GROUPS TRY TO HARNESS THE ENERGY
Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List urge participants to consider run for public office
Now that the Women’s March on Washington is over, women like 32-year-old Jacqueline Glass will determine whether it marked a historic oneday demonstration or the start of a widespread resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Glass was among the more than 2 million people who came out in a show of global protest — from Washington to Sydney, Australia. Now women’s groups and civil rights organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, are scrambling to harness that energy by enlisting more supporters and encouraging women to run for local public office.
Glass, an African American who recently settled in Norfolk, Va., after retiring from the military, has felt discouraged ever since the election, when her 10year-old son woke up crying. “I don’t want him feeling like he’s in a place where he’s up against the world. This is America,” she said. “I was having these sinking feels about the world and really down for a period of time,” she said.
The feeling became so strong that Glass took to Google, which led her to VoteRunLead, a New York non-profit that grooms women for public office. She’s
now researching local commissions and boards in which to get active. “I’m taking these tiny steps toward an ultimate goal,” she said, which is to run for U.S. Senate.
There’s early anecdotal evidence that some women are turning grief over the Election Day loss by Hillary Clinton into action. According to VoteRunLead, more than 2,300 women have signed up for training seminars in the past two months, a major increase. Planned Parenthood, which provides free health screening to poor women and is targeted for funding cuts by Republican leaders opposed to abortion, is seeing hundreds of thousands of people signing up to volunteer and reach out to their members of Congress. EMILY’s List, which works to elect proabortion-rights women, drew at least 500 women for a Sunday workshop in downtown Washington on running for office.
“This is the moment of the beginning of the revival of the women’s movement,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told the throng of demonstrators around the Capitol Saturday. “We don’t have equal pay for equal work in this country” or national paid family leave. “Until every woman and girl in this country has a chance to reach her God-given potential that America will not reach its full potential,” said Gillibrand, something that won’t happen until they’re better represented in government.
Women are more than half of the U.S. population, yet they hold fewer than one in four seats in the nation’s state legislatures, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Running for office is just of many ways the event’s organizers are hoping women will take action.
Filmmaker Michael Moore gave the crowd a “to-do list,” including running for office and calling Congress on a daily basis to resist the Republican agenda. He urged marchers to turn their communities into “regions of resistance” to fight Republican policies and pass progressive laws on health care and anti-discrimination measures.
Recently, in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis., 50 medical students in lab coats delivered a letter signed by 400 health care professionals to his office. Nearly 50% of the low-income counties served by Planned Parenthood have no alternative health-care provider. About 3% of its services are abortion-related, with the majority focused on providing contraception and screening for treating sexually transmitted diseases and infections.
Despite these bursts in activism, the same thing that made the march an overwhelming success — it drew half a million in Washington alone, or twice as many as expected — also makes it hard to measure its long-term impact.
Many of the women who streamed into Washington in buses, trains and planes are busy mothers, working professionals or older women who already fought the battle over women’s rights in the 1960s. “We won’t live long enough, most of us, to see the damage done by any Supreme Court appointees that are going to be made during the Trump administration,” said Marcelle Leahy, wife of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “This is such an important time. You’re all geared up and I want you to go home and keep on going,” she told a breakfast before the march.
Many marchers expressed interest in getting involved, but didn’t have concrete plans. Joan Treistman, who came from New York City to the march, was heading for lunch with her friend and daughter. It was her first time in public activism, and she left resolved to stay active. She said she planned to be in contact with her senators and local lawmakers as well as talk more with her friends about issues important to her. She had mixed emotions leaving the parade.
“It’s the intersection of exhilaration being at the parade, and sadness that we have to be so vigilant” of government, she said.
Women first began to run for office in the 1920s. Since the mid-1970s, women greatly increased their numbers in state government. Yet progress has slowed in recent years, and nationwide statistics show little or no growth in the numbers of women serving in state-level offices since the turn of the century, according to Rutgers data.
“This is the moment of the beginning of the revival of the women’s movement.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.