The Women's March: Reigniting Resistance

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Alyssa Hurst:

You're listening to RadioEd.

Lorne Fultonberg:

A University of Denver podcast.

Nicole Militello:

We're your hosts, Nicole Militello.

Lorne Fultonberg:

Lorne Fultonberg.

Alyssa Hurst:

And I'm Alyssa Hurst.

Alyssa Hurst:

I was living in Baltimore in January, 2017 and I remember driving by Penn Station on the day of that very first Women's March and seeing just an endless line of pink, literally circling around the block with folks trying to catch a train to DC. Millions of people ended up marching that day across the country for women's rights, making it the largest protest in U.S. history. And since then, it has seemed like women have been having this really powerful moment. This past weekend marked the fourth Women's March, and that got me wondering, what kind of tangible change all of the signs and speeches and chants have actually made. So I asked Marie Berry, she's a professor and political sociologist who works from an international studies framework. Her research focuses on civil resistance everywhere from Brazil to Bosnia, but she's also a self-described scholar-activist, feminist and an enthusiastic supporter of the Women's March.

Alyssa Hurst:

So welcome.

Marie Berry:

Thank you so much.

Alyssa Hurst:

What kind of impacts have we seen so far, especially here in the United States and on American politics?

Marie Berry:

Well, certainly there's been a sustained engagement in issues of asserting women's rights, but also I think of resisting the Trump administration's policies more generally. And of course the 2017 Women's March was just was massive. And so we've seen, while we've seen some sort of decline in the number of people actually turning out to the marches in the subsequent two marches in 2018 and 2019, I think we still did see a very vibrant and robust movement in the streets. But I think the impacts of the Women's March are felt much more broadly than actually in the streets that day. We saw many of the same nodes or sort of local organizing chapters for the Women's March converting to chapters for the kind of mobilizing around the midterm elections. And I think we saw a lot of Indivisible chapters springing up out of the same networks that had been involved in actually organizing and planning the women's marches.

Marie Berry:

I'm actually quite amazed, I think, at the type of impacts we can see from the marches. I think beyond generating solidarity and beyond actually creating an environment in the United States that was really kind of dynamic and vibrant, the Women's March really has led to the emergence I think, or it's led to a couple of different things. I mean, I think it's led a conversation around intersectionality at the mainstream. The importance of looking at race and class and ability and immigration status and so many other categories of difference alongside gender has been something that the Women's March I think really played an integral role in actually shepherding to the mainstream of political discourse.

Marie Berry:

And then of course also we've seen, I think, the emergence of really strong female candidates for political office across the board at all levels of government. And many of that is linked to the momentum around the march, but also around Hillary Clinton's loss. And then around the kind of rising visibility of misogyny and of violence and kind of harassment against women in the U.S. So yeah, I look forward to see what this fourth march does as we lead into the, to the 2020 election.

Alyssa Hurst:

So can you talk about whether or not the Women's March has had any kind of reverberating effect outside of the U.S. Has it made a difference worldwide, too?

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. I think the Women's March happened really on the eve of this period of widespread people power mobilization that we're seeing really in its peak right now. From Lebanon to Hong Kong to Chile, to so many other places that are currently, as we sit and as we speak, have people in the streets mobilizing, not just for women's rights but for democracy and human rights more broadly. And of course women's rights as part of that. And so, yes, I think we see tremendous links from the Women's March here to global women's marches. Of course there were women's marches all over the world and in 2017, I think that in some ways, the march and the sheer scale of the march helped really remind people of what's possible when we claim our democracy back and claim our rights and claim our seat at the table. I think thinking about the Women's March in as it is kind of in line with so many other people power movements across the globe is really how to think about it.

Alyssa Hurst:

Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned in that first part of the conversation that politics have changed, that more women have organized and gotten into politics specifically because of the Women's March. What is the mechanism there? How did the Women's March actually put people into office?

