The Women's March, Year 4: Broader Issues and More Controversy

The first Women’s March, held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, swamped the nation’s capital with as many as half a million demonstrators united in their disdain for the new president and their demands for equal rights. Nationwide, as many as 5.2 million marchers are estimated to have turned out at more than 650 locations.

Three years later, the Women’s March movement has been battered by controversies and fractured by infighting. Crowd predictions for Saturday’s marches do not approach the numbers of past protests: Some 25,000 people have committed to attend the Washington demonstration, according to Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the chief operating officer of Women’s March Inc., the nonprofit group that sponsors the protests and supports work for its causes. An additional 22,000 have signed up for 252 demonstrations planned in other cities.

But the group’s leaders say a head count is a poor way to measure the movement’s strength.

The march was at the center of another public outcry this week, but this time it was for what the federal government — not organizers — had done. The Washington Post reported that the National Archives in Washington had blurred signs that were critical of Trump in a photograph of the 2017 march. The move prompted complaints from marchers, historians and other archivists.

Here’s what you need to know about the demonstrations.

What are this year’s marches about?

The first demonstrations in January 2017 were an almost cathartic response to the Trump presidency by its critics, and opposition to the president and his policies remains a rallying point for protesters. But the marches on Saturday, and the events that preceded them this week, are emphasizing three issues that organizers say were broadly backed by the group’s national members: climate change, immigration and reproductive rights.

In part, the organizers say, that reflects the organization’s renewed focus on hands-on efforts — to lobby elected officials, run for office and become personally involved in civic life.

“This is about the system on which our lives run,” said Rinku Sen, a co-president of the Women’s March board of directors. “Changing to a better system is going to take more than a single day of action.”

Where are women marching?

From Boise, Idaho, to Orlando, Florida, protesters joined hundreds of marches in parks, streets and city halls.

The gatherings were filled with colorful signs, slogans for various Democratic presidential candidates and the trademark knitted hats that turned the National Mall into a sea of pink in 2017. Politicians and activists spoke at rallies around the country.

In New York City, snow-dusted protesters gathered near Times Square, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., made a surprise appearance.

Much of the protesters’ ire was focused on Trump, but the marches also became channels for rallygoers to express frustration over a broad range of local and national issues. A sign at the women’s march in San Jose, California, said the local police department had failed rape victims. Placards in Douglas, Michigan, urged tighter gun restrictions, and some women in Greeley, Colorado, held signs protesting gerrymandering. In Chicago, several people urged residents to fill out the census in 2020.

What happened to the Women’s March as an organization?

The Women’s March has been dogged by controversies and internal divisions from the start.

The march organizers removed an anti-abortion group from its list of sponsors, potentially alienating some supporters even before the first protest. Some leaders became embroiled in charges of anti-Semitism in 2018, stoked by a refusal to disavow — and on occasion public support — Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader widely criticized for his anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ positions. Supporters discouraged by the organizers’ tight control of the movement formed their own organization, March On, seeking to broaden its reach beyond its politically liberal base.

In response, the Women’s March has overhauled its management and philosophy in the last year. Three of its founders stepped down, and the group diversified its board of directors.

“There are 16 new women leading the Women’s March as a volunteer board,” Sen said. “We’ve fixed what we could fix on the anti-Semitism front. We’ve acknowledged the mistakes we’ve made, and the harm people have felt.”

Can the movement keep its momentum?

The rifts in the organization, as well as an onslaught of political drama from Washington, have led to many doubts about the movement’s relevance. But march organizers cite studies concluding that roughly seven of 10 participants in previous marches have been newcomers, and they say their focus is on quality, not quantity.

“I’m not worried about our numbers tomorrow,” Sen said. “Whoever shows up is going to be ready to do something — not just Sunday, but Monday, Tuesday and beyond.”

David S. Meyer, a sociologist and scholar of protest movements at the University of California, Irvine, said she might have a point.

“Big demonstrations are great visuals,” he said, “but they really are like exclamation points in a larger story about social movements.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the civil rights march on Washington in 1963 is a national touchstone, he said, but it was a single highlight in a civil rights struggle that has spanned decades and touched millions of people — and continues today.

So it is, he suggested, with movements like the Women’s March.

“Everybody wants to tell an apocalyptic story where people turn out in the streets and the world changes,” he said. “Unfortunately, the world is more complicated than that. In real life, social change takes a long time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .