that the official march that was scheduled to follow was canceled for safety, though many paraded through downtown, anyway.

In Manhattan, Fifth Avenue became a tide of signs and symbolic pink hats, while in downtown Los Angeles, shouts of “love trumps hate” echoed along a one-mile route leading to City Hall, with many demonstrators spilling over into adjacent streets in a huge, festival-like atmosphere.

The marches were the kickoff for what their leaders hope will be a sustained campaign of protest in a polarized nation, riven by an election that raised unsettling questions about American values, out-of-touch elites and barriers to women’s ambitions.


DONALD TRUMP AND WOMEN By NEETI UPADHYE 2:16
Women March Around the U.S.
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Women March Around the U.S.
Hundreds of thousands of women came out to march in Washington, D.C. There were also hundreds of solidarity marches held around the nation and the world. By NEETI UPADHYE on Publish Date January 21, 2017. Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
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On successive days, two parallel and separate Americas were on display in virtually the same location. First there was President Trump’s inauguration, his message of an ailing society he would restore to greatness aimed at the triumphant supporters who thronged Washington on Friday.

Then on Saturday, in what amounted to a counterinauguration, the speakers, performers and marchers proclaimed allegiance to a profoundly different vision of the nation. They voiced determination to protect an array of rights that they believe Mr. Trump threatens, and that they thought only recently were secure.

“Thank you for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are,” Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and an honorary chairwoman of the march, told those gathered in Washington. “Pressing ‘send’ is not enough.”

To mobilize a progressive movement reeling from Hillary Clinton’s defeat, organizers broadened the platform beyond longstanding women’s issues such as abortion, equal pay and sexual assault to include immigrant rights, police brutality, mass incarceration, voter suppression and environmental protection.

Photo

Protesters at the women’s march in Paris on Saturday. Credit Jacky Naegelen/Reuters
But the march’s origins were in the outrage and despair of many women after an election that placed gender in the spotlight as never before.

Mrs. Clinton assertively claimed the mantle of history, offering herself as the champion of women and families, and calling out her opponent for boasting of forcing himself on women in a recording that prompted a national conversation about sexual assault. In a sly allusion to the crude remarks Mr. Trump made on the tape, many marchers, women and men alike, wore pink “pussy hats” sporting cat ears.

In Washington, demonstrators old and young pushed strollers and hoisted children onto their shoulders or guided elderly parents through the milling crowds. They waved handmade signs: “Hate Does Not Make America Great,” “I Will Not Go Back Quietly to the 1950s” and “I’m 17 — Fear Me!” They chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.’”

Emma Wendt, 13, came with a large group of family members and schoolmates from Kensington, Md., for a simple reason: “being part of history.”

PHOTOGRAPHS
Pictures From Women’s Marches on Every Continent
Crowds in hundreds of cities around the world gathered Saturday in conjunction with the Women’s March on Washington.


OPEN PHOTOGRAPHS
The marchers were confronting a president who has appointed just a handful of women to his cabinet and inner circle, and who has pledged to nominate a Supreme Court justice who opposes abortion rights and to dismantle a health care act that covers contraception. His appointees have track records of voting to cut funding for anti-domestic violence programs, opposing increases in the minimum wage and restructuring Medicaid — moves that disproportionately affect women and minorities.

Crowd estimates were not available in some locations, but a city official in Washington said that participation there likely surpassed half a million, according to The Associated Press. Added to the more than 400,000 that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said had marched in New York City, hundreds of thousands more in Chicago and Los Angeles, and those who showed up at many other marches nationwide, the total attendance easily surpassed one million in the United States. Marches also took place in a number of cities abroad, including Berlin, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and Cape Town.

In Boston, where the crowd swelled to 175,000, Senator Elizabeth Warren looked out at the admiring throngs and conjured up the image of Mr. Trump’s being sworn in the day before.

“The sight is now burned into my eyes forever,” Ms. Warren said, adding, “We will use that vision to fight harder.”

GRAPHIC
Where Women’s Marches Are Happening Around the World
The Women’s March on Washington is expected to be the largest inauguration-related demonstration in United States history.


OPEN GRAPHIC
Yet women did not protest — or vote — as a bloc. About 53 percent of white women voted for Mr. Trump, according to exit polls, and many said his demeaning comments about women mattered less to them than their belief that he had the independence and business experience to bring about change, restore well-paying jobs and protect America’s borders.

