Advice for the Women’s March

PLEASE, sisters, back away from the pink.

Pink pussycat hats, sparkly signs, colour-coordinated street theatre all of it is gleefully in the works for the upcoming Women’s March on Washington on January 21.

And that scares me. Because all of this well-intentioned, she-power frippery can make this thing more Lilith Fair than Lilly Ledbetter. And the Women’s March of 2017 will be remembered as an unruly river of Pepto-Bismol roiling through the streets. This is serious stuff. It’s about human rights. It’s about the way 51 percent of our nation’s population still gets less pay, less representation in elected office and in corporate corner offices, less access to health care, less safety and less respect that the other 49 percent of our deeply divid- ed nation. The Women’s March needs grit, not gimmicks.

Case in point? Bra burning. That’s the trope that folks have been using to dismiss feminists for nearly half a century.

In fact, no bra was burned at Miss America protests in 1968 and 1969. Feminists threw false eyelashes, mops, Playboy magazines, bras and other symbolic “instruments of female torture” into a trash can. But the Atlantic City municipal code didn’t allow them to set it on fire.

Yet because the idea of a burning bra was so lurid, it eclipsed the fact that in the 1960s, women couldn’t get a credit card without a husband’s signature, weren’t allowed to study at some of the nation’s Ivy League schools, couldn’t get a prescription for birth control pills if they were unmarried and could easily be fired from a job if they got pregnant. Among other outrages.

But thanks to a stunt, they’ve been called bra-burners for decades. Even Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and mother of the movement, objected to what she called the “bra-burning, antiman, politics-of-orgasm school” of feminism.

Sorry, knitters. I know the pink hats with pussycat ears y’all are knitting for the march are clever and cute and fun. They’re a snarky middle finger to the incoming predator in chief, who somehow managed to win the presidency despite openly bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.

But it also undercuts the message.

Dana Fisher, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, has been studying political action for nearly two decades. And when she was in deep on climate change protests, she saw a hard-to-miss family: They all had mohawks, even the kid. And despite the scientists, environmentalists and students trying to make serious points at the protests, all the cameras focused on the mohawk family.

But mohawks are fun! So were all those drummers during the globalisation protests outside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund a decade ago, and the puppets and street musicians at the anti-Iraq War marches.

Occupy Wall Street was totally right. But their goofy protests, tent cities, body piercings, chants are what folks remembered. Meanwhile, Wall Street plundered the rest of America.

“It’s a difficult line,” Fisher explained. Because there’s the temptation to make the protest fun, to give it a street-fair feeling and draw more people. Crowds amplify a message and get attention. It’s especially tempting for the Women’s March, which plenty of children are expected to attend.

Protests are successful and effective when they have a clear message, a clear mission. That’s part of what made the 1913 march by the suffragettes seeking the right to vote so memorable and the 1963 Martin Luther King Jr-led March on Washington so powerful.

They are unsuccessful when they are simply a stage for venting.

So what are women trying to say when they gather the day after Trump’s inauguration?

“I’m seeing the New York State Nurses Association, Planned Parenthood, Free the Nipple? I don’t even know what that is,” Fisher said. “It’s just wacky.”

Planners are predicting 150,000 women at the march. But we can’t make a difference with goofy hats, cheeky signs and silly songs. This is our chance to stand up, to remind the world how powerful we are and demand to be heard. On equal pay and opportunity, on assault, on reproductive rights, on respect. We need to be remembered for our purpose, not our pink pussycat hats.