Marie Berry:

That's a great question. I think that it did not actually put people directly into office, but what it did do is create networks of people that were committed ideologically and really practically towards resisting the Trump agenda and to resisting the kind of encroachment of conservative populist politics in their local contexts. And so we see women who were very, very inspired by the kind of tremendous outpouring of solidarity running for political office. We see some of the same groups that were in charge of organizing the Women's March, then converting into these groups that were really trying to kind of swing left to these progressive, blue different organizations. I mean there's a bunch of organizations that have been involved with trying to get women into political office, both running for Congress, running for city council, running for governor. And I think that we see the kind of, not just the momentum, but also the organizational structures that were formed as part of that Women's March coalition really, really doing a tremendous amount of work during the midterm elections in particular. And I think that they will continue to do really important work and getting female candidates and getting progressive candidates elected in the 2020 elections.

Alyssa Hurst:

Sure. Are there any people that you could point to in particular that came from this?

Marie Berry:

That's a great question actually, and of course we talk about the squad and people that have really risen to a position of visibility. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as being kind of really a household name these days and known really widely. Her campaign is not directly linked towards the Women's March necessarily, but it absolutely was linked to the campaign that, frankly, in the 2016 election was a last link to the Hillary Clinton campaign, but was actually more linked to the Sanders campaign. And that type of grassroots organizing, this small sort of door to door, really decentralized and deinstitutionalize kind of community organizing strategies that that campaign put into practice were very linked towards the success of candidates like AOC in the midterm elections.

And I think depending on where you're looking, we see, we see similar successes of people coming out of that more progressive bent of the Democratic party. If we look at the way in which the Democratic party I think has typically strategized its elections, a lot of those same actors, the same organizations that are kind of doing that more mobilizing work, were very involved in mobilizing people in the Women's March. And so I think in some ways a lot of these things are all linked, but it's an important, I think, shift and an important tactic for especially kind of progressive candidates on the left to be looking at that community level engagement and mobilizing among the people rather than kind of these big ad campaigns and those really resource-demanding campaigns that have required so much investment from large super PACs and so forth thus far. I think we're going to see a continuation of that type of mobilizing in the 2020 elections.

Alyssa Hurst:

I think I kind of know what your answer to this one will be, but is there value in repeating these marches and doing it every year, even though the attendance is going to drop probably? You can't match that first year. So what's the value in repeating it, do they get stale? Is it actually really, really useful and important?

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. I think there's a few ways that we can think about its value. I think if we look at the 2017 March, the value was certainly in an expression of collective grief, anger and frustration over the way that that election went. And I think the solidarity gained by people that participated in that march was something that will last some people, not everybody, of course. And I think it was actually alienating for some people who attended the marches. But I think that that solidarity and that felt sense of shared kind of community outrage is really powerful for reminding us of our democratic responsibility and our responsibility to actually foreground issues of women's rights and the rights of the most vulnerable in our politics. This is not an issue of a kind of politics on paper.

This is lived experiences that people have. And I think the Women's March really reminded people of the consequences of our apathy, the consequences of our lack of engagement. And so I really think that first and foremost, the solidarity gained by being at such an event can be really powerful. And I think that is something that also can require and can benefit from an annual kind of reminder. And then secondly, I mean, I think especially if we look back to that 2017 march, movements are not spontaneous. They're rarely spontaneous, I should say. And so often we see these kinds of outpourings of people in the streets and we think, "Wow, this was social media that that mobilized everybody there." And that can happen, that can be true. But more often than not, there's some sort of structure, some sort of organizing body, some sort of leadership behind the scenes that is making decisions about lots of different parts of what that event is going to look like.

And with something on the scale of the 2017 Women's March, there was a tremendous amount of labor and that went in, and thought that went in, to the really about nine weeks of planning that march, between the actual in November and the March and January. We had Carmen Perez, one of the national co-chairs of the Women's March out here to the University of Denver a couple of years ago. And she really talked about the tremendous sort of work that it was to bring hundreds of community based organizations, women's groups into some sort of kind of coordination. And some sort of agreement on what the march would actually prioritize and what the march would look like. And those structures that become established as a result of that event don't necessarily dissipate.

The second that event is over, they can be repurposed. Those networks can then say, "Hey, let's actually mobilize for this particular cause. We see these networks being essential." When we have just organizations that are kind of involved in immigrant rights, focused on these issues, their platform exists but it's not as expansive as if they're able to kind of build coalitions with organizations and with leaders that are working also on climate crisis. They're working also on a women's rights and reproductive rights, that are also working on you name it, any sort of issue. I am a believer in these, in these marches as a way of also reminding us of our connections and the connections between our various causes and kind of specific issues we might work on a day to day basis.

