Neighborhood activist and videographer Aurea Astro has put together her look at the 2018 Seattle Women’s March. CHS provided her some views of the scene from above. Her clips give you some of the inspirations behind what was happening on the ground.
More coverage of the march and the weekend’s actions from CHS can be found below. Continue reading
During an event Sunday at The Riveter for Womxn Act on Seattle, Fleur Larsen encourages a panel of women to discuss their lives, to their enjoyment (Image: Kevin Teeter)
By Kevin Teeter, UW News Lab/Special to CHS
Capitol Hill coworking gathering space The Riveter was bustling Sunday. The events, which also included voter registration, free yoga, and meditation classes, followed the momentum of Saturday’s Seattle Women’s March and were part of community “hubs” in neighborhoods across Seattle.
Sunday marked a day of action for Seattle Womxn Marching Forward, an organization that supports movements related to feminism and social justice in Seattle. Throughout the city, food drives and voter registration booths were set up, and lectures and exhibitions were held.
Around 50 people were gathered for the 1 PM panel, as a yoga class went on downstairs. Backlit by the sun through a wall of windows, Seattle-based event-facilitator and speaker Fleur Larsen moderated a panel on intersectional feminism, keeping the mood light while leading discussion of the serious topics exploring the feminist movement concerned and how gender overlaps with class, race, ethnicity and other identities in discrimination and oppression.
“Feminism has been a white women’s movement that has been latent with racism and classism, so we’ve got some clean up to do,” Larsen said. Continue reading
By Frankie Godoy, UW News Lab/Special to CHS
Thousands of people from in and out of the Seattle area made their way to Cal Anderson Park Saturday morning for this year’s Seattle Women’s March with strollers, signs, pets, and pink hats in tow. Everyone gathering in the park had a reason for marching. Some wrote out their reason on their clothing or carried it on a sign.
Janet Caragan, from Gig Harbor, Washington, was among the people in the largest rush arriving at 9 AM. Caragan was unable to attend last year’s march, but said she was excited about attending more Women’s Marches in the future. She said she wished more young people would participate in the march and other political movements.
“Young people need to get out here to make changes,” said Caragan. Continue reading
The view up E Pine (Image: CHS)
Before today's #SEAwomensmarch, officials think largest crowd ever hosted at Cal Anderson was last April's March for Science. Estimates? pic.twitter.com/6Yqmb4dF9C
— jseattle (@jseattle) January 20, 2018
Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Capitol Hill, stretching from Cal Anderson Park to downtown Saturday for the 2018 Seattle Women’s March. It was the start of a weekend of activism and, officials, say the largest event the neighborhood’s central park has ever hosted.
“We stand together with one heart, one mind,” Deborah Parker, legislative policy analyst for the Tulalip tribes, said in her time at the microphone addressing the massive crowd assembled on the park’s Bobby Morris playfield.
Parker and tribal representatives from across the region began the day’s event with songs and prayers for missing and murdered indigenous women.
“It is time we stand together,” Parker said.
Saturday’s march comes after one year of Trump’s America with the federal government shut down in a budget impasse. It’s been a year of battles over women’s rights, immigration, and health care but also of movements like #MeToo against sexual assault. Sunday, neighborhood “hubs” and forums will focus on organizing, voter registration, and education at locations across Seattle. “March on Saturday, act on Sunday,” one organizer told CHS. Continue reading
The 2017 Women’s March set a tone of mainstream resistance, in Seattle and across the nation and world, to the many competing agendas of President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress. Seattle City Council member and representative for District 3, where the 2018 march will step off from Capitol Hill this weekend, Kshama Sawant recalls the historic event:
“Right after Trump was elected, everybody — and especially Democratic party operatives, who had just lost the election for Clinton — was sitting in a sort of paralysis of shock and demoralization,” she said. “Ordinary people were not. In fact, the day after the election, ordinary people, especially young people, wanted to go out and show their complete opposition to Trump’s anti-worker, anti-immigrant agenda.”
Outrage against the new president — regularly stoked by its subject — remains white-hot one year later. “In a lot of ways our worst fears and concerns have played out through 2017, and continue every day when we look at the headlines,” said state Rep. Nicole Macri. “The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have taken on assaulting our very basic rights here”–for instance, those of immigrants and patients.
2018 Seattle Women’s March
A smaller than expected but spirited group gathered Saturday outside E Madison’s Planned Parenthood to counter ongoing demonstrations against the women’s health facility. CHS reported on the Seattle Clinic Defense actions that have come amid increasing national rhetoric against reproductive rights — though the organization that the group is trying to defend has officially discouraged counter-protests. Those who use the health services Planned Parenthood provides shouldn’t have to withstand demonstrations from outraged fundamentalists while they’re walking to and from the doctor, one clinic defender who CHS talked to about the efforts said. “Having something to do instead of just getting online has been really empowering for me,” she said. Continue reading
It will be difficult to outdo the amazing signs from the 2017 march. Sign makers gathered Sunday at Capitol Hill’s The Riveter co-working space to begin working on this year’s batch
The day after Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, women around the world marched: for each other, for the future, for the flickering hope of a sane world.