“The women’s march clearly doesn’t represent all women,” Alex Smith, the national chairwoman of the College Republicans, said in an email. She noted the exclusion of anti-abortion women’s groups from the event. “It is precisely this type of dogmatic intransigence that voters rejected.”

The marches came a day after confrontations between anti-Trump protesters and the police led to more than 200 arrests in Washington. But Saturday’s demonstrations were peaceful, and counterprotests were few. In St. Paul, one man was arrested after marchers reported he had “sprayed irritants” into the crowd, the police said.

By midafternoon, the target of the protests had not said anything about the marchers, verbally or on Twitter. Though the Washington march ended within sight of the White House, and some demonstrators passed by his recently opened hotel, Mr. Trump did not cross paths with the crowd.

Photo

A woman wore a United States flag as a hijab during a protest in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Credit Gregor Fischer/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The march had strong echoes of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign events, with some of the celebrities, performers and slogans. Madonna, who gave a speech, said toward the end of it: “I have thought a lot about blowing up the White House. But I know that this will not change anything.” (The Secret Service declined to comment on the remark, though an investigation seemed unlikely.)

After attending the inauguration on Friday, Mrs. Clinton herself was not seen at the march. She did, however, acknowledge the moment on Twitter.

“Thanks for standing, speaking & marching for our values @womensmarch,” she wrote.


The marches captured the potential and the perils for the progressive movement — whether it can frame its message to appeal to new generations and whether it can translate protests into action locally and nationally.

Plans for Saturday’s march in Washington began as Facebook posts just after the election by a retired lawyer in Hawaii and a fashion designer in New York, both of whom are white and had no experience organizing protests. Soon, protests flooded the feeds urging them to diversify. In the end, a triumvirate of African-American, Latina and Muslim women joined the leadership team.

Photo

In a sly allusion to crude remarks made by Mr. Trump about sexual assault, many marchers wore hats sporting cat ears. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
The march’s initial struggles echoed broader debates in the movement about whether the courting of new demographic groups alienated the white working-class voters who had carried Mr. Trump to victory, or whether white women had betrayed gender solidarity by voting for him. Yet on Saturday, these tensions did not deter a multiracial, multigenerational turnout. Mothers marched with daughters and granddaughters; whole families, including husbands and sons, marched arm in arm.

Mikhael Tara Garver, 37, of Brooklyn, who marched with her mother, recalled how her family had reacted after the election: “We were all calling my great-aunts because we all knew how important Hillary was to them and how important surviving to see that moment was for them.”

Another family came from Baltimore. “We have to get away from fear,” said Lureen Grace Wiggins, 49. Her daughter, Eden, 17, was exhilarated by the size of the crowd: “When you’re out here and people see you, they know you care.”

The march was rich in historical allusions — most deliberately, the 1963 march led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it echoed many other marches, including those in the 1970s that brought hundreds of thousands of women to the streets championing an Equal Rights Amendment that was ultimately defeated, and those from the late 1990s and on for abortion rights, culminating in a 2004 March for Women’s Lives that organizers said drew more than one million to the capital.

Saturday’s march happened to come just six days before quite a different one: the annual March for Life by opponents of abortion.

But perhaps the most apt analogy, said Ellen Fitzpatrick, the author of “The Highest Glass Ceiling,” was to the 1913 suffragists’ march on Washington, timed to coincide with the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson. Led by the renowned suffragist Alice Paul, it featured a lawyer, Inez Milholland, riding a white horse down Pennsylvania Avenue, with 24 floats, nine marching bands and luminaries like Helen Keller. The women were hooted and jeered at and roughed up by the police, prompting congressional hearings and generating public sympathy. They won the vote seven years later.

Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood, said that women have always had to regroup, even after they thought battles were won. “This is not new,” she said. “We have to go back to the battlefield and re-fight the wars against women.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/w ... v=top-news

I was there in New York today. It really was incredible to be shoulder to shoulder with so many people.

[Hong Wu]

Picture of the kind of garbage they leave behind:


I like how one of the signs says "Feminism is the radical notion that ".