We, I think, can actually try to drive a broader movement forward in a way that will actually result in the ultimate goal, which is I think a free and fair and open democratic society where every single human being is free from oppression and free from harm.

Alyssa Hurst:

You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but here in America we've had #MeToo, we've had the Women's March, we've seen women rise up in politics, so obviously women are kind of having a moment right now. And that's not just a local thing either. So is this new or are we just starting to pay attention?

Marie Berry:

Well I think in some ways women are having a moment, but women are also facing unprecedented an onslaught of harm and of threats to their rights, to our rights. And I think a backlash in many ways, not just in the United States, but across the world towards the gains women have made in recent decades in terms of rights and in terms of representation.

Absolutely. The last few years has seen sort of, I think in some ways, an unearthing of a lot of the conversations that have for so long been buried and have been happening behind closed doors. I mean when #MeToo started, I think the recognition of so many people that they're harassment and that their experiences in the workplace it was a not random kind of one-off event. It was something that is systematic. This, I think is in some ways, is just so deeply horrifying. And I think we can celebrate in some ways the expression and the outpouring and the sense of solidarity and recognition that this is something that's a real profound issue, while at the same time recognizing that we elected a president who has so many people out alleging sexual harassment, sexual assault.

I think it's a really troubling moment too, because even with the Women's March, even with the kind of recognition of all of the harms that are gendered harms in our society and more broadly, women are still subjected to a tremendous amount of inequality and tremendous amounts of violence. I mean, reproductive rights. I've never been so threatened as to right now. And I see these limitations and restrictions on reproductive rights as a form of state violence against women. And I think that we live in an incredibly kind of fraught moment when we see when we can celebrate kind of the visibility of, yes, we have the highest number of women in our legislature, in our Congress that we've ever had. That's great.

Alyssa Hurst:

But at the same time.

Marie Berry:

Exactly, exactly.

Alyssa Hurst:

Here in America, women can go to a march. A lot of women can take a day off of work and go to a March and they can do that without worrying about any kind of real, tangible, scary repercussions that's not necessarily true in other parts of the world. So can we talk about what kind of advantages American women have when they go out to march versus women in other countries and maybe what we can learn from these overseas sisters?

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. I think we live in a democracy, although a democracy that has been challenged. And there is a freedom of assembly and there's a freedom of speech and of taking to the streets and being able to actually do so in a way that doesn't necessarily make one afraid for brutality. But I'll note too that I think that this is a sense of security that tends to not be shared by every woman in America. Women of color, women from, from, from other marginalized communities that there is no kind of presumption of security when taking to the streets in a movement. There's a fear of violence from all angles, from the state, from the police, from the community

In some ways I think that the struggles that American women face and the insecurity is actually more similar sometimes to the struggles of women of other places in the world than we then we kind of choose to—

Alyssa Hurst:

And that's important for people to know.

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. And I think it's especially important for white people to really recognize and white able bodied people to really recognize our own kind of assumptions of that protection is a privilege and not everybody shares that.

I was in Uganda a couple of weeks ago and there were students that were protesting at Makerere University there about some fee hikes that were happening at the university. And the brutal crackdown from police against these largely female demonstrators was really a reminder to me of the way in which it's, especially in this current global political moment, there is a tremendous risk associated with standing up for your rights. And across the globe right now we're seeing violent backlashes against many of these people power movements. These movements are getting traction, they're getting concessions, they're actually changing narratives and conversations in each of their respective places. For instance, in Latin America there's been a swell of kind of indigenous protests of people claiming and demanding rights that have actually been met with concessions from the government.

Same thing, some concessions in Hong Kong, concessions in Lebanon, there are some of these victories, but they've come at a tremendous price. In Sudan for instance, in a place that had a really woman led people power movement topple the regime of Omar [inaudible 00:19:21] just last summer. We also see tremendous amounts of sexual violence being directed at these protesters. And so I think reminding all of us of the commendable bravery and courage it takes in somebody under these repressive conditions for protesters sexually stand up and demand.

