While its vision of equality is still far from being fully realized, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s won important victories and offers vital lessons for today’s organizers.
Dissent editors reflect on the weekend’s marches.
If we are going to spend the next four years—or much more—arguing about the meaning of solidarity, well, that is a fight the left should welcome. Saturday’s marches showed that we are off to a good start.
At Saturday’s marches, countless first-time protesters joined veteran activists championing often ignored struggles, with a camaraderie to match the grim nihilism of the day before.
Someone on the march told me that this was the best line I had ever written. But I didn’t write it. It was a collective product, written down by my grand-daughter. The “grand” is in parenthesis because my daughters are also nasty women. And my wife has been a bolshevik feminist since she was twelve. I am absolutely certain that they will win.
The 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump represent a major political constituency; but if Saturday was any indication, they may before long be outnumbered by the likes of the marchers I saw holding signs that said, “Women are not up for grabs.”
