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These Are the Women Organizing the Womens March on Washington
One very cold New York City morning just before Christmas, a group of women showed up to have their picture taken by photographer Cass Bird at a warehouse turned studio in the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, a chunky little peninsula that reaches out into the East River toward Rikers Island.
Those who made the trek were among those responsible for organizing the Women’s March on Washington, a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.
It’s also an all-hands-on-deck, eleventh-hour, race-to-the-finish-line kind of endeavor, which has required all 10, or 15, or 16, or 20 of its chief orchestrators to work around the clock since the week of the election. This is the type of national effort that the group’s communications czar, Cassady Fendlay, told me could take “six months to a year to plan.” These women had just over two months to pull it off.
The story of how the Women’s March on Washington came into being has already been codified into lore. As the returns rolled in on November 8, a Hawaiian grandmother and retired attorney named Teresa Shook created a Facebook page suggesting that women gather to protest in D.C. on inauguration weekend. Then she went to bed. By the time she woke up, 10,000 people had affirmed the plan.
Simultaneously, Bland, founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York and an advocate for domestic manufacturing, had a similar idea. She also posted about it on Facebook, where her followership had ballooned after she raised $20,000 for Planned Parenthood by selling Nasty Woman and Bad Hombre T-shirts. “We need to form a resistance movement that’s about what is positive,” she remembered thinking. “Something that will help empower us to wake up in the morning and feel that women still matter.”
Those who made the trek were among those responsible for organizing the Women’s March on Washington, a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.
It’s also an all-hands-on-deck, eleventh-hour, race-to-the-finish-line kind of endeavor, which has required all 10, or 15, or 16, or 20 of its chief orchestrators to work around the clock since the week of the election. This is the type of national effort that the group’s communications czar, Cassady Fendlay, told me could take “six months to a year to plan.” These women had just over two months to pull it off.
The story of how the Women’s March on Washington came into being has already been codified into lore. As the returns rolled in on November 8, a Hawaiian grandmother and retired attorney named Teresa Shook created a Facebook page suggesting that women gather to protest in D.C. on inauguration weekend. Then she went to bed. By the time she woke up, 10,000 people had affirmed the plan.
Simultaneously, Bland, founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York and an advocate for domestic manufacturing, had a similar idea. She also posted about it on Facebook, where her followership had ballooned after she raised $20,000 for Planned Parenthood by selling Nasty Woman and Bad Hombre T-shirts. “We need to form a resistance movement that’s about what is positive,” she remembered thinking. “Something that will help empower us to wake up in the morning and feel that women still matter.”
http://www.vogue.com/13520360/meet-the-women-of-the-womens-march-on-washington/
I wish I could be there. Kudos to all the DU'ers who are making the trip!
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