That is, ultimately, what I want for the feminist movement, in all its pluralities, to do for the young girls and women who are discovering it: cherish and respect them. It’s imperative for the feminisms of our future to draw a hard line against racism, ableism, classism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia—all the ways in which we promote hate and preach division. But we cannot smooth over our intersections; we must acknowledge those differences, make those shushed voices loud, and seek to remedy our mistakes. We must act. But what if we acted compassionately as well as courageously? What if we leaned into our discord with love and respect and trusted—trusted—that feminism is a constantly evolving politic but we can get to the right place together. Yeah, sure, this sounds like a Hallmark card for feminism, something you’d find tucked into the “Get well soon!” rack with little doodles of blooming flowers, halved fruit, and other euphemisms for vaginas drawn all over it. But there must be a way, I figure, to talk amongst our differences, to make the movement accessible and welcoming for newbies, to connect and disagree, and through this political force, to uplift all of those around us. So, yes, maybe it sounds cheesy. But is it unattainable?
Back at the Belmont-Paul museum, another old protest banner provided a potential answer. It simply read “Failure is impossible.” It was a reminder not to underestimate women. The early suffragists faced a violent anti-feminism not so different from today’s attacks. Back then anti-feminists distributed postcards that depicted suffragist women as ugly, overweight, and generally prone to having gigantic schnozzes. In these cartoons, they beat policemen with their umbrellas. Women were painted as actual fluffy cats in hats, complete with draped suffragist capes (a suggestion that granting women the vote was about as useless as giving it to Mrs. Tabbykins). Yet another, in a series by the same artist, Walter Wellman, showed a wavy woman who said of her demand for the vote: “I believe in a reduction on the tariff of Paris gowns.” The artist helpfully added a bit of creep to the blood boil: “I’m just sixteen. Yours for votes.” Silly, vapid young women! Oh, how these naysayers must have been surprised when women won, toppling voting restrictions like dominoes across the country. And today, the young are at the gates still—promising that, this time when feminism rises, it will listen and make change for everybody.
Or, at the very least, it will try.
10
Defining the new feminism: How we can harness the discord and create a better feminism for the future
The light bounced off the mist-dampened sidewalks surrounding Toronto’s Union Station. It was a quarter past seven on the evening of January 20, 2017, and the gathered women were nearly an hour early. Mercifully, for once, so was I. Hoisting my backpack, I joined dozens of my soon-to-be bus buddies as they collected outside the city’s transit hub, where raucous excitement immunized us against the chill. Earlier that day, far away in Washington, DC, Donald Trump had celebrated his inauguration, marking his first day on the job with a populist and eerily dystopian speech. He pledged to the world that America would be first again: selfish and mighty. He preached his own brand of unity: “It’s time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are Black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.” To be fair, if you were a supporter, I suppose you might have considered his speech inspiring, truly patriotic, even. And, indeed, Trump retroactively declared it the National Day of Patriotic Devotion, an occasion with an Orwellian twist.
The women gathering at Union Station were not Trump supporters. They were part of the Canadian delegation of the Women’s March on Washington, roughly half of the six hundred who would travel through the night, across borders and through the soupy fog, so they could add their bodies and their chants to the massive crowd. The women on the bus were not radicals. They were not experienced activists. Many of them had never done anything like what they were about to do. They brought with them brownies and granola bars, fanny packs, and sensible shoes. They also brought rage and conviction. Trump and the turning tide of their southern neighbors had unleashed something in them: resilience and anger and fear and hope and love—a cauldron of emotions that could be summarized in one word: enough. Even though it wasn’t their country, they had decided, like thousands of others, that it was their fight. Stitched through with worry and shaken safety, they wondered—some for the first time—if their daughters’ lives and their granddaughters’ lives would be worse than their own. Would their own lives be more constricted than their mothers’? Were some things once thought entrenched already tumbling loose?
Later, I chatted with a group of women about why they’d decided to come. One, a young prosecutor named Sylvia, went silent as our footsteps pounded the pavement. “It’s just…” she started, stopped, thought. “Well, how could I not be here?” How could all of them not be there?
On the way to the border our bus captain, Penelope Chester Starr, warned us not to utter the word “protest.” She confiscated and tore up two signs that a couple of teenage girls had made. While hiding the signs in a plastic bag under some garbage, she explained that if American border guards asked us, we were to respond that we were going to a peaceful march—not a lie, exactly. The head march team in Washington also shunned protest language, deliberately shifting the focus to positivity, engineering the movement as more than a clap back against Donald J. “Grab ’Em by the Pussy” Trump.
