Why Today’s Feminists Need Both Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood

Women’s March 2017 participant holds a sign with an Audre Lorde quote. (Wikimedia Commons)

Women have marched, protested and spoke out in the year since Trump took office, because women’s rights, especially those concerning reproductive health, have been threatened again and again. Here is a partial list that demonstrates the current administration’s stance on women’s rights:

• The president backed plans to defund Planned Parenthood and signed legislation that will enable state and local governments to prevent abortion providers from receiving federal funds.
• Trump backed House Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which would have allowed insurers to deny coverage to women with “preexisting conditions,” that ranged from mundane procedures (C-sections) to serious circumstances (past sexual assault).
• Trump has appointed conservative judges to the federal courts who seem likely to support his anti-abortion stance.
• Trump’s education secretary scrapped Obama-era guidelines for investigating campus sexual assault.

Because of the instances included above and many others, women and their allies took to the streets on Saturday in cities across the U.S. for a second Women’s March. Thousands are expected to participate. Anger, after all, is a powerful impetus. And women have plenty of reasons to be angry in 2018. Audre Lorde, a black…