January 21 marks the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. All this week, Glamour will be spotlighting the stories, people, and issues that framed the March, as well as where we go from here.
Albert Einstein famously said that the most important thing each of us must decide for ourselves is whether the universe is a friendly or an unfriendly place. I had always believed the former—that despite its horrors, the world tilts, slowly but inexorably, toward progress. I was an optimist. I thought the best of people. It informed everything I did.
The election took that certainty away from me.
The march brought it back—in newer, wiser form.
I was one of those much-mocked idealists crushed on the morning of November 9. After all, I’d blithely told a reporter just a week before that I thought that come mid-November, Donald Trump would be “getting smaller by the second in the rearview mirror.” There was his open courtship of white supremacists and his flagrant misogyny, both denounced even by many in his party. There was his epic ineptness; surely no one who had watched him stumble through the debates could find him presidential. And there was, of course, the overweening cruelty that was his hallmark: mocking people with disabilities, taunting his opponents, ridiculing a Gold Star mom. I had hoped this would be damning: Wasn’t the Golden Rule, or a version of it, the one common shared teaching among all religions? As my family headed to the Javits Center on November 8 for what we were sure would be Hillary Clinton’s victory party, my eleven-year-old son asked me what would happen if Trump won. “He can’t win,” I said confidently. (“Well, Mom, he can,” he pointed out.) Watching the results felt dislocating: like taking a step onto a well-trod stair that suddenly was not there. In the pre-dawn hours the next morning, messaging with a friend who had spent eighteen months working to mobilize the Latino vote, I said in disbelief, “I never believed all that ‘two Americas’ stuff. Even now it is hard to believe this is what half our population wants.”
I know how sheltered it all sounds. In a Saturday Night Live episode that aired the following weekend, one skit featured a group of friends watching the election results. The women, all white, are shocked. “Oh my God,” gasps the actress Cecily Strong, “I think America is racist.”
A white male partygoer is outraged: “This is the most shameful thing America has ever done!” he exclaims—at which point the black actors Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock collapse in uncontrollable hysterics.
“C’mon, get some rest,” Rock, rolling his eyes, tells the crowd. “You’ve got a big day of moping and writing on Facebook tomorrow.”
I didn’t spend the next day moping and writing on Facebook. I spent it grieving for an image of America I started to believe had only existed in my head, where my neighbors—both the ones I agreed with and the ones I didn’t—were fundamentally good-hearted.
January 21 felt like a miracle. I boarded a D.C.-bound bus with fifty of my friends and colleagues, along with my fourteen-year-old daughter and her friends—it was my birthday, and there was no better party.
The highways were crowded with buses crammed full of pink hats; the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station was so jammed that we spent a good hour underground, chanting and patiently inching our way toward the exit.
The woman next to me held a sign that read, “My Husband’s Chemo Costs $10,000 a Month”; she explained that she’d never been to a protest before, but that the health-care issue had compelled her to show up. “And also,” she added, “the misogyny.” The misogyny was what tied all our interests together, but what was magical about the march was that it made visible the fact that we had so many interests. There were grandmothers and grown men, church groups and unions, indigenous women and Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
Years before, at a reproductive-rights march, my husband and I had spotted a sign that read, “We came down on buses to save our uteruses.” We’d found it hilarious, and he’d made me a T-shirt for that January day with the slogan on the front. But as I pressed through the crowd with my daughter, the shirt felt entirely insufficient—a glib remnant of another time. We, women, were not here for our uteruses. We were here for our lives, for other women’s lives, for our souls and the soul of our country.
And there were so, so many of us. The universe felt friendly again.
Or more properly: The universe felt bound together by people willing to work for a friendly planet—by speaking out over and over again, and not just on the issues we call our own. The year since the march has brought regular ugliness: Those were my fellow Americans lighting torches in Charlottesville and cheering the government’s vicious anti-immigrant moves. But I know which vision of our country I choose to believe in, and if the millions of us who showed up on that January day, in big cities and small towns, keep showing up—to protest, to run for office, to vote—I think it can be made real.
I’m still an optimist. After all, Einstein wrote that if we do believe the universe is unfriendly, we’ll spend our lives “creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons.” We have an administration dedicated to doing just this. “But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place,” he continued, “then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”
The Women’s March helped us understand. The world will continue to spin forward, but only if we push.
Excerpted from Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World, available for purchase now.
More on The Women’s March:
–Everything You Need to Know About the 2018 Women’s March