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.

Larsen repeated the message power with, not power over.

“I work with white women specifically, on white privilege and how to be accountable and in allyship,” Larsen said.

Seattle Womxn Marching Forward is led by a team of volunteers from the Seattle area, and is the Seattle chapter of the national Women’s March. The group helped organize more than 70 events on Sunday, along with voter registration booths and food and clothing drives.

CHS talked with the weekend’s organizers about what drove them to mark the anniversary of the first Womxn’s March with a weekend of action. “The mantra of the Women’s March is that all issues are women’s issues, and that nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” Liz Hunter-Keller, who helped organize last year’s march, told CHS.

Getting out the vote was a big