THE RISE OF
THE WOMAN
= THE RISE OF
THE
NATION
The Women’s March on Washington
in Eugene and across the country
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
“H
CONSTANCE VAN FLANDERN
BETHANY GRACE HOWE
PHOTOS: TODD COOPER
12
January 12, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
ere I am at 79, I’m going to
be an activist,” says Deanna
Eisinger, a retired grade
school teacher. “I think we
need to ruffle feathers and
raise some consciousness.”
Recently out of the hospital after an asthma
attack triggered her atrial fibrillation, Eisinger
is not going to let something like an irregular
heartbeat stop her from speaking up. She is
going to carry a sign in the Jan. 21 Eugene
sister march to the Women’s March on
Washington, the day after Donald Trump’s
presidential inauguration.
“I’m planning to go; I may not be able to
walk the whole route but I’m going to go,” says
Eisinger, who lives on a farm in Lorane. “We
have to keep resisting and speaking out. I’ve
never been a loudmouth but I’m changing. At
my age I don’t care what people think.”
Trump’s election means that Democratic
candidate Hillary Clinton did not break that
final glass ceiling and become the first woman
president. According to the World Economic
Forum, 59 other countries have had a female
head of state, but not the U.S.
Trump’s election also means that the man
who once bragged that when he sees good-
looking women, “I grab them by the pussy,” is
our nation’s leader.
His election, despite losing the popular vote
to Clinton by more than 2 million ballots, put a
man in office who has vilified Mexicans and
Muslims and whose campaign statements won
Pulitzer Prize winner PolitiFact’s 2015 Lie of
the Year award.
The post election worries are well-known:
The hateful election cycle rhetoric, fears that
women’s reproductive rights will diminish and
chances for equal pay will be reduced, worries
about immigrant rights and anxiety Trump will
start World War III with a tweet: The list goes
on.
As a result, a lot of people — and women in
particular — woke up in the days after the
Nov. 8, 2016 election motivated to speak up,
act out and make changes. So the Women’s
March on Washington was born.
“I’VE BEEN A WOMAN NOW for 53 weeks,”
Bethany Grace Howe muses. “And now I’m
hopping into the deep end of the pool.”
Howe is one of a group of eight Oregon
women who decided after Donald Trump’s
November election that they needed to stand up
for women’s rights — all women — and
recognize “that our vibrant and diverse
communities are the strength of our country,”
as the official statement for the national
Women’s March on Washington goes.
Howe, who is a doctoral student in
journalism at the University of Oregon and is
transgender, says that while the march is not a
protest, “It is naïve to pretend it’s not a
response to the election.”
The national march came together, if not
spontaneously, then organically, nearly
overnight. A retired attorney and grandmother
living in Hawaii named Theresa Shook created
a Facebook event page for a march before
going the bed election night and invited 40 of
her friends, who invited their friends.
The idea hit the “Pantsuit Nation” Facebook
page and the numbers exploded, (though the
march itself is unrelated to Pantsuit Nation).
More women began to create pages to sign up
to march.
Fashion entrepreneur Bob Bland was one of
those women who administered a page early
on. In a statement on its origins, the march’s
website says that, “The reality is that the
women who initially started organizing were
almost all white.”
Many of the organizers refer to themselves
as admins, taking the language from Facebook
where administrators run pages.
In addition to the exploding number of
marchers, what also soon exploded was a
discussion of issues such as diversity and
racism — the name that Shook chose, Million
Woman March, is also the name of a 1997
gathering of about 750,000 African-American
women in Philadelphia, and some saw using
the same name for the new march as cultural
appropriation.
And as the Women’s March origin statement
says, “It was, and is, clear that the Women’s
March on Washington cannot be a success
unless it represents women of all backgrounds.”
By Nov. 11 the name had been changed to
the Women’s March on Washington, and as
Oregon organizer Erin Barnhart wrote that day
on the state march admins’ page, “This cannot
be a white feminist march; it must be
intersectional, in name, participation and
spirit.”
Intersectionality is way of thinking about
identity and its relationship to power, and is the
theory that people have multiple intersecting
identities that reflect related systems of
oppression, domination or discrimination.
Oregon admin Howe calls it “the ability to
understand there is more than one lens through
which to view things.”
Barnhart had an Oregon Facebook page up
for the event by Nov. 10.