SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The message sent by last Saturday’s worldwide women’s marches will resonate,
On the first full working day of Donald Trump’s presidency, a chilling picture emerged from the Oval Office.
There was President Trump, sitting at his desk, flanked by six white men of immense privilege, signing a global gag order which forbids America giving any international financial aid to non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that counsel women on abortions or perform them.
This gag order comes and goes depending upon which party commands the White House.
But I was struck by how symbolic and threatening the image itself was. This is what the white male patriarchy used to look like folks, and astonishingly in 2017, still does.
As a tweet by a British male journalist said: “As long as you live you’ll never see a photograph of 7 women signing legislation about what men can do with their reproductive organs.”
Set your clocks back a few hundred years. Or refuse to.
Wasn’t that what Saturday’s enthralling marches were all about? They started with a simple visual statement: “We’re here,” or in the Star’s memorable headline, “She the People.”
Organized mainly, as American writer Rebecca Traister pointed out in New York magazine, by women of colour, the Women’s March last Saturday drew an unprecedented four million women — and men — out on streets all around the world to protest the election of Donald Trump, and to state, in funny signs and angry speeches, a variety of grievances and goals.
As Traister brilliantly summed up the irony, “a lot of people predicted that women were going to change America’s political history in January of 2017. But pretty much no one anticipated that they’d be doing it as leaders of the resistance.”
Many thought we’d instead be celebrating the arrival of power, the election of the first female president.
Instead women everywhere suited up with pink pussycat hats and got on planes, trains, buses and subways to take to the streets and say “we can do better than this as a society.”
I really wasn’t sure about all that pink. Why girlie up such an important democratic moment, I thought, until I saw the pictures and found the sea of pink actually moving.
The signs, brash and funny, were aimed at a vulgar, intemperate and dangerous new president who has bragged of assaulting women and so far gotten away with it: “Think Outside My Box.”
They were targeting an administration committed to rolling back abortion rights: “Girls just want to have Fun-damental rights.” They spoke to a new government intent on limiting immigration and tone deaf to racial equality: “Respect existence or expect resistance.” Almost every woman I know who marched used the word “exhilarating” to describe how it felt to show up for one of the largest worldwide one-day demonstrations in history.
That’s certainly how I felt as I marched, with a close friend amidst thousands, from Queen’s Park past the U.S. Consulate. There were lots of chants, but because the two of us were journalists, we made up our own in solidarity with our American colleagues: “Ho ho, hey hey, freedom of the press has got to stay.”
It was peaceful, positive and inspirational, especially talking to other marchers, one of whom, a young academic, said she had done her thesis on the stalled Occupy Wall Street movement, but her feeling now is “women will lead this movement for change.”
Such conversations were not only a highlight of the march, but one of its purposes. As feminist icon Gloria Steinem, 82, honorary co-chair of the Washington D.C. march, replied, when questioned by the New York Times about rifts developing between white women of privilege and women of colour: “It’s about knowing each other, which is what movements and marches are for.”
It’s a sign of progress that the demonstrators had different agendas. How could there not be tension between women of colour and white women of privilege? The movement for change needs a more inclusive direction if it’s going to morph into a new massive and assertive civil and human rights movement.
No one should doubt taking to the streets will be necessary again. But right now it’s our American friends who have to get up every morning, as documentary maker Michael Moore suggested, and bug congress or get involved by community organizing or running for office.
Only days later, the march was subsumed by the minutiae of an unpredictable (to put it mildly) new president’s first days in office as Trump began signing away Barack Obama’s legacy.
Donald Trump’s embattled new press secretary, Sean Spicer, was on Monday, offensively obtuse about the marchers, saying they weren’t really marching “against” anything. Get real.
It was almost as if its historic peacefulness in the U.S. capital — no arrests — was something this angry new administration didn’t understand. “A moment or a movement?” asked a CNN host, maddeningly offering only a binary choice. It was both, but also, admittedly, a therapeutic interlude.
Mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, best friends, kids, newborns. Fathers, husbands, friends — all out on the street, when they could have been doing a thousand other Saturday things, in a show of strength, resilience and spirit.
On my subway ride to Queen’s Park, a marcher held her 3-monthold daughter in a carrier close to her chest, kissing the top of her baby’s head.
She admitted: “I didn’t bring a sign.”
“Yes you did,” I replied looking at her infant daughter, “She’s your sign.” Judith Timson’s column will move to Friday Life section on Feb. 10. She writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson