How can Women’s March organizers keep the momentum alive six months later?
Converting a movement into electoral victories is the next step
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Perry Stein.
Friday marks the six-month anniversary of the Women’s March on Jan. 21, hailed as giving birth to a new and reenergized feminist movement. Millions protested around the world in a rebuke of the president on his first full day in the White House.
While no demonstration in Washington D.C. this year has matched the size of the Women’s March, organizers say they have sustained momentum in less visible ways. And people have converted the spirit of the march into something more tangible through volunteering and activism.
Still, supporters will have to wait until the 2018 midterms to see whether their movement can translate into electoral victories.
What’s happened since the march?
Bob Bland, one of the movement’s organizers, said that since the Women’s March, its leaders have morphed it into an advocacy organization with plans to become a nonprofit group. They have directed supporters to organize local “huddle” groups around the country to push progressive agendas in their own communities.
They also have staged demonstrations such as the “Day Without a Woman” strike in March and a protest earlier this month outside the National Rifle Association offices in suburban Washington.
The planning of January’s Women’s March exposed long-existing racial, socioeconomic and political rifts within the feminist movement. Bland said the focus of the Women’s March continues to be elevating women, particularly women of color, in politics and society, while training the next generation of activists.
“The immediate question we got after the march is, how do you take the moment and make it into something sustainable?” she said. “That takes time, and it takes tenacity, and over the last six months we have continued building together on an intersectional basis.”
People who say they were inspired by the march also have initiated actions of their own. The Women’s March kicked off a string of protests on the Mall during the Trump presidency, including the March for Science and March for Truth. The National Park Service says it processed 388 permits to host demonstrations on federal land between January and the end of June, a nearly 30 percent increase over the same period last year.
Converting passion to policy
Even if the Women’s March helped to build a resistance to Trump and his policies, leaders face an uphill challenge in translating it into widespread electoral victories.
A Washington Post-ABC poll released Wednesday shows that Republicans hold an advantage in enthusiasm for the 2018 campaign cycle.
The Women’s March also cannot claim any national legislative victories, particularly considering that Trump’s budget proposal aims to cut federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Bland said such victories take time and organizers are still laying a groundwork.
Over the next six months, Bland said, the Women’s March will continue work to motivate supporters to engage with their local community and to help eliminate an “us vs. them” mentality. Organizers also plan to host a national Women’s March conference in the fall.
“The best organizations are the ones that are working toward their own extinction,” she said. “We are not concentrating this as a lasting movement but as a lasting course to bringing women, particularly women of color, into this work and into the center of leadership.