We in the United States can reflect both on our privilege. But also I think it's important for us to reflect on who's able to protest, who is able to take a day off work. And it's certainly not that that's a privilege to be able to do. And I think that's important.

Alyssa Hurst:

Right. So zooming back into the U.S. a bit, you've talked to me in the past about the history of women's movements in the U.S. And this is not the first one by a long shot. So can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the ways that women have organized in the U.S. in the past, maybe ones people don't necessarily know about?

Marie Berry:

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll admit that it's not my area of expertise by any means. But we're coming up this year on a few major anniversaries and I think one of them is the 100 years of suffrage in the United States. And so this is a reminder, I think, of the organizing that that was done by women in the early 20th century around ensuring women had access to voting, white women in particular. Full voting rights of course were not extended to African American women for several decades more. And even then, informal barriers remained in terms of people actually accessing the ballot box.

When I think about the suffragist movement, actually at what I really love kind of in tandem to that is the way in which it also was a peace movement. I mean, not all of that movement was, but there were factions that were very, very linked towards women's groups in Germany and France and then in the UK during World War II. And then WILPF, the Women's International League For Peace And Freedom, is the oldest sort of women's peace organization, celebrated its 100th anniversary a couple of years ago.

And this was because during World War II, there were women actually demanding these conferences and these basically issuing lists of demands all linked towards stopping the violence. And women were joining together from, from across the enemy lines, if you will, the German women joining together with French women and American women and British women and actually convening at conferences during the war, while the war was going on. And I think that's a very Western example of one way that women throughout history have, in context of tremendous violence and war, found ways oftentimes to set aside the kind of political divisions and find shared humanity across lines, around issues of peace, around issues of ending war.

And women's peace movements in the United States and elsewhere across the world are oftentimes standing in solidarity with each other and with history in terms of the way they, I think, hold up an ideal kind of a more of a pacifist ideal. An ideal that this world is harmed every time there is, there is militarism, there is a military engagement, there is violence, there is death.

Alyssa Hurst:

So you mentioned sort of these things that are real strengths among women who are organizing and have been for a long time. Can you talk about maybe some of the tools that women bring to the table that aren't necessarily there if they're not?

Marie Berry:

Well, I think so often and in so many of the movements that I've been working with across the globe and been fortunate to be able to interview activists and people that have participated in these movements, I think one of the things that comes out is that to successfully mobilize a large number of people to actually make demands on their government, to make demands on different corporations and other institutions, it requires a broad cross section of society. And so when women are not in the movement, I mean it just doesn't represent society. It's like all of our needs and all of our kind of demands are just simply not reflected or are present. There are so many examples of women being really key, and I all say that it's not just women.

Men, too, but women are oftentimes key in trying to maintain nonviolent discipline when these movements take to the streets. I think I was interviewing some activists from Venezuela recently who were involved with the anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela. And they were talking about groups of women who sing these traditional Venezuelans songs at some of these movements, especially nearby to youth groups at the movements that tend to be more prone to violence. And if there's sort of a tension or a sense of worry that the crowd is going to start kind of getting restless or aggressive, they'll start singing. And they sing these songs and it's sort of a way of saying, "Look, this is our history. We need to be in this together and also calm down." And I think that's just one example.

My work in Bosnia has brought me into so many spaces with activists, Bosnian women who take to the streets every month or sometimes every week to demand information about the whereabouts of their loved ones whose bodies have never been discovered after the violence. And these women have mobilized in so many ways around their shared grief as mothers who have lost sons, who have lost husbands, who've lost fathers, who've lost other loved ones in the conflict, which was at this point more than two decades ago. And the kind of shared ability to mobilize around this grief in a very nonpolitical way I think has been one of the real strengths of that movement. And it takes inspiration for movements like Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who starting in the 70s and then into the 80s and still today, I believe it's every Thursday, Las Madres still take to the Plaza de Mayo Bueno Aires and they still carry pictures of their, of their families, of the kids that were disappeared during Argentina's dirty war.

