Getting it Right by Getting it Wrong: on Pussyhats and the Women’s March
I spent day one of the Trump presidency marching for women’s rights and then basking in the glow of it all on social media. My friends and I texted pictures of our favorite protest signs back and forth. We virtually high-fived on Twitter and Facebook. We marveled at the crowds and the hats and the signs. We felt hopeful for the first time in months.
But only a few hours had passed when the criticisms of the Women’s March ramped up. Some came from predictable sources; some didn’t. Some were valid; many were not. But nearly all of them pointed to something that has been frustrating to me personally and to feminism in general: the danger that no matter what women do, they are doing it wrong. Herewith, a (very partial) list of these criticisms, from least to most valid.
- Get over it. Trump won. You’re just being a sore loser.
You bet I’m sore. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, and yet Trump is now the president of the United States. (Thanks, random FB guy for explaining to me how the electoral college works, but I do, in fact, understand how this happened.) That I didn’t see it coming was my own fault. My own privilege, the algorithms that curate my Google searches and social media feeds, and my own stubborn unwillingness to really listen to what Trump supporters were saying blinded me to the possibility that he could really win. That was naive and myopic, but no, I will not “get over it.” If the losing party’s job is to just have a seat, then why did Republicans spend the last eight years ensuring that the only version of the Affordable Care Act that could be passed would be deeply flawed? Why didn’t they conduct hearings to confirm Merrick Garland? Yes, Trump won. Challenging his cabinet picks, his policies, his business dealings and his loose relationship with facts are ways of keeping him accountable to the people of this country — the very ones he claims to have returned to power.
2. What rights do women not have?
Perhaps a better question is, what rights do women have that they haven’t had to fight for, and which of them did their mothers and grandmothers enjoy? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you are the reason millions of women marched all over the country and the world. Next?*
3. Why are you protesting this but not the oppression of women in other countries?
This criticism is being leveled by anti-feminists (mostly white men) who are trying to shift the conversation away from the very real threat to freedoms that have been established for decades in this country. This is an #alllivesmatter type crowd, now fired up because gender equality is looking a lot like oppression to them, accustomed as they are to their privilege. Check out the Twitter feeds of these trolls and it quickly becomes apparent that they don’t give a damn about women in other countries except as a way to antagonize women here. Do kindly shut up.
4. Where was all this outrage on election day?
Even as a rhetorical question, it’s sort of dumb. It’s highly unlikely that people who would brave distance, crowds, traffic, weather, and any number of other obstacles to get to a march for women’s rights wouldn’t have budged from their couches to vote, so I’m pretty sure they did — and that they voted, with few exceptions, for Hillary.
A more nuanced version of this question is:
5. Where were these women before the election? Why didn’t they mobilize then?
The answer to that is more complicated. Too many people, myself included, didn’t believe that Trump could get elected. This was an egregious miscalculation (see #1 above). So I can see why the outrage shown by marchers seems a day late and a dollar short. This wasn’t helped by the failures of many women (even some organizers) to articulate exactly why they were marching. The fact that the Woke White Girls got together and threw a party that half a million people showed up to may ring a little hollow in light of the reality that 54% of white women who voted did, in fact, cast a ballot for a man who is consistent and unapologetic about his utter disdain for them. So yes. We should have done better. Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back for putting on a pink hat and showing up for a day. That was easy. The next four years are going to be much harder work. And about those hats…
5. Your stupid pink hats are racist and transphobic and you are not an intersectional feminist!!
Ouch.
Yes, it is true that not all vulvae are pink and not all women have vulvae. But perhaps you did not read the mission statement of the Pussy Hat Project, which explains why the color pink was chosen and why making them by hand for the occasion was part of the symbolism. They also address the loaded word “pussy”: how it has wrongly been used to denigrate women and men and define their gender. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of centering womanhood around body parts; doing so excludes trans women and even some cis women with atypical anatomy. But I also realize that many of the threats to women’s health and freedom do center around our reproductive organs.
For me, in the week leading up to the inauguration, knitting pussy hats kept me sane. It kept me engaged in (traditionally) “women’s work,” using a skill passed to me by my mother. It allowed me to be “present” in D.C.. It was an act of service to women I care about, who wore them proudly. I made and sent them with the very best of intentions. Maybe I got it wrong.
But here’s the thing:
Shouting down other women for doing feminism wrong has a chilling effect on feminism. I have hesitated to write about women’s issues not because I’m afraid of trolls, but because I’m afraid of getting it wrong for women: of excluding someone or appropriating something or getting out of my depth or out of my lane. I am doing my best. I am learning. I am a late bloomer. I did not hear the term “intersectional feminism” until I was well into my forties, and it took some time for me to get my head around it. So I try to check my privilege. I read as much as I can. I know I will get it wrong and say stupid stuff on occasion. But isn’t it better to try than to say nothing at all?
Ultimately, that’s what yesterday boiled down to for me. It wasn’t a perfect march, but for a lot of people, it was a real watershed. I marched with a woman who, until recently, had hesitated to identify as a feminist because the term was pejorative where she grew up. Many of the marchers had never protested anything before. It would be easy to dismiss these women as pseudo-feminists or pseudo-activists if it weren’t so important to include them. They may not be the kind of feminists some want them to be, but they showed up. In our zeal to ensure that feminism is inclusive, we must be careful not to be exclusive.
And besides, the march I attended was pretty great. Speakers from Muslim, disabled, African American, Native American, LGBT, and many other communities were represented (and remember, this is Dayton!). I’ve never been prouder. Except perhaps when, the day after the march, my daughter, who marched in D.C., reminded her friends to “keep feminism intersectional pls and thx.” She’s way smarter than I am.
- *But seriously. Smart people have asked me this question. Legally, in this country, if you are a cis gender, middle class, typically-abled white woman like myself (and plenty of other marchers), you’re in pretty good shape, rights-wise — for now. Otherwise, not so much. (More on this later).**
- **edit: Turns out someone else has already written this rant, and far more eloquently than I could have. Perhaps you’ve already read it. If not, you should: To Christy on Facebook, who doesn’t need the Women’s March.
- ***edit: Here’s another one you should read re: #2 above. You are Not Equal. I’m Sorry.
