The Cost of Attending the Women’s March on Washington
Is marching worth the trouble and the cost? (Absolutely.)
In the planning stage, there were so many reasons not to travel to the Women’s March on Washington: concerns about safety and inclusion, accessibility, the crowds, the traffic, the police, the hassle of bus travel. As the day grew closer, the concerns about broken glass, pepper spray, and a few arrests from the inauguration day protests.
There are always a hundred reasons to stay closer to home, especially if children or elderly family members rely on you. But there are plenty of reasons to attend, too: to process what has happened, what is happening, how to keep each other safe, to send a message, to listen to others who are already on the ground, and to plan our next steps. “I have no choice but to march,” many of Saturday’s signs said, each with a short list of reasons to stand up.
I work on a college campus in rural Ohio. Our students arranged a trip to D.C., and I hoped to have a chance to talk with them about what is happening on the national level, listening to what their first experience voting and marching would be like. Other people inevitably traveled here — some from great distances — for different reasons (anger, excitement, fear, a sense of solidarity; the chance that your relationship will no longer be recognized by the government; the chance that the color of your skin will affect the way you are treated by your neighbors, the government, and the police; a need to be heard; the desire to share this political moment shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of thousands of people; to gain a sense of belonging or acceptance; to honor a loved one; to demonstrate against any or many causes, and reasons so close to them I can’t speculate what they are).
A march is not an expensive thing. Like so many other aspects of civic engagement, it’s surprisingly cheap.
$0: Calling local and state representatives to share concerns and goals in this particular moment. Signing petitions. Meeting with our local community members to discuss what’s going on. Attending readings like #WritersResist, and conferences like Between Two Coasts.
$20 for the bus: I work for a nonprofit that is located on a campus about 400 miles from D.C. An impressive student arranged three buses from Gambier. We left at 10:00 p.m. Friday, arriving at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Then we met Saturday night to ride all night home, arriving around 4:30 a.m. Not glamorous, but certainly in budget, and a great opportunity to have a dialogue with our students about what’s happening. Plus, no parking or hotel fees. We were lucky to have this transit available — the traffic and cost could be prohibitively expensive from other places.
$1.59 for a bag of popcorn: We didn’t eat it. Our crowd spent both trips sleeping, not snacking.
$6 for snacks from the bulk food bins at the grocery store (trail mix, etc.). I carried the trail mix in a pocket during the march, and offered it around. A fine substitute for lunch.
$1.79 for a bottle of water. Bottled water waste is appalling, I know, but this particular bottle was nearly lost rolling around the floor of the bus, and it was easy to reuse for two days without worrying about the bottle getting lost in a crowd.
$25 for a copy of Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women to read on the bus. (Cheated and read half of it before we left.)
$3.99 for socks to wear after a long day of standing. This is admittedly the silliest thing I packed, but taking off my boots in the middle of the night (propped against the wall of the tiny bus bathroom), man, new socks felt great.
$39 to print and laminate a sign. Designed a poster online, selected the largest available size, and had it printed at a local Staples. I like the way it turned out, but wouldn’t do it this way again. Printing a sign so large made it a little unwieldy, and anyway, a march is the perfect moment for handmade signs.
Also packed: hiking boots, one of those embarrassing neck pillows you’d only buy during a long airport layover, earphones, two library books (Transit by Rachel Cusk, Swing Time by Zadie Smith), maps, emergency phone numbers, a back-up phone charger, buttons that represented our local community members who couldn’t attend, and every item I thought an undergraduate student in transit might need — toilet paper, Purell, aspirin, Band-aids, hand lotion, Sharpies.
Women from our community arrived at the bus Friday night with 160 pink hats. They’d sewn one for every person in attendance.
We stopped once on the way to D.C., parking alongside eight other buses of people headed the same way. You can imagine the lines to the bathroom and snack counter that wove through the rest stop (so many pink hats). When we arrived, we had to jump off the bus immediately. There was no time to dress or brush our teeth.
We arrived at the march early, and had a good view of the speakers on-screen. It was exceptionally well thought-through. The students danced to the bands and listened closely to Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, Sophie Cruz, Linda Sarsour, Janet Mock, the Mothers of the Movement, and so many others. The crowd was very polite, with plenty of excuse mes and thank yous, even with dozens of blocks of demonstrators in every direction. When a blind woman lost her companions, an on-stage announcement helped to reunite them.
An elderly woman led us in quiet singing down 7th St. NW. As we turned down Independence Avenue, our students led the chant, “This is what democracy looks like!” Two of them told me that they planned to run for office. When speakers encouraged the crowd to get more involved in local government, they looked to one another and smiled.
$10 for a march t-shirt. I regretted not having one from the March for Women’s Lives in 2003 (they ran out early). Older women at gas stations across Pennsylvania were wearing hot pink shirts from a march before then. Will aspire to keep this t-shirt long enough to run into other women in a Pennsylvania restroom line on our way to the next march.
$30 after tip for dinner and a glass of wine. The restaurant wait anywhere near the march quoted at least two hours’ time. The students had already made arrangements to eat together.
I was lucky enough to get a small table at a bar, some coconut curry, and the company of friendly strangers. One woman from Brooklyn and one from the Bronx shared my table for half an hour; they shared highlights from the New York protest on Thursday, clips of Michelle Obama, and photos of John Kerry, whom they’d spotted with his dog that afternoon. A man and his wife came over to challenge us on why some women had voted against Hillary, and to talk about Bernie Sanders. When they moved out of the restaurant, two women from Minnesota took up residence in their space. One of them had been in public service for twenty-seven years — she’d even served as mayor.
They said they’d had to climb over a fence that morning to hear the speakers. “On one side, we were helping each other up. On the other side, there were two people there to catch us.” Imagine a whole day with strangers like that.
Total: $137.37
