The light bounced off the mist-dampened sidewalks surrounding Toronto’s Union Station. It was a quarter past seven on the evening of January 20, 2017, and the gathered women were nearly an hour early. Mercifully, for once, so was I. Hoisting my backpack, I joined dozens of my soon-to-be bus buddies as they collected outside the city’s transit hub, where raucous excitement immunized us against the chill. Earlier that day, far away in Washington, DC, Donald Trump had celebrated his inauguration, marking his first day on the job with a populist and eerily dystopian speech. He pledged to the world that America would be first again: selfish and mighty. He preached his own brand of unity: “It’s time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are Black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.” To be fair, if you were a supporter, I suppose you might have considered his speech inspiring, truly patriotic, even. And, indeed, Trump retroactively declared it the National Day of Patriotic Devotion, an occasion with an Orwellian twist.
The women gathering at Union Station were not Trump supporters. They were part of the Canadian delegation of the Women’s March on Washington, roughly half of the six hundred who would travel through the night, across borders and through the soupy fog, so they could add their bodies and their chants to the massive crowd. The women on the bus were not radicals. They were not experienced activists. Many of them had never done anything like what they were about to do. They brought with them brownies and granola bars, fanny packs, and sensible shoes. They also brought rage and conviction. Trump and the turning tide of their southern neighbors had unleashed something in them: resilience and anger and fear and hope and love—a cauldron of emotions that could be summarized in one word: enough. Even though it wasn’t their country, they had decided, like thousands of others, that it was their fight. Stitched through with worry and shaken safety, they wondered—some for the first time—if their daughters’ lives and their granddaughters’ lives would be worse than their own. Would their own lives be more constricted than their mothers’? Were some things once thought entrenched already tumbling loose?
Later, I chatted with a group of women about why they’d decided to come. One, a young prosecutor named Sylvia, went silent as our footsteps pounded the pavement. “It’s just…” she started, stopped, thought. “Well, how could I not be here?” How could all of them not be there?
On the way to the border our bus captain, Penelope Chester Starr, warned us not to utter the word “protest.” She confiscated and tore up two signs that a couple of teenage girls had made. While hiding the signs in a plastic bag under some garbage, she explained that if American border guards asked us, we were to respond that we were going to a peaceful march—not a lie, exactly. The head march team in Washington also shunned protest language, deliberately shifting the focus to positivity, engineering the movement as more than a clap back against Donald J. “Grab ’Em by the Pussy” Trump.
We were clapping back against the whole damn system. Nobody on the bus risked defying the edict at the border, but it was easy to bristle at the watered-down semantics, to wonder if we’d yet again given the feminist movement a pastel makeover the political equivalent of a doctor’s office painting: palatable and inoffensive. Hell, I’d prickled at it, too. Now, on the bus, surrounded by ceaseless voices, I rethought my initial reaction. Maybe we needed this openness before we got down to the difficult work of rebuilding the feminist movement. Maybe it was late, but it wasn’t too late for us to see that the fight wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot, not for everybody. The Women’s March on Washington had built the biggest ramshackle tent it could and invited everyone inside, and just look at everyone who’d shown up.
We showed up because on November 8, 2016, as the US election results rolled in, Teresa Shook, a retired attorney and grandmother in Hawaii, realized that Donald Trump was going to win. What happened next has already passed into feminist lore. That night, Shook created a Facebook event page proposing women protest in DC on Inauguration Day weekend. She asked her friends to spread the word, and when she went to bed that night more than forty women had said yes. When she woke up, that number had hit ten thousand. It swelled even more after she merged events with Bob Bland, CEO and founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York, who had started her own Facebook event page.
The beginning was energetic but shaky. The march’s initial name, Million Women March, was taken—absent of historical recognition—from 1997’s march of the same name, which had rallied thousands of Black women in Philadelphia for social, political, and economic progress. This appropriation received widespread criticism, so the original organizers changed the name, issuing a press release with an apology and a promise to do better. They did. The organizing committee soon reflected the diversity of those they hoped would attend the march, as well as for those whose central rights the feminist movement must advocate.