We were clapping back against the whole damn system. Nobody on the bus risked defying the edict at the border, but it was easy to bristle at the watered-down semantics, to wonder if we’d yet again given the feminist movement a pastel makeover the political equivalent of a doctor’s office painting: palatable and inoffensive. Hell, I’d prickled at it, too. Now, on the bus, surrounded by ceaseless voices, I rethought my initial reaction. Maybe we needed this openness before we got down to the difficult work of rebuilding the feminist movement. Maybe it was late, but it wasn’t too late for us to see that the fight wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot, not for everybody. The Women’s March on Washington had built the biggest ramshackle tent it could and invited everyone inside, and just look at everyone who’d shown up.
We showed up because on November 8, 2016, as the US election results rolled in, Teresa Shook, a retired attorney and grandmother in Hawaii, realized that Donald Trump was going to win. What happened next has already passed into feminist lore. That night, Shook created a Facebook event page proposing women protest in DC on Inauguration Day weekend. She asked her friends to spread the word, and when she went to bed that night more than forty women had said yes. When she woke up, that number had hit ten thousand. It swelled even more after she merged events with Bob Bland, CEO and founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York, who had started her own Facebook event page.
The beginning was energetic but shaky. The march’s initial name, Million Women March, was taken—absent of historical recognition—from 1997’s march of the same name, which had rallied thousands of Black women in Philadelphia for social, political, and economic progress. This appropriation received widespread criticism, so the original organizers changed the name, issuing a press release with an apology and a promise to do better. They did. The organizing committee soon reflected the diversity of those they hoped would attend the march, as well as for those whose central rights the feminist movement must advocate.
The American mainstream press, however, pounced on the discord. One magazine ran an article, “Why the Women’s March on Washington Has Already Failed,” in which the journalist highlighted discussions around race and privilege (she called it bickering) and contended that women weren’t actually feeling threatened by Trump. In a feature on the march, the Washington Post’s magazine, Express, infamously (and hilariously) featured the male gender sign, not the female one, on its cover. Inside, the headline reduced the mass political movement to “When Venting Goes Viral,” focusing on the “rocky start” and the assertion that “minorities, particularly African Americans . . . have felt excluded from
many mainstream feminist movements.” (I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but it’s a strange one to find in a basic news report.) In a dedicated online section, the New York Times ran a series of opinion pieces on the march, including several authored by women of color, who provided valuable insight. It also ran a bizarre piece on the march’s Facebook discussion in which a white woman said she’d canceled her plane tickets to the march after bristling over a Black woman’s post that encouraged marchers to use the renewed focus on women’s issues to consider their privilege. “This is a women’s march,” the offended woman told the Times’ reporter. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about ‘White women don’t understand Black women’?”
Such pieces fueled the discord, painting those who planned on attending the march, and feminists in general, as petty, incompetent, and shrill. Though the movement ballooned overnight, newspaper articles rushed to point out that the organizers hadn’t secured permits, nor had they considered the march route, and so on and so on. Women, the message went, cannot organize. Women cannot get along.
Some of that tone changed after march organizers released their “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” document on January 12, 2017, displaying an unapologetic commitment to intersectionality. It paid homage to the abolitionists, the suffragists, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and more. “We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights,” read the document’s opening principle. “This is the basic and original tenet from which all our values stem.” The document called for racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, full reproductive rights, an end to racially motivated policing and police brutality, more accountability, a reformed criminal justice system, comprehensive health care for “our gay, lesbian, bi, queer, trans or gender non-conforming brothers, sisters and siblings,” gender-affirming identity documents, equal pay, family leave, and more. It rejected mass deportation and family detention. It rejected hate.
I had booked my bus ticket because, like many others, I needed the reminder that I wasn’t alone. After more than two years of wading through the sludgy waters of anti-feminism, I craved a reason for optimism. For a supposedly dying movement, feminism had undoubtedly roared awake, seemingly overnight. The first one hundred bus tickets from Toronto to Washington sold out in twenty-four hours. More than thirty sister marches were organized throughout Canada. More than 670 sister marches took place worldwide. But Washington was the epicenter, and like the rest of those on the bus, I wanted a front-row seat to the feminist revival.
Penelope Chester Starr, one of the four Canadian national co-organizers, told me that the overwhelming response was worth the exhaustion of organizing the event. Even though we sat together on the bus so I could interview her on the way down, we didn’t get a chance to talk until after midnight. It was only then that everyone else on the bus had gone to sleep, and Chester Starr could, at last, take a break from organizing, answering questions, fielding media, documenting the trip, and ensuring the sister marches were on track. She leaned back on the plush seat, put her phone down for a moment, and exhaled.
She told me that her mother was French and her father was American. Though she was raised in France, she’d also spent some time in the US before moving to Canada in 2008. As an American citizen, she had been able to vote in the election, and she had: for Hillary Clinton. She was devastated when Clinton lost. But the march galvanized her, stopped her from becoming immobile, helpless, stuck in grief. What many people didn’t understand about the march, she said, was that it was not the end goal; it was only the beginning. Though she didn’t know what would come next, she assured me that something would. She’d help organize it, and it would be intersectional and diverse, whatever it was. The point, she said, is that we, especially those of us who are more privileged, need to learn to listen to each other. “I hope we’re starting something new here,” she said, picking up her phone. “Look at what a group of strangers has already accomplished in eight weeks.” Her phone blinked with missed messages. Her eyes darted over the stacks of texts and emails that needed her attention, her thumbs moving dextrously as she apologized for the disruption.