Sorry but Hillary didn't lose because of misogyny. But congrats for standing shoulder to shoulder with women in a gender-centric protest, even though you are male, in a liberal utopian city whose policies are funded by wall street money.



But wait, there's more:


What western women really want is to be enslaved under sharia law like Muslim women are, without being stigmatized or bullied for it:

[Beren]

I was there in New York today. It really was incredible to be shoulder to shoulder with so many people.

You mean women?

[Ter]

The protesters wanted a woman president, yes.
And a cabinet full of women.
Alas for them, it was not to be.
Millions of other women have voted for somebody else, and won.
Maybe those other women think that having jobs is the most important motif to vote on ?
Hillary would certainly not have bothered much about jobs in America.

[Rugoz]

Great job, women.

How about not voting for this piece of shit?

[noir]

Highlight

[OllytheBrit]

Lots and lots of negative reporting of these global marches from the BBC this morning, and making it all about Trump and his perceived sins. They're a mixed bag of wackos to be sure, but they don't give a tinker's cuss about 'locker room talk' or grabbing minges - I daresay a lot of them would like to have their minges grabbed? - to them it's a day away from their humdrum pathetic lives, for lesbos to meet other lesbos, and to make lots and lots of noise. It's the old 'empty vessel' thing again, ie the more stupid someone is the more noise they make.

[Tewodros III]

Lots and lots of negative reporting of these global marches from the BBC this morning, and making it all about Trump and his perceived sins. They're a mixed bag of wackos to be sure, but they don't give a tinker's cuss about 'locker room talk' or grabbing minges - I daresay a lot of them would like to have their minges grabbed? - to them it's a day away from their humdrum pathetic lives, for lesbos to meet other lesbos, and to make lots and lots of noise. It's the old 'empty vessel' thing again, ie the more stupid someone is the more noise they make.

Wat mate?

[OllytheBrit]

Wat mate?

Pardon?

[Tewodros III]

Pardon?

The hell was that wall of text about.

[The Sabbaticus]

Wanted to make a thread about this, in light of one of the organisers/founders of this march being a Sharia-promoting ultra-reactionary orthodox Islamic woman, but whatever.

Agenda for Women’s March has been hijacked by organizers bent on highlighting women’s differences
Andrew Tavani

The controversy surrounding the exclusionary identity politics unsettling what should be a unifying event — Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington — shows that the fractures underpinning Hillary Clinton’s devastating election loss have not healed.

Unfortunately, the activist wing of the Democratic Party and many leading progressives are clinging to a profound disconnect with the broader mass of Americans, both women and men.

I live in Washington and plan to attend the protest because Donald Trump’s presidency, and what it portends for America and the democratic world, demands such action. A commander-in-chief who revels in grabbing women “by the pussy,” myriad insults to women, cozies up to a Russian dictator who hacked the U.S. election, spews contempt for our allies including Angela Merkel, wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, or target people because they are of the Muslim faith, merits a strong collective response.

But the attempted hijacking of the march’s agenda and all the nasty tit-for-tat between white versus black/queer/Muslim/trans and other identities tells a very disturbing story about the divided state of feminism today. The separatist, inward-looking politics that helped drive Trump to power and Clinton into oblivion is not going away — in fact it is becoming more entrenched, and all for the better, say organizers bent on highlighting women’s differences rather than their commonality as American and international citizens.

Just go to the official Facebook page of the march and associated events, read the online discussions, and there amid the enthusiasm and excitement you will witness the unfiltered and unedifying spectacle of women going at each other not because of the content of their character but because of the color of their skin, their gender, ethnicity, or religion.

The New York Times reported on a white wedding minister from South Carolina, who is persecuted at home for marrying gays, but said she wasn’t attending the march. She was made to feel highly unwelcome and ridiculed for only allegedly waking up, since Trump’s win, to the racism that black women have always experienced. Others were also riled by constant suggestions they “check their privilege” or more offensive versions of the censorious catchphrase. Then in a story titled “The Activist divide over the Women’s March on Washington,” Northeast Public Radio profiled a Black Lives Matter activist from Minnesota who said she was skeptical about going because “a lot of the stuff I was seeing on social media was really centered around white women being upset that they didn’t get their way.”