The American mainstream press, however, pounced on the discord. One magazine ran an article, “Why the Women’s March on Washington Has Already Failed,” in which the journalist highlighted discussions around race and privilege (she called it bickering) and contended that women weren’t actually feeling threatened by Trump. In a feature on the march, the Washington Post’s magazine, Express, infamously (and hilariously) featured the male gender sign, not the female one, on its cover. Inside, the headline reduced the mass political movement to “When Venting Goes Viral,” focusing on the “rocky start” and the assertion that “minorities, particularly African Americans . . . have felt excluded from many mainstream feminist movements.” (I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but it’s a strange one to find in a basic news report.) In a dedicated online section, the New York Times ran a series of opinion pieces on the march, including several authored by women of color, who provided valuable insight. It also ran a bizarre piece on the march’s Facebook discussion in which a white woman said she’d canceled her plane tickets to the march after bristling over a Black woman’s post that encouraged marchers to use the renewed focus on women’s issues to consider their privilege. “This is a women’s march,” the offended woman told the Times’ reporter. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about ‘White women don’t understand Black women’?”
Such pieces fueled the discord, painting those who planned on attending the march, and feminists in general, as petty, incompetent, and shrill. Though the movement ballooned overnight, newspaper articles rushed to point out that the organizers hadn’t secured permits, nor had they considered the march route, and so on and so on. Women, the message went, cannot organize. Women cannot get along.
Some of that tone changed after march organizers released their “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” document on January 12, 2017, displaying an unapologetic commitment to intersectionality. It paid homage to the abolitionists, the suffragists, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and more. “We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights,” read the document’s opening principle. “This is the basic and original tenet from which all our values stem.” The document called for racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, full reproductive rights, an end to racially motivated policing and police brutality, more accountability, a reformed criminal justice system, comprehensive health care for “our gay, lesbian, bi, queer, trans or gender non-conforming brothers, sisters and siblings,” gender-affirming identity documents, equal pay, family leave, and more. It rejected mass deportation and family detention. It rejected hate.
I had booked my bus ticket because, like many others, I needed the reminder that I wasn’t alone. After more than two years of wading through the sludgy waters of anti-feminism, I craved a reason for optimism. For a supposedly dying movement, feminism had undoubtedly roared awake, seemingly overnight. The first one hundred bus tickets from Toronto to Washington sold out in twenty-four hours. More than thirty sister marches were organized throughout Canada. More than 670 sister marches took place worldwide. But Washington was the epicenter, and like the rest of those on the bus, I wanted a front-row seat to the feminist revival.
Penelope Chester Starr, one of the four Canadian national co-organizers, told me that the overwhelming response was worth the exhaustion of organizing the event. Even though we sat together on the bus so I could interview her on the way down, we didn’t get a chance to talk until after midnight. It was only then that everyone else on the bus had gone to sleep, and Chester Starr could, at last, take a break from organizing, answering questions, fielding media, documenting the trip, and ensuring the sister marches were on track. She leaned back on the plush seat, put her phone down for a moment, and exhaled.
She told me that her mother was French and her father was American. Though she was raised in France, she’d also spent some time in the US before moving to Canada in 2008. As an American citizen, she had been able to vote in the election, and she had: for Hillary Clinton. She was devastated when Clinton lost. But the march galvanized her, stopped her from becoming immobile, helpless, stuck in grief. What many people didn’t understand about the march, she said, was that it was not the end goal; it was only the beginning. Though she didn’t know what would come next, she assured me that something would. She’d help organize it, and it would be intersectional and diverse, whatever it was. The point, she said, is that we, especially those of us who are more privileged, need to learn to listen to each other. “I hope we’re starting something new here,” she said, picking up her phone. “Look at what a group of strangers has already accomplished in eight weeks.” Her phone blinked with missed messages. Her eyes darted over the stacks of texts and emails that needed her attention, her thumbs moving dextrously as she apologized for the disruption.
