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6th ANNUAL WOMEN’S HOUSING MARCH / Caelie_Frampton

January 6, 2017; USA Today

With less than two weeks before Inauguration Day, women and their allies are finalizing logistics for a huge march on the Capitol and a series of marches across the country and the world to take place on January 21st. No matter how many women show up, this increasingly unified movement will need to agree on next steps and how to best use the momentum that began with a Facebook post.

The women’s march effort has faced multiple setbacks and controversies but is poised to be the biggest inauguration demonstration in history. More than 150,000 people registered, according to the Washington Post, in the two months since a red tide rolled through the country on Election Day, November 8th. President-elect Donald Trump is poised to take office with a Republican majority in both the Senate and House—the first Republican trifecta in more than 10 years.

The grassroots movement has recently gained some of the nation’s top progressive nonprofit organizations as official partners for the march. Among them are dozens of organizations with household names, including Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, GLAAD, Oxfam, and NAACP.

This conforms to the “canary in the coalmine” construct mentioned yesterday in relationship to Planned Parenthood and to comments made by Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, about the emergence of a new informal coalition of cause:

I will say, I’ve been doing this work a long time, not always at Planned Parenthood but in various progressive organizations. If there is one thing that his election did for the progressive community, it served as an enormous bonding experience. Over the last month, we’ve had meetings of some of the major progressive organizations. Folks recognize that our issues, our organizations and frankly our activists are all connected. Planned Parenthood patients are immigrants, they’re Muslims, they’re LGBT folks, they’re single parents, they’re students. And all of the attacks that folks are anticipating going forward are ones that are already engaging our activists as well. We feel a particular responsibility to stand with those who’ve stood with us as we’ve been under attack these many years.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post Express, a free daily newspaper, had to correct a story on the women’s march last week when it mistakenly used the symbol for men instead of women to illustrate the cover.—Anna Berry