The idea first came to Teresa Shook, a Hawaii retiree, in the hours after Donald Trump was elected. Perhaps, she suggested to a few friends on Facebook, women could march on Washington to show the depth of their resistance. Two days later, New York fashion designer Bob Bland joined the call for action with her own message.
“Who wants to join me?!?” she asked.
Turns out, a whole lot of people did.
The astounding sea of women in bright pink “pussy hats” — half a million in Washington alone, and many more in hundreds of marches elsewhere — became the face of the resistance to Trump and his agenda. It inspired thousands of women to do something they’d never done before: explore a run for political office. The jolt of energy, and unity, also laid the cultural groundwork, many believe, for the “#MeToo” phenomenon to catch fire later in the year, calling powerful men to account for sexual misconduct.
Now, the loosely defined “resistance movement” — a network of groups around the nation, with men and women raising money and knocking on doors and supporting hundreds of progressive candidates — is setting its sights on the 2018 midterm elections, hoping to deal the White House and the all-GOP government in Washington a permanent setback.
Next stop for the Women’s March organizers: Las Vegas. Rather than returning to Washington, they’re holding a “Power to the Polls” rally in the Nevada city on Sunday, launching a voter registration tour and putting out the message that the next step is all about votes. “The year 2018 is really where the rubber meets the road,” said Linda Sarsour, one of the original organizers along with Bland.
A year on, Sarsour said what she’s proudest of is that “the march set the tone for the resistance … if you look at so many of the fights that happened this year, whether it be around health care, the tax bill, the dreamers, if you really look, it was led by women.”
The group pointedly decided to spend the anniversary in a battleground state, won narrowly by Hillary Clinton in November. “If it can happen in Nevada, it can happen anywhere,” she says. Also, she said, Nevada is at the crossroads of crucial issues like immigration and gun control; in October, it suffered the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Fueling these electoral ambitions is an infusion of first-time women candidates. Emily’s List, which helps Democratic, pro-abortion rights candidates run for office, has proudly kept a tally all year of women who’ve expressed interest in running, via its website. More than 26,000 women have done so since the women’s march, compared to only 920 in the two years before, according to its president, Stephanie Schriock. The group has been buoyed by recent state legislative victories in Virginia — where it focused on 16 races, and its candidates won 13 of them — and by this week’s victories of two Wisconsin candidates.
“We’re still recruiting hundreds of candidates, until the last filing deadline,” Schriock says. “There’s a decade of candidates coming.”
Debbie Walsh of Rutgers University, who’s been studying women in politics for 35 years, said she initially had feared that women would be discouraged from seeking office by Clinton’s defeat. Instead, she said, “there was this instantaneous response that stemmed from this visceral need to take back some control, assert some power.”
It’s a unique moment for women on the left, she said: “The kind of focus, attention, activism — I can’t remember a moment quite like this.”
One woman who’s already taken the plunge is Lisa Mandelblatt, a former attorney in Westfield, N.J., who’s running for U.S. Congress, trying to unseat a Republican incumbent in November. Like so many, she made her decision to run at last year’s women’s march — “truly a life-changing event.”
Mandelblatt, 53, will be marking the anniversary at two marches this weekend in her home state. She said she’s been thrilled to see that “the resistance is still being fueled by women. Men are helping it along, but I’m so excited to see that it’s really being spearheaded by women activists.”
The post-inauguration marches and this year’s encores — not just the main event in Las Vegas, but in gatherings of varying sizes across the country and overseas — bookend a year of activism that has helped deliver electoral victories for liberals. They’ve won local offices, made huge gains in the Virginia General Assembly, and even claimed a U.S. Senate seat in conservative Alabama.