It was one AM. None of the women on the bus knew what to expect the next day, but they’d shown up anyway. Wings of hope, I thought blearily. As I burrowed into my makeshift pillow, a bunched-up scarf, Chester Starr was still on her phone. I don’t know when she went to sleep.
Was the Women’s March on Washington a crucial time for women to join together, or was it an opportunity for feminism to confront its historically privileged and narrowly rigid roots? Yes. And yes. For feminism to regain and maintain relevance it has to be both. The lesson to those of us who care about women and their rights is to remember both the march’s messy, wrong-headed beginnings and its effort to do better, to be inclusive, to consider whose voices we are putting forward, and whose voices we are not. This is how we, as privileged women, settle into the discomfort: we listen, and then we throw open the doors that have been open to us, and then we listen some more. All of us must acknowledge our mistakes and then do better. This never stops. What I’ve learned from the front line of the new post-feminism is that feminism itself must never, ever reach a concrete definition. To thrive, it must always be a new feminism; it must always keep evolving without losing sight of its core principles of inclusion and equality.
Acknowledging our privilege is not the same thing as discounting our struggles. Intersectionality is the ongoing and fully committed practice of recognizing all those complex intersections of struggle and privilege and barriers. It’s not about silencing voices, not about attacks, not about exclusion; it’s about raising the voices of everyone around us. Does that not make us louder, together? Having examined all the ways in which we haven’t achieved the goals of feminism at all—the ways in which we may, in fact, be in danger of stalling or even teetering backward—can’t we take action to band together and move forward? Isn’t the whole point of confronting the backlash that we have to look at where we’re heading, change course toward a renewed commitment to a more equal society, not just in opportunity, but in policy and practice?
Certainly, we humans can be selfish and apathetic; we can also be courageous and selfless. Even in a culture of mounting division, violent discourse, and insidious sexism, we’ve shown time and time again that we do care about the rights and lives of women and girls. We’ve shown that we can respect our different opinions and experiences and fears and worries and democratically move forward. And we did. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, three hundred thousand people donated to Planned Parenthood, hitting more than forty times the organization’s normal rate. Around 70 percent of those who dipped into their wallets had never donated to the organization before. The American Civil Liberties Union raised $7 million through online donations in just five days; its website crashed post-election thanks to a 7,000 percent increase in website traffic. Projects like Donated Bigly, launched by two women lawyers to help match donors to in-need organizations, sprouted up almost overnight. That’s to say nothing of the many women and men who acted outside the US election to build a movement for hope and change.
In Canada, Indigenous activists and their allies have pushed the federal government to start a $40 million, two-year inquiry into more than one thousand cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Women-led grassroots initiatives such as Ladies Learning to Code, Dames Making Games, and the Pixelles are all dismantling the barriers women face when entering STEM fields in encouraging, creative, and fun ways. The National Film Board of Canada pledged to achieve gender parity in its funding and its films.
In the US, Hollywood stars became vocal about the gender pay gap. Activists rose up against the culture of victim blaming in sexual assault trials. Gymnast Simone Biles shot back against mega-sexist Olympics coverage with, “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I’m the first Simone Biles.” Two-time Olympic we
ightlifter Sarah Robles shared uplifting, badass messages about body positivity.
Throughout my own time talking to and working with women and girls, I’ve met a hugely diverse cross-section of activists, advocates, and community volunteers—all working to push back against cynicism and hate. They’ve organized conferences and meet-ups, talks and clubs, celebrations and solidarity, for women of color, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, LGBTQ women, women in business, women in poverty, women of size, those who’ve experienced violence and discrimination, those who cheer sex positivity, and all the intersections in between. It goes on and on, this resilience against the darkness.
Would it not be better, practically and possibly morally, to focus on what those women are doing rather than to shine a spotlight on those who are actively working against them? After all, have we not overcome impossible odds before? I’d argue the answer sits somewhere in between, along the scale of doing both. Let feminists engage with their critics, both inside and outside the feminist movement. In doing so, let us not be didactic, but open to many answers. Though I can’t define anyone’s feminism for them, or provide a fix-all pill to do better, I can say this: Let us raise this conversation to rock-concert decibels. Let it be both a reminder to communicate with each other and a refusal to be silent. And, as we lean into the feminist movement’s growing pains, let us also celebrate our victories and our heroes. We must remember that we can triumph. We’ve done it already, so many times before. Look around. We’re doing it right now.
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