The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Women’s march events planned in cities across the state
Three years after Alex Bergstein traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in the first Women’s March following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Bergstein will be the keynote speaker at one of several Women’s March events this weekend.
Back then, in January 2017, the idea of running for office hadn’t crossed her mind. And the Women’s March movement appeared strong and unified.
“That was an event that I will never forget, that changed my life for many reasons,” said Bergstein, who was elected to the state Senate in 2018 and notes emphatically that the Women’s March is not just women advocating for women’s issues, but people of all gender identities advocating for a number of progressive ideas.
“It was the first time that I experienced the incredible power and unity of people. It wasn’t just women, it was all types of people coming together for values and principals and It was an extraordinary event ... I think everybody left with a sense of purpose and hope and we can do this.”
But the movement in 2020 looks a lot different than it did in 2017. As the number of individual marches across the country has declined and crowd sizes have shrunk, event organizers are taking a new approach to the Women’s March this year.
In Connecticut, that will take the form of several press conferences and rallies in the state’s cities. In a message to followers, organizers from the Connecticut chapter of the Women’s March, a national organization founded ahead of the first iteration, wrote on Facebook their reasoning for the transition away from marching.
“We do believe that the
previous marches have been powerful visibility events and we have worked hard to amplify the voices of those most marginalized in our state but we think it is time for action,” the note reads. Organizers encouraged those still interested in marching to consider D.C., New York, Boston, or Springfield, Massachusetts.
A full list of events taking place across the state this weekend can be found on the Women’s March Connecticut Facebook page . They include press conferences on targeted issues at 9 a.m. in Bridgeport, 11 a.m. in New Haven and 2 p.m. in Hartford, weather permitting. At each event speakers will focus on specific issues identified as priorities by the national Women’s March organization.
In April, the group plans to host a day of workshops that will include training, networking and informational sessions related to the goals of the movement and “that expand on whatever topics participating members, groups, and organizations decide they need or want.”
Some argue the shift from massive, coordinated marches around the world, to smaller individually coordinated events with lower attendance could be a sign of a weakening movement, impacted by internal fractures and dissent, others say it could actually be the sign of a matured movement that has now shifted from symbolic impact to political action.
Jeremy Pressman, an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, cofounded the Crowd Counting Consortium after the first Women’s March with the idea that accurate information about popular participation can help gauge the progress and latent power of a protest movement. He pointed out that while the Women’s March numbers have dwindled to less than 1 million, it still draws a crowd larger than most other protests.
“The last three years under President Trump have seen a number of days of huge demonstrations and the Women’s March last year was still bigger than all other marches,” Pressman said. “The only ones that were bigger were the first two Women’s Marches and the March for our Lives.”
Pressman said the 2019 Women’s March, which drew an estimated 700,000 participants in more than 300 locations across the country, including Hartford — a far cry from the 3 to 5 million estimated in 2017 — was still more people than the March for Science in April 2017, the Families Belong Together protest in 2018, and even more than the estimates from the 1963 March on Washington, at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“The first Women’s March in 2017 ... obviously had a huge symbolic impact. It was the single largest day of protest in U.S. history, it was the day after President Trump had been inaugurated,” Pressman said. “In 2020, it’s not going to have the same type of symbolic impact that it had in 2017. That said, there’s other kinds of impact we could consider: Are they running for office, are they working on campaigns, are they doing educational work, are they lobbying?”
All signs point to yes, those things are happening, Pressman said, citing the increased participation by women in the 2018 elections as a prime example.
“So a march getting smaller could be a sign that it’s transitioning into those other kinds of political activities they advocated for,” Pressman said. “It could be a sign of people saying, ‘I work my job, I may only have limited time.’ Maybe in 2018 instead of marching, I decided to work on a campaign and knock on doors.”
Take Bergstein, for example. Though she’s still participating in the Women’s March events, her political participation and election to the state Senate, and that of a wave of other progressive individuals in the state, are a symbol of the movement’s successes.
That’s not to say a 2019 a schism within the movement and activism fatigue haven’t also impacted participation in the movement, Pressman said, citing internal disagreements, dissension, charges of antisemitism and media coverage as things that could also be impacting participation.
“It’s not only that the movement itself can make missteps, which it did, but it’s a battle going on in society between the movement and their political adversaries to push government policy in the direction that they want, that can undermine a movement and the ability to bring about change,” Pressman said.