And I think that in some ways there's this strategic essentialism that many women's groups and mother's groups in particular do. Or they strategically say like we are women and we are actually not demanding something that's highly contentious or political. We're demanding knowledge about our kids. There's nobody in the world who can fault us for that, who could fault us for wanting to know what happened? Did they suffer? Where can we bury them? All of these questions that when unanswered I think just really prevent them from ever having a sense of peace. And so I think again, sometimes that's essentialization of gender, of women's roles, of caregivers, as mothers, as those that are less political than men I think has benefited many movements over the years as a tactic, as a strategy.

Although I always maintain a slight bit of caution in talking about that. I think because I think it's not to say that women are less political. I think oftentimes that grief is very political.

Alyssa Hurst:

And always less violent, also.

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. Absolutely, right. There's so many examples of women as champions of war, as proponents of violence. And I think we lose some of that when we kind of talk about women's inherently more peaceful nature. But I do think it can serve as a really powerful mobilizing theme for a lot of these movements.

Alyssa Hurst:

Is there any data out there that supports the fact that when women are involved, movements are more successful? Is that something that's proven?

Marie Berry:

Yeah. There's a tremendous amount of research that's, that's just coming out really, really strengthening some of these claims. And research by my former colleague here, Erica Chenoweth, who's now at the Harvard Kennedy School, has really shown this to be the case.

We are also running a project here at the University of Denver, which uses photographs taken at mass protest events to really look at the gender ratio of the crowd over the duration of the movement. And this is additional data that I think will help us better tease out the importance of women's involvement. And kind of the way in which women's involvement doesn't only matter for movement success, but may also matter for movements not turning violent during the course of the campaign. We'll be releasing some of those findings early next year, but the kind of one of the main simple sort of findings that was advanced by Erica Chenoweth but also Maria Stephan, who's at the U.S. Institute of Peace, their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, showed how when you bring a broad cross section of the population together, movements more likely to succeed.

And of course women are essential to the sheer number of people that show up in one of these movements.

Alyssa Hurst:

Wonderful. So we've talked about this a little bit, but do you consider yourself an activist? Obviously you're a scholar, you research activism, but you also march sometimes. Is that activism?

Marie Berry:

Absolutely. I mean my activism is certainly not limited to marching.

Alyssa Hurst:

Of course.

Marie Berry:

But I consider myself deeply to be a scholar activist. And what that means is that my scholarship is perhaps sometimes inspired and it's focus by a political commitment towards, for me, a kind of a feminist approach to pursuing, to fighting for the rights and emancipation of all human beings from any form of harm, as sort of my, my value commitment to the work that I do. But the challenge is that that value commitment can't shape the science and the social science that I do and the data I collect and it can't bias the type of analysis that I conduct, on the data I connect, that I collect I should say.

So for me, being a scholar activist requires in some ways doing, doing two separate things that then have a shared sort of a merger at the end. And so doing the research that's as objective and rigorous as possible while maintaining a political commitment and doing work perhaps separate from the research that's very focused on these goals of really trying to make the world a less harmful place. And then what happens, I think effectively for those of us who wear that hat as a scholar activist, is that our data, our findings then really becomes the currency that informs the research, or informs the advocacy. Yeah, exactly. And so at the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative here at the University of Denver, I mean, I'm so proud of the fact that what we do every year is we take evidence based strategies for waging effective nonviolent movements for social change.

And we put them in the hands of activists because they then take those findings, those best practices, those ideas, and they can use them in their own campaigns, in their own context. And so our research has gotten into the hands of activists from Columbia, from Togo, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Uganda, from Nigeria, from Ukraine, from Russia, from Thailand. I mean all across the globe from Nepal, from Pakistan, from India. And I think that these activists are then able to do the work that they do more effectively because of the rigor of the research that we conduct as academics. But certainly for my own reflection, I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't want to-

Alyssa Hurst:

Make a difference in some way.

Marie Berry:

Yeah, work towards a more just world. And so that's really the goal.

Alyssa Hurst:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being with us today.

Alyssa Hurst:

To learn more about Marie Berry's work with women activists through the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative, check out our show notes at Du.edu/radioed.

I'm Alyssa Hurst, today's host and RadioEd's executive producer. James Swearingen produced our theme music. Aaron Pendergast did our sound mixing and Tamara Chapman is our managing editor. This is RadioEd.