When I returned home from the Women’s March in Miami I felt invincible. I carried my optimism in feet aching from hours of marching and a raspy voice from hollering dozens of liberal aphorisms through the downtown streets. My exuberance lasted until the next day, when my ears stopped ringing and I was again without the immediate presence of ten thousand protesters crying “Pussy grabs back.”
The Women’s Marches were an inarguable success, a worldwide grassroots triumph. Marching in one was inspiring, and anyone who participated can tell you that the sensation of hope was palpable.
In spite of this, the Women’s Marches will likely do little to curtail the Trump administration’s frantic efforts to undo Obama’s influence. Unlike the most successful grassroots movement in the United States—the Civil Rights Movement—the Women’s Movement has not decided on a single message that is accessible or inclusive to all Americans. Disparities in opinions on reproductive rights (what do we do with all the pro-life feminists?), what it means to be a woman (how does the transgender marcher feel about the woman sporting a homemade uterus hat?) and the apparently confounding role that race plays in this whole thing have already lead to infighting and alienation of women and others outside the movement.
To add to the ambiguity, the Women’s Movement seems to have tacked itself onto the Black Lives Matter and environmental awareness movements, which on the surface appears to be an act of inclusivity and solidarity. However, assigning unrelated beliefs to millions of individuals has more potential to divide, rather than bind—a result often, if not always, conjured by the employment of identity politics.
The Civil Rights Movement was able to secure success by placing economic pressure on political systems. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was hugely successful because it forced the Montgomery bus system to comply with the demands of protesting African Americans, who made up about three-quarters of the bus system’s ridership. The Women’s Movement has yet to offer an economic incentive for the government to continue meeting their demands.
I believe deeply in the power of the Women’s Movement to influence the course of our nation over the next four years, and the decades after that. These are the nascent stages. The Women’s Movement must make a lot of decisions about what it wants to be—and if success is in the cards, those decisions must augment and deepen, not limit, our collective American identity.