It was one AM. None of the women on the bus knew what to expect the next day, but they’d shown up anyway. Wings of hope, I thought blearily. As I burrowed into my makeshift pillow, a bunched-up scarf, Chester Starr was still on her phone. I don’t know when she went to sleep.
Was the Women’s March on Washington a crucial time for women to join together, or was it an opportunity for feminism to confront its historically privileged and narrowly rigid roots? Yes. And yes. For feminism to regain and maintain relevance it has to be both. The lesson to those of us who care about women and their rights is to remember both the march’s messy, wrong-headed beginnings and its effort to do better, to be inclusive, to consider whose voices we are putting forward, and whose voices we are not. This is how we, as privileged women, settle into the discomfort: we listen, and then we throw open the doors that have been open to us, and then we listen some more. All of us must acknowledge our mistakes and then do better. This never stops. What I’ve learned from the front line of the new post-feminism is that feminism itself must never, ever reach a concrete definition. To thrive, it must always be a new feminism; it must always keep evolving without losing sight of its core principles of inclusion and equality.
Acknowledging our privilege is not the same thing as discounting our struggles. Intersectionality is the ongoing and fully committed practice of recognizing all those complex intersections of struggle and privilege and barriers. It’s not about silencing voices, not about attacks, not about exclusion; it’s about raising the voices of everyone around us. Does that not make us louder, together? Having examined all the ways in which we haven’t achieved the goals of feminism at all—the ways in which we may, in fact, be in danger of stalling or even teetering backward—can’t we take action to band together and move forward? Isn’t the whole point of confronting the backlash that we have to look at where we’re heading, change course toward a renewed commitment to a more equal society, not just in opportunity, but in policy and practice?
Certainly, we humans can be selfish and apathetic; we can also be courageous and selfless. Even in a culture of mounting division, violent discourse, and insidious sexism, we’ve shown time and time again that we do care about the rights and lives of women and girls. We’ve shown that we can respect our different opinions and experiences and fears and worries and democratically move forward. And we did. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, three hundred thousand people donated to Planned Parenthood, hitting more than forty times the organization’s normal rate. Around 70 percent of those who dipped into their wallets had never donated to the organization before. The American Civil Liberties Union raised $7 million through online donations in just five days; its website crashed post-election thanks to a 7,000 percent increase in website traffic. Projects like Donated Bigly, launched by two women lawyers to help match donors to in-need organizations, sprouted up almost overnight. That’s to say nothing of the many women and men who acted outside the US election to build a movement for hope and change.
In Canada, Indigenous activists and their allies have pushed the federal government to start a $40 million, two-year inquiry into more than one thousand cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Women-led grassroots initiatives such as Ladies Learning to Code, Dames Making Games, and the Pixelles are all dismantling the barriers women face when entering STEM fields in encouraging, creative, and fun ways. The National Film Board of Canada pledged to achieve gender parity in its funding and its films.
In the US, Hollywood stars became vocal about the gender pay gap. Activists rose up against the culture of victim blaming in sexual assault trials. Gymnast Simone Biles shot back against mega-sexist Olympics coverage with, “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I’m the first Simone Biles.” Two-time Olympic weightlifter Sarah Robles shared uplifting, badass messages about body positivity.
Throughout my own time talking to and working with women and girls, I’ve met a hugely diverse cross-section of activists, advocates, and community volunteers—all working to push back against cynicism and hate. They’ve organized conferences and meet-ups, talks and clubs, celebrations and solidarity, for women of color, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, LGBTQ women, women in business, women in poverty, women of size, those who’ve experienced violence and discrimination, those who cheer sex positivity, and all the intersections in between. It goes on and on, this resilience against the darkness.
Would it not be better, practically and possibly morally, to focus on what those women are doing rather than to shine a spotlight on those who are actively working against them? After all, have we not overcome impossible odds before? I’d argue the answer sits somewhere in between, along the scale of doing both. Let feminists engage with their critics, both inside and outside the feminist movement. In doing so, let us not be didactic, but open to many answers. Though I can’t define anyone’s feminism for them, or provide a fix-all pill to do better, I can say this: Let us raise this conversation to rock-concert decibels. Let it be both a reminder to communicate with each other and a refusal to be silent. And, as we lean into the feminist movement’s growing pains, let us also celebrate our victories and our heroes. We must remember that we can triumph. We’ve done it already, so many times before. Look around. We’re doing it right now.
