We Are at a Tipping Point, and the Women’s March Represents a Desire for Change

Ai-Jen Poo

Ai-jen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of the Caring Across Generations campaign.

January 9, 2017

Five years ago, Francis Fox Piven, a social movement historian, said that Occupy Wall Street, protests in Wisconsin over Draconian measures to curb the power of unions, and young immigrants known as Dreamers who had taken dramatic action for the legalization of the undocumented were all responses to growing inequality in our economy and democracy. She said they were the signals of the coming of the next great social movement in the United States, a movement that would engage millions of people and transform our democracy. Not long after I heard her say this, #BlackLivesMatter took hold across the country in response to the rash of police killings of unarmed black people.

This march is doing exactly what it should be doing — galvanizing and focusing mass public opposition to a serious threat to the future of our democracy.

It’s not a surprise that women, particularly young women of color, were in the leadership of many of these movements. Women are often first responders — in their own homes and communities, on the job and in politics. For Piven and for me, change was clearly afoot, but the tipping point would only come when we witnessed not only activists, but millions of everyday people — disenfranchised and disaffected, with no connection to any organized social movement — express their desire for change.

The Women’s March on Washington is the first major indication that our tipping point has arrived. Some have criticized how it started. Others say it doesn’t matter how it started, it matters how it will end, or what it will lead to. I believe both matter. The fact that it started organically, with a woman and her Facebook friends, and grew to a quarter of a million people officially registered in 2 months, matters. It speaks to the breadth and depth of outrage at the turn of public events.

This march is doing exactly what it should be doing and what no one else is doing — galvanizing and focusing mass public opposition to a dangerous and erratic administration that poses a serious threat to the future of our democracy. And to a president-elect who ran on a platform that promoted violence and explicitly denigrated women.

We should celebrate the women who had the foresight and courage to put the call out for the Women’s March on Washington. They are defenders of our democracy. I hope their names will go down in history as having played a major role in catalyzing our nation’s next great social movement, the one that saves and expands our democracy and that refuses to stand down in the face of authoritarianism and bigotry. But, of course, how it will end is up to all of us.


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Topics: Donald J. Trump, Issues for Trump and America, women, women's issues

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