A grand time was had by feminists from all over the nation Sunday, out exercising our right to peaceably assemble and to petition our government for redress of grievances. While we still can.
The women who organized the march came up with a scheme to count our numbers and announced that there were more than a million of us there and it was the largest demonstration in the history of the nation. ABC had us down to "tens of thousands." Other networks admitted to "several hundred thousands." I didn't see FOX News, but I assume we were down a few thousand on that channel, and almost all the news outlets gave either some or equal time to the few hundred anti-choice groups that turned out. The National Park Service has quit trying to guess the numbers on big marches, so it was up for grabs.
As a longtime reporter on protest marches, I guarantee the best way to estimate a crowd is to count all the feet in it and divide by two. Actually, there are a couple of traditional methods -- you can use an aerial photo, divide it into small squares, count all the people in one square and then multiply that by the total number of squares. Or you can station yourself at a given intersection, count the people who pass by in one minute, and then multiply that by the number of minutes the whole march takes to pass. No one has ever claimed either method is precise. I can only report that women filled the Washington Mall on Sunday and put on a whale of a show.
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The signs ranged from feisty to funny to touching. "My daughter marched for your rights in Iraq; I am here today to march for her rights." "Keep your rosaries out of our ovaries." "George W. Bush believes in abstinence -- Lucky Laura." And, of course, the omnipresent, "Who decides?"
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