The buses barreled down the highway toward RFK Stadium, the current home of major league soccer team D.C. United and also where we were permitted to park. It was just a few minutes after eight am, and my belly sloshed with the Tex-Mex breakfast I’d shoveled down earlier when hundreds of us swarmed a suburban Chevys. Nervous and excited, we leaned forward, our bodies at acute angles, anticipating the first glimpse. The stadium’s parking lots were a sprawling doughnut ring that could fit eight thousand cars, or up to twelve hundred buses. We had all wondered how many would show up.
Our driver, Frank, was the first to see them. “Wow, look at all those buses,” he breathed. Holy Moses. “I’ve never seen so many buses in one place.” Then we saw it. From our vantage point, high above the bowl of the parking lots, the bus tops glistened, blocking out the asphalt and filling the lots to capacity. (Nearly one thousand other buses, it was later reported, had permits to park elsewhere in the city.)
“Look at all the people!”
“We could hold the march right here!”
“I’m going to have goosebumps all friggin’ day,” someone behind me said.
Chester Starr led the bus in a chant as it inched behind the lineup to the lots.
“What do we want?”
“When do we want it?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Dressed in matching red hats and unfurling contraband “Sisters of the North” signs, the Canadian delegations poured out. On everyone’s arm, scrawled in black Sharpie, were the digits 613-996-8885—the emergency consulate number for Canadians traveling abroad. “I don’t believe you will need this number,” Chester Starr said as she passed around the Sharpies, their chemical tang punching the air. “But just in case.” She warned us against possible violence, uncontrollable anger. Organizers expected counterprotestors, whether they were cheering for Trump or holding up anti-abortion signs. Nobody could guess at the size of the crowds we’d soon encounter, or the expected mood. The night before, more than 217 people had been arrested, and someone had set fire to a black limousine. As we grouped outside, Chester Starr flicked her lighter against a cigarette. Tension crackled off her; she wanted to make sure we all stayed together, that she got us there okay. She grabbed a cardboard tube from the depths of the bus, her own smuggled banner announcing our delegation. I followed her outside the parking lot as we snaked behind hundreds of other marchers. She apologized for being “cranky,” but I understood. Her phone was still buzzing with questions. Her fingers flew over the glass front, tweeting updates. Spark. Another cigarette.
It was a half-hour walk to our meeting spot with the other Canadians, including Marissa McTasney, an entrepreneur who’d taken the initial lead on organizing the Canadian delegation and who’d never engaged in activism before. Today was her birthday. In the weeks leading up to the march, McTasney had faced a deluge of online threats and horrific name-calling in response to media interviews. Men’s rights activists and anti-feminists had hurled what was now, to me, a vile, familiar roster: she was called fat, ugly, and stupid. And she was threatened with rape. Some men reached out via email, spewing right into her inbox. But here she was. Here we all were. As we headed down Independence Avenue SE, cars honked their support and people emerged from their houses and shops to thank us, to ask us where we were from. One family passed out Starbucks coffee, another Hershey’s chocolate kisses. By the time we met with the others, it seemed impossible that the day could turn to violence. Chester Starr charted our first steps on Facebook Live, wiping her brow before smiling wide: “Make some noise! All right, yes, this is exciting! We are going! We are on our way! We’re going to march! Woohoo!”
At the National Mall, the downtown park, the crowd enveloped us. Before that day, estimates had pegged the expected crowd at two hundred thousand; after crowd scientists analyzed the pictures, that number soared to at least—at least—470,000, roughly three times the number of people who attended Trump’s inauguration. (The Trump administration, of course, had “alternate facts” about the respective crowd sizes.) The crowd was so thick, I never made it to the speakers stage. I missed all the stars: Janelle Monáe (“Whenever you feel in doubt, whenever you want to give up, you must always remember to choose freedom over fear.”); America Ferrera (“A platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America. We are America.”); Alicia Keys (“We will continue to rise until our voices are heard…until our dollar is the same dollar as a man’s.”); Scarlett Johansson (speaking to Trump: “I want to be able to support you, but first I ask that you support me . . . Support my daughter, who may actually, as a result of the appointments you have made, grow up in a country that is moving backwards, not forwards.”); and, of course, Gloria Steinem (“You look great. I wish you could see yourselves. It’s like an ocean.”).
One reporter tweeted that, from where he was standing near the back of the packed park, it would take him nineteen minutes to walk to the stage, if the route were clear. After he tweeted, he realized he was no longer at the back; hundreds more people had closed around him. There were so many people that they filled the entire march route. I didn’t move for an hour as we waited for the staggering crowd ahead of us to start. And even then, we moved not along the route, but beside it, uncontainable. I was so surrounded that I couldn’t quite fathom how big the crowds were until a friend sent me an aerial shot. And pink was everywhere—everywhere. Anti-feminists and Trump supporters had mocked marchers for knitting pink “pussy hats,” a cheeky play on Trump’s own derogatory talk and a way to reclaim a word that was never meant to be ours. (Also, the cat-eared hats were cute.) A blogger with Chicks on the Right wrote the hats were “what happens when militant feminists from across the country put their ‘deranged cat lady’ knitting skills to use.” And they call us killjoys.
The crowd itself reflected the deliberately, unapologetically diverse mandate of the march, a mishmash of messages and chants, people and goals. This was discord acknowledged and celebrated, a promise for the feminist movement to do better, written on the faces of everyone, and shouted in every hoarse voice, separate and together. Black Lives Matter signs punctuated the throngs of people moving slowly, the chants rolling through like a tidal wave. We shouted: “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” We shouted: “We want a leader, not a creepy tweeter!” We shouted: “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” We chanted for Muslim rights, transgender rights, queer rights, Indigenous rights, disability rights. We chanted for inclusivity and diversity, and a free media. Signs asserted: “Love trumps hate,” “Let it rain glass,” “Climate change is real,” and “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” We invoked humor: “We shall ‘overcomb,’” “There shall be hell toupée,” and “This pussy grabs back.” Maya Angelou was a hero. Martin Luther King was a hero. Nasty women were heroes, too, and the motto “Love is love is love” thrummed through the crowd. So many women carried signs that simply read “Equality.” Through it all I heard drummers, playing out a steady rhythm, like a beating heart.
I embarked on this project because I wanted to examine the growing influence of anti-feminist narratives, the paralyzing effects of the “Ciao, feminism!” culture, and how both are polluting feminism’s necessary growing pains and intense self-analysis. This book joins a number of recent titles that analyze how feminism is connecting today, how it’s being attacked and celebrated and practiced, and what it means to put feminism in the bright and glaring spotlight once more. I’ve interviewed some of the authors of these other books and discussed the work of others. I see all of us working together, even those of us who are strangers, to ignite a sorely needed conversation on equality and human rights, and how we, as a society, choose to value, protect, and guarantee both. I’ve heard from so many feminists who, upon hearing that I actually spent a fair amount of my research time with anti-feminists, remark on my bravery or ask me what “they” were like, their curiosity akin to a five-year-old studying an especially nasty bug. I hope these pages answer the latter question, and call for us all to have that same bravery, to learn from those who disagree with us, if only to make ourselves stronger.
At its core, though, my subject has been how women today navigate their lives. My goal was to trace the trajectory of how women define their choices and the contexts in which they make them, particularly in a world that historically and currently has prescribed who we can and cannot be. That trajectory is not one line, but many; not straight, but messy. It reveals both true steps toward equality and also the fierce need to not let that be enough. We need a relentless, energetic force that doesn’t stop until it has dismantled our structural imbalances and barriers and built something better. Some women have made great strides, sure, but that is not the same thing as equality. And isn’t that what’s at stake here: the very definition of what we mean when we talk about equality?
We all don’t fucking have enough bread. If we continue to deny that, we’re heading for a dismal future. We’ll never reach parity in the workforce; structural support to keep women from opting out will remain stunted; we’ll continue to make less while we do the same work; we won’t have control over our own bodies; we’ll continue to be raped at astounding rates; we’ll continue to be told and to believe that we deserve it; we’ll keep acting like this is the best we can do; we’ll see bigger roadblocks placed in front of women of color, women with disabilities, and women who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum; Indigenous women will keep going missing; and we’ll continue to categorize women, deciding who is worthy of attention and who is not, how a woman can be and how she cannot. We will tell ourselves we chose it. Some of our lives will get better, because that is the undeniable promise of anti-feminism and post-feminism (even, to some extent, mainstream white feminism).
These backlash movements are appealing precisely because they pin both success and failure on the individual. It’s a heady mix of choice and can-doism that allows women to claim their own empowerment while not acknowledging what keeps others from claiming theirs. I don’t believe anti-feminists and post-feminists truly want the worst of the Dark Ages for women, or that pop feminism only cares about white, middle-class women. But I do believe they work in their own way to protect a system that has given them power and protected their values while maintaining very clear roles—it promises them certainty in a time when uncertainty blooms like weeds. And I do believe we can do better. It’s more important than ever for us to keep making more bread, until all our baskets runneth over.
If we ever hope to achieve this, feminism also has to do better. It must keep peering into itself and keep practicing inclusivity and intersectionality. Not to get too sappy, but it must keep practicing love. Whenever I think about this, I think back to what Colleen MacQuarrie, a PEI-based activist, told me about the successful campaign for abortion access in her province. She credited a lot of the success to hope and the celebration of different tactics and coalitions within the movement. Activists welcomed new ideas and responded with a simple, “Yes, and how can I support you?” For her, hope did not come from envisioning one single mass movement but rather a diverse upsurge of movements in constant dialogue about the principles of equity and respect for different peoples and the world we live in. “If we can have more voices and more actions, I don’t worry that we won’t be creative enough,” she told me. “I don’t worry that we won’t be able to find the evidence. I know we will. What I worry more about is the silence. I worry when we’re not hearing about the uprisings.” She added that action is about hope responding to its antithesis: despair. “Despair is the gift to oppressive forces. To the extent that you can inspire despair and degradation, you’re winning the status quo.” Anytime we see a rise in despair, she argued, you hear a Mad Libs–style, fill-in-the-blank-here question: “What can we ever do about…?”
Hope is an antidote to that despair. It tells us that we can do something and then it propels us into action.
Later, I’d hear about the counterprotestors. A makeshift float, which its driver dubbed “Trump Unity Bridge,” tried to truck Trump supporters through the march. Later, anti-feminists would troll the social media accounts of marchers, posting anti-abortion gifs and spreading misogyny. Later, at a bar with the Canadian marchers, I’d hear men jeer at feminists, drunkenly telling them to “go back to the kitchen.” Later, as we prepared to walk back to the parking lot, locals would tell us which streets to avoid, warning us that it wasn’t safe for women at night. We’d discover our bus had broken down, and our grassroots organizing would falter, stranding some of us in the parking lot, lost. American Red Cross disaster relief would swoop in and save us, doling out fleece blankets, Ritz crackers, and hot chocolate. We’d joke that it wasn’t symbolic.
In the coming weeks, all the old tropes would dance by like cardboard cowboys at a carnival shooting gallery. Anti-feminists and conservatives would point to Madonna’s comment to the crowd—that she’d “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House”—as proof of feminism’s inherent violence, its terrorist intent. And, later, the women who marched would have tough conversations about how to keep the momentum going. They’d debate and discuss how to be intersectional, stumbling forward and back, striving to build a new feminist movement. Later, we’d remember that it was all so, so uncertain, this success. But right now, all of that was far away. Surrounded and embraced by a thunderous crowd with no edges, we were a reminder that, together, nothing could touch us. In that briefest of moments, we were unstoppable.