“And to me, you know, as a black queer woman navigating the world, it was really clear to me post-election that black folks, immigrants, LGBTQ folks like myself included, are at a higher risk of violence of targeted policies that are meant to take away our rights,” Lena Gardner said. “And I really wasn’t hearing those sorts of things from a lot of white women. Some were articulating that. And some were just like — it was almost like a temper tantrum.” On Twitter, a dissenter fumed, “So this should be called ‘White Womens March on Washington?” In a subsequent post, she added, “My solidarity detectors read ‘nah bruh.’ I’m not with a movement whose poster children are WW [White Women] who have directly shitted on BW [Black Women & WOC [Women of Color]. Bye.”

It saddens me to see the inclusive liberal feminism I grew up with reduced to a grab-bag of competing victimhood narratives and rival community-based but essentially individualist identities jostling for most-oppressed status. We need a better reaction to the election of a man who cynically responded to the center-left’s fragmentation by celebrating his own angry populist’s definition of white identity. Can’t we rise above the sniping about “privilege,” “white feminism,” “intersectionality,” and hierarchies of grievance in the face of Trump and the dangers he poses to the American and international liberal world order and women everywhere?

Such an approach doesn’t mean ignoring the differing experiences of women, or the history of racism between women, but confronting them empirically and resisting blaming each other for systemic disadvantage. Despite rampant inequality in the U.S., the word “class” doesn’t get a mention in the ‘Guiding vision and definition of principles’ of the march. Yet trans women/youth/migrants receive six references.

Cursory attention is given to the structural inequalities that limit all American women, regardless of their race, religion, sexual or other identities. American women across the board face huge barriers to labor force participation and achieving work-family balance compared to their sisters in Europe and other comparable developed countries. The vision document doesn’t even call expressly for nationally mandated paid maternity leave of at least three months — it describes “family leave” vaguely as a “benefit” rather than a right, in contrast to LGBTQIA human rights.

There is no detail about the urgent need for the creation of a universal public system of quality, affordable child care, pre-school and after-school care, coverage and access to decent, paid pre-natal and post-natal care and the universal coverage of deliveries so no woman is crippled by exorbitant costs when she has a baby. Did all of these goals of feminism just get sidelined? Women are dying in childbirth at increasing rates in the U.S., the world’s richest country, at triple the rate of Canada, going against global trends, and particularly hurting black women.

Strangely there is no reference to Latino women either in the march’s vision document, yet alongside poor African-American women they suffer greatly from soaring economic disparities, poverty and discrimination. Have they been “replaced” by transgender and Muslim women? But Muslim is not a “race” or class, it is a religion; American Muslim women are of diverse national, racial and ethnic backgrounds and, in the U.S., the Muslim population compared to Europe’s, for example, is more middle-class and educated. And if we are going to talk about religiously-based disadvantage why not name Jewish women? The latest figures show American Jews are by far the most targeted group for hate attacks based on religion, well ahead of Christians and Muslims. Meanwhile, poor white women in the U.S. are experiencing declining life expectancy, in contrast to all other groups, however their plight isn’t referred to.

The emphasis on a particular perspective regarding religion appears to have something to do with one of the march’s lead organizers. Linda Sarsour is a religiously conservative veiled Muslim woman, embracing a fundamentalist worldview requiring women to “modestly” cover themselves, a view which has little to do with female equality and much more of a connection with the ideology of political Islam than feminism. Could we imagine a wig-wearing Orthodox woman emerging from a similar “purity”-focused culture predicated on sexual segregation and covering women, headlining such an event? No, because she is rightly assumed to be intensely conservative, not progressive on issues surrounding women’s roles and their bodies. Bizarrely, however, it is Sarsour, who has taken a high-profile role speaking about ordering pro-life women out of the march, after a bitter dispute over the initial participation of a Texas anti-abortion group. In justifying the decision, the co-organizer invoked the liberal language of choice, despite her association with an illiberal ideology that many Muslim women say is all about men controlling their bodies, and taking away that choice on a range of issues including reproductive health.