The marches were massive, attended by an estimated 2.6 million people around the globe, including your correspondent’s mama. In Washington, D.C., hundreds of thousands of marchers overwhelmed the nation’s capital. In the Emerald City, organizers estimated more than 120,000 marchers stretched from the Central District to the Seattle Center. Last year’s marches set the tone of mainstream “resistance” that has defined political opposition to current ruling party’s agenda. The symbolic import of the march is difficult to overstate.
“The mantra of the Women’s March is that all issues are women’s issues,” says Liz Hunter-Keller, who helped organize last year’s march, “and that nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Power to the Polls: Anniversary of the Womxn’s March on Seattle/Seattle Women’s March 2.0 – 2018
Official route for #Seattle Womens' March 2.0 now available. Cal Anderson Park to E Pine Street, 4th Ave, Cedar Street, 5th Ave, Thomas Street to @seattlecenter Program starts at 10AM, March at 11.30AM Saturday, Jan 20. Join us#seawomensmarch #resistance #WomensMarch2018 pic.twitter.com/dHGBawQgwE
— Seattle Women's March 2018 (@womenmarch2_0) January 15, 2018
The “Unity Principles” shared by Women’s Marches across the country expand on that view, detailing opposition to state violence and environmental degradation and support for civil rights for people who are pregnant, queer, employed, political, immigrants, or disabled. The marches are sometimes titled with nonstandard spellings of “womxn” or “womyn,” in order to repudiate discrimination against trans women by bigoted feminists and to reject the categorization of women as a subset of “mankind.”
In short, lots of women et al marched last year in lots of places for lots of reasons, with lots of feelings. So that’s good. But let’s get practical for a moment: what did last year’s march actually accomplish? Continue reading
Hundreds are going. Thousands are interested. It’s difficult to know how many will show to counter anti-choice protesters outside the Planned Parenthood’s Capitol Hill Clinic on Saturday, January 13. Officially, Planned Parenthood disapproves of the counter-action by pro-choicers, asking supporters of bodily autonomy to instead channel their activism into more conventional channels, such as donating and tweeting. Organizers of the pro-choice counter-action — called Seattle Clinic Defense — say they must reclaim the spaces outside clinics that anti-choicers have already politicized, and say their goal is not to protest but to shield patients from harassment.
“The outside of clinics right now is not a politically-neutral zone,” Jessi Murray, a 29-year-old software programmer and co-founder of Seattle Clinic Defense tells CHS. “The anti-choicers have claimed ground that the pro-choice side has ceded for a long time.”
In a month of marching and activism for women’s rights, turnout for the pro-choice action is hoped to be strong.
According to Seattle Clinic Defense’s January 13th event post, “there is a group that protests the Madison St. location of Planned Parenthood once a month, harassing patients and contributing to the stigma of those just trying to get healthcare” —
When we show up as clinic defenders, with supportive smiles for patients and workers, we see a decrease in the amount of yelling and direct confrontation that happens. Our goal is to take back the political space that they have staked out and let them know that their behavior is unacceptable.
There will be an orientation emphasizing de-escalation and creating a supporting environment for patients at 8:45 AM. The defense action begins at 9 AM.
The Defense began in 2011, after a Walk for Choice, says Murray, where another marcher, co-founder Leela Yellesetty, held up a sign that read “Interested In Clinic Defense?” The organization’s first action was an embarrassing failure, she recalls, in which about half a dozen people protested outside a so-called Crisis Pregnancy Center that wasn’t even open. Since that initial blunder, however, Seattle Clinic Defense steadily built up its organizational capacity, says Murray. Continue reading
Organizers planning two different Seattle marches on January 20th, 2018 to mark the anniversary of the 2017 nationwide protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump will work together on an event starting in Cal Anderson Park.
CHS wrote about the separate efforts earlier this month. Over the holiday break, organizers announced they will collaborate on a single anniversary march on Saturday starting in the Capitol Hill Park.
Power to the Polls: Anniversary of the Womxn’s March on Seattle/Seattle Women’s March 2.0 – 2018
Supporters of abortion rights cautiously celebrated at 10th and Pike Monday night after the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that has restricted clinic access in the state. Shout Your Abortion organizer Amelia Bonow reminded those gathered that only 24 hours earlier, the group planning the Seattle event wasn’t sure if it would be a night of celebration — or tears.
“This decision could have gone either way,” Bonow told the crowd of people who came out to the nightlife district to the corner that has also become a popular gathering place to mark victories.
“We dodged a bullet but our collective body is still being beaten,” Bonow said. Continue reading
