Plus ça change…

Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the USA will take place in Washington DC on January 20, 2017. And on the following day, it has been announced, there will be a women’s march

to show our strength, power and courage and demonstrate our disapproval of the new president and his values.

US feminists have been here before. On January 20 1969, the (first) inauguration of President Richard Nixon was also marked by a demonstration in the nation’s capital. The event was mainly organised by campaigners against the Vietnam War, but it included a feminist protest in which women carried banners with slogans like ‘Give back the vote’ and ‘The vote wasn’t worth the struggle’.

One of the feminists involved, Ellen Willis of New York Radical Women, explained:

Since women’s 80 year struggle for the vote had achieved a meaningless victory and vitiated the feminist movement, we planned to destroy our voter registration cards publicly as a symbol that suffragism was dead and a new fight for real emancipation was beginning.

The women who formed the early Women’s Liberation Movement came out of (and often remained connected to) a New Left which believed that true democracy required a lot more than just the right to vote. They also wanted the second wave to learn from the mistakes of the first one, which in their view had lost sight of its original radical goals as it became narrowly focused on the single issue of women’s suffrage. In pursuit of that objective (which in the US was finally achieved in 1920), the leaders of the suffragist movement had put what was politically expedient over what was right: in particular, they had been willing to sell out Black women to win the support of white women in the southern states.

To the radical activists of the mid-20th century it did not seem that the enfranchisement of women had done much to advance their cause. By 1969 they’d been voting for nearly half a century, but they were still a long way from gaining equality. Radical women were not even treated as equals by their own comrades on the Left: when they tried to make a statement on women’s liberation to the assembled anti-inaugural protesters, they were met with jeering, catcalling and shouts of ‘Take her off the stage and fuck her’.

Since 1969 almost another half-century has passed, and here we are again. Not, this time, planning to give back the vote, but still arguing about whether ‘real emancipation’ can be delivered through the ballot box, still divided on whether to support a woman leader who has made compromises in pursuit of power, still dealing with the reality of racism, and still being dismissed by some leftist men as just a bunch of over-privileged whiners. And still taking to the streets to protest because the White House is about to be occupied by a man whose whose views and behaviour feminists find repugnant, and whose intentions while in office they have every reason to fear.

Postscript: this is the women’s march in Washington DC on 21 January 2017.