And why is a woman seen wearing a heavy veil pulled up tight to cover her neck — not even a headscarf — emerging as the symbol of the rally? Yes, Trump is singling out Muslims but must we play his reductionist game? Muslim women are a diverse group. Such a vision purposefully excludes non-veiled Muslim women, who make up the majority of American Muslims, and all feminists who champion a woman’s right to be free from the degrading virgin-whore dichotomy that has afflicted them since most of the world’s great religions blamed women for tempting men. Beyond the domestic context, what about all the persecuted and murdered women activists and dissidents in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere fighting the politico-religious ideology behind the veiling of women? Encouragingly the official march mission statement names Nobel winner Malala Yousafzai who fought the Taliban’s hatred of young girls and women and their own attempts to assassinate her for going to school.



Official poster art for the Women’s March on Washington titled ‘We the People are Greater Than Fear’ by Shepard Fairey.

Then there is the growing body of secular activists, ex-Muslim women or “apostates” who didn’t vote Trump but have no representation among the organizing group. The Women’s March on Washington could also take care to call out the shaming of those women who have voted for Trump, including minority women labeled “traitors.” Muslim reformer Asra Nomani has been abjectly harassed and vilified for admitting she voted for Trump, mainly due to her concerns over the Obama administration’s response to radical Islamic terrorism and healthcare. I don’t share her views on the president-elect and Nomani’s decision may be a rarity among Muslim voters, but her defense of the secular public space is not an outlier, and no one deserves to be told they are “betraying” their race or religion for exercising their democratic rights.

If one lesson is to be learned from Trump’s election, which was helped along enormously by ultra-traditionalist evangelicals, the opposition movement needs less religion — not more. Or as Barack Obama said in his farewell speech in Chicago, we need to recall the origins of America, “that spirit born of the enlightenment,” with its faith in reason and science.

Feminism in the Trump era needs to reclaim its universalist core, realizing that conservative religious modesty culture, like the binary hyper-sexualized image of women, seemingly favored by the incoming president, is doing us no favors.

Here’s hoping the Women’s March on Washington will stick to one of the core principles it has wisely outlined and that hundreds of thousands and even millions around the world will remember the forward-looking message of unity, liberty and justice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

Emma-Kate Symons is a Washington-based journalist and editor, and former Paris correspondent. A regular contributor to Women in the World, her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Quartz, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Australian. Follow her on Twitter here.

NYTimes (women in the world)

(For the record, Sharia banking doesn't work that way. You do pay interest, only it's referred to as something 'Islamic', whereby it's somehow not usury, but it's the same underlying principle.)

More:

[Tewodros III]

@The Sabbaticus What you're trying to say, the whole movement was a bust?

[Igor Antunov]

Largest media/SJW meltdown in history. A premier source of amusement for the meme makers.

[Tewodros III]

Largest media/SJW meltdown in history. A premier source of amusement for the meme makers.

When I see dead trumpanzees that'll be my amusement.

[Igor Antunov]

Come on now, look:

Now tell me that isn't amusing.

[Tewodros III]

Come on now, look:

Now tell me that isn't amusing.

[center-img]http://16004-presscdn-0-50.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/trump-supporter-beaten-720x480.jpg[/center-img]
This is more amusing.

[noir]

@Tewodros III about the second vid, do you have Antifa in America? Thought it's German org

[Tewodros III]

@Tewodros III about the second vid, do you have Antifa in America? Thought it's German org

Of course, there's lots of organizations across the first world.

[Igor Antunov]

The womens march is forever tarnished. Just tools of the Islamist patriarchy. Courtesy of lead organizer:

[MistyTiger]

Well I am pleased to see all the support that women have gotten worldwide.

I just would like to suckerpunch whoever paid the sky writer to put "Trump" in the sky over Sydney. He/she wasted their money.

The protesters wanted a woman president, yes.
And a cabinet full of women.
Alas for them, it was not to be.
Millions of other women have voted for somebody else, and won.
Maybe those other women think that having jobs is the most important motif to vote on ?
Hillary would certainly not have bothered much about jobs in America.

We did not specifically ask for a cabinet of women, we know that that is not very possible since Republicans do not take women representatives that seriously. The majority of women voted to give the popular vote to Hilary. The damn electoral college just did not want to match the popular vote.

At least my state elected 2 women Senators. I will relish the small victories.

The job market has been improving. I just hope Trump does not do anything to botch up the progress. I would like to see more outreach programs to help people find employment and help them to keep a job. It is just amazing how some people do not know such little things like how to dress for an interview or what not to do in front of the interviewer.