By Gabriella Borter, Stephanie Kelly and Allende Miglietta
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Caroline Waterman, a 59-year-old artist in Charlotte, North Carolina, joined her local 'Women's March' the day after Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017 and found a political home, becoming a poll greeter and taking on responsibility for canvassing on behalf of local Democrats.
This year, Waterman said she is so demoralized and ashamed of her fellow white women who voted for Trump that she cannot bring herself to join a planned anti-Trump march this Saturday.
"It feels like we’re out there complaining constantly but we just can’t seem to do anything about it,” she said. “I’m just feeling hopeless at the moment and I’m not sure a march is going to fix it.”
Millions of American women, angry about Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, staged the largest single-day protest in U.S. history on Jan. 21, 2017, flooding Washington with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and filling streets in state capitals around the country.
While the 'Women’s March' organization is coordinating another protest this Saturday, it is now dubbed the 'People's March' and just 25,000 are expected in Washington, compared to an estimated 500,000 in 2017. Dozens of cities around the country are also holding demonstrations, but they are expected to be low-key.
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem and musicians Madonna and Alicia Keys were among the 2017 stars, but the Washington People’s March doesn't have any big headliners. Steinem made the “hard decision” not to attend as the 90-year-old scales back on her travels, a representative said.
The crushing defeat of Kamala Harris, the second Democratic woman to challenge Donald Trump to the presidency and lose, has left liberal women exhausted and laid bare racial divides in the women's rights movements that will take some time to heal, more than a dozen activists and organizers told Reuters.
Despite Trump's role in restricting abortion rights and a court finding him liable for sexual assault, more white women voted for him in 2024 than in 2016, some 53% compared to 52%. Only 7% of Black women voted for Trump.
Rachel Noerdlinger is a senior advisor with Win With Black Women, a group of thousands of Black political advisers, fundraisers and strategists who poured money and organizing muscle into getting Harris elected. She said the women's movement was fractured: "We've got some tough conversations to be had, and we have to recognize we have commonalities and we have differences."
PEOPLE’S MARCH PLANS
Organizers are billing Saturday’s rally as a day of “joyful resistance,” and dozens of groups are participating to promote causes including climate justice, Palestinian rights, immigration rights and abortion rights.
“I would love to say that a women’s march, an effectively run march, could completely unify all women in the country. The truth is that it’s just not that simple,” said Rachel Carmona, Executive Director of Women’s March, who was not involved in organizing the 2017 protest. “There’s no silver bullet solution that’s going to come and happen and take the place of down and dirty, back to basics, on the ground organizing and mobilizing.”
Women’s March Managing Director Tamika Middleton said organizers are trying to use Saturday’s march as a way to recruit social activists for the long haul, focusing on sign-up tables and political skills training, and hosting a mass mobilization call the week after the march.
Rona Kaufman, 49, a law professor who attended the 2017 Women's March in Washington with her kids, may give a window into how tough it might be to recruit some former marchers. This time, she said, she voted for Trump, even though she is still critical of his character, because she prefers Republicans' policies on Israel and parents' rights, among other reasons. She noted that she had also supported Democratic President Bill Clinton based on policy, despite sexual misconduct claims against him.
"The reality is, unfortunately, in the world we live in, sexual assault and sexual harassment and demeaning of women, and misogyny and sexism are ever prevalent," said Kaufman. "And the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, they both have plenty of sexist, misogynist rapists amongst their leaders. So I voted on policy and not on character."
US FEMINISM'S DIVIDED ROOTS
Mainstream feminism in the U.S. has notably never benefited all women equally; the 19th amendment guaranteeing women’s right to vote was ratified in 1920, but Black women were not assured the right until 1965.
In December, a group of women activists organized by Rhonda Foxx, who headed women's outreach for the Harris campaign, met at Steinem's Upper East Side home to try to figure out how liberal women could move forward together.
"The women's coalition will persist," Foxx said, adding the movement was ready to mobilize and organize in a new political era.
Women need to speak to their neighbors and friends about the effects a Trump administration could have on women's rights, said A'shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits women to run for office. "I want that woman who has 80 Instagram followers because those are her family, her friends, her cousins," Gholar said.
Drilling down to local-level politics, from talking to neighbors to attending school board meetings and writing to state legislators, could be the best hope for the women’s rights movement to rise above virtue signaling and finger-pointing, activists said.
Several Black activists told Reuters they felt betrayed by white women.
"They do need to interrogate why they tend to align with the patriarchy, why their allegiance to their race supersedes their allegiance to their gender," said Amara Enyia, interim co-executive director for the Movement for Black Lives.
The era of the fun, symbolic "Women’s March" with its quippy posters and pink "pussyhats" is over, many activists said. A brief post-2024 election social media trend of liberal white women wearing blue bracelets to signal that they had voted for Harris quickly faded away.
"We cannot pink hat and blue bracelet our way out of systemic oppression," said Jordan Williams, a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a Black content creator. "This is not an arts and crafts project.”