Women’s March on Washington

The day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, millions of women and their allies around the world marched to express opposition to his ideology and support for women’s rights. With around 1 percent of the entire population of the United States participating, the event was probably the largest single-day protest in the country’s history.

Almost two years later, one of the organizations that grew out of the march, Women’s March Inc., is embroiled in controversy, its leaders accused of anti-Semitism and mismanagement.

One of the biggest concerns after the initial Women’s March demonstrations last year was whether protesters could sustain the momentum. Would people remain interested in protesting President Donald Trump’s government and the systemic sexism that led to his election?

Well, the numbers for the latest Women’s March protests — held over the weekend — are in. And people are definitely still interested.

It began as an unpaid modeling gig.

A decade ago, Munira Ahmed met with photographer Ridwan Adhami to shoot photos for the now-out-of-print Illume magazine, a publication focused on the lives of Muslims in America. Now a likeness of her face has become one of the most popular protest images following President Donald Trump’s election.

Last Saturday, 440,000 people marched on Washington in support of women’s rights and against the Trump presidency.

The new estimate comes from Curt Westergard, the president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, whose company both shoots and analyzes aerial photos and has counted other large gatherings on the Mall, such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

“Woman is the ni**er of the world.”

Jasleen Kohli was at Saturday’s Women’s March in Los Angeles when she saw a white demonstrator holding a sign emblazoned with that phrase.

Judging by the Women’s Marches that took place around the world on Saturday, January 21, the revolution will be pop cultural.

Sign after sign was built on pop cultural references, showing off empowering female characters or quoting famous movie lines or song lyrics or riffing off of famous plot twists.

PARK CITY, Utah — On Saturday, an estimated 8,000 men, women, and children converged on Park City, Utah, to take part in the Women’s March on Main, a satellite event coinciding with the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and many others around the country and the world.

As luck would have it, the march coincided with the first Saturday of the Sundance Film Festival — when Main Street is usually clogged with premieres, parties, stars, filmmakers, and attendees. They were all there too. But that morning, the march overtook the town.

Half a million people were estimated to have attended Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. More than 600 sister events were held around the world. The outpouring of activism generated national media attention.

But the true test of the demonstrations wasn’t on Saturday. Instead, the key will be if their energy and passion can be channeled into organizations built for a longer fight — and whether those institutions will effectively defend the march’s agenda in the months and years ahead.

There were two protests that took place in Washington, DC, on Saturday, both under the banner of the Women’s March on Washington.

One was headlined by Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem; the Indigo Girls and Toshi Reagon; Alicia Keys and Ashley Judd. The other was a messy, glorious, wildly unstructured free-for-all of families and singletons, millennials and octogenarians, all there to take a stand for women’s rights, in whatever form that took.

NEW YORK — Navigating from one end of Grand Central Station to the other is always a matter of skill and luck. On January 21, it was a matter of sheer determination — a feeling that radiated from the Women’s March protesters who kept pouring into the train station from all corners of New York City and its neighboring cities and suburbs beyond.

Though some New Yorkers opted to travel a few hours south for the main march in Washington, DC, an estimated 400,000 people took to the streets of New York City, where Donald Trump was born and raised and where he built his iconic real estate business. Still, in the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton won New York state, where she served as a senator, with 60 percent of the state’s vote.

In Boston, event planners for a sister Women’s March were expecting around 25,000 participants. Come Saturday, more than 100,000 people filled the streets. At the main event in Washington, DC, crowds are estimated at half a million.

It’s a story being told around the world.

Today was a big moment for women’s solidarity. Millions of people turned out in cities and towns around the world to demonstrate for women’s rights and challenge the presidency of Donald Trump. Thousands sported pink hats and carried signs with sharply worded messages for the new administration.

In total there were at least 670 events around the world, but the Women’s March on Washington was one of the most robustly attended, with at least 500,000 people estimated in the crowd.

Millions of people across the country marched for women’s rights Saturday, with hundreds of thousands of people at the main Women’s March in Washington, DC, as well as other large rallies in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Boston.

Overall, more than 600 marches were planned around the world for Saturday. But groups in smaller towns and cities in the United States also gathered in sister marches to rally for gender equality on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Here are 17 other places, many of them in states Trump won, where women gathered.

Hundreds of thousands of people poured into Washington, DC, to take part in the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday. But the number of participants alone doesn’t give a very good visual of just how huge the event is.

Thankfully, Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce offered a great visual for the occasion with Google Maps:

The Women’s March on Washington is a grassroots response to President Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory over Hillary Clinton, who was the first major party female candidate in US history.

Saturday’s event, as its name indicates, is largely about the gender dynamics behind Trump’s rise and Clinton’s loss. But it’s also adopted a broader progressive platform — one that includes a variety of issues, such as freedom from sexual violence, ending police brutality, and immigrant and refugee rights.

It started with a small idea on Facebook, born out of despair after the election — a group of women marching to protest the presidency of Donald Trump. Soon, the idea of a women’s protest ballooned through social media channels into a viral event with thousands expected to descend on Washington, DC, the day after inauguration.

Organizing the protest got off to a shaky start. The initial organizers, white women, sparked controversy for calling the march the Million Women March, the same name of famous marches organized by black activists in the ’90s to address struggles of the black community. Some women took to the Facebook event page to express their fear and frustration that the protest represented an exclusive feminism for white women only, ignoring intersecting race, class, and sexual orientation identities that may have other needs.

Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton came as a shock to many — and for many women who opposed Trump in particular, Clinton’s loss was personally devastating. But after the election, desperation and fear swelled into a plan for action: a “Women’s March on Washington” on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration and the first full day of his administration.

What started as a viral idea on social media has snowballed into what could be the biggest mass mobilization yet that America has seen in response to a presidential inauguration. About 60,000 people protested Richard Nixon’s 1973 inauguration at the height of the Vietnam War, and thousands protested George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration.

The organizers of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, which has brought hundreds of thousands of participants to the nation’s capital and inspired satellite events around the country and world, say the event’s ultimate goal is “to affirm our shared humanity and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination.”

But a promotional video posted to YouTube by the organizers of the event provides a more personal perspective, in which participants explain why they’re attending.

On Inauguration Day, Washington, DC’s metro cars and buses were emptier than usual. Despite road closures, traffic was subdued. Outside of the roughly 250,000 people who attended President Donald Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, and the thousands of anti-Trump demonstrators staging protests in the surrounding streets, Washington, DC, had largely gone dark for a day.

Only a day later, just getting to the nation’s capital is proving much more difficult, as hundreds of thousands head to the National Mall for the Women’s March on Washington.

“What are they doing out there?” “What do they want?” “What’s their goal?”

If there’s a protest or demonstration, you can count on an observer asking these questions from the sidelines. And, to be fair, the answer is less than obvious when tens of thousands of diverse people have gathered, with signs, chants, and group memberships that cover a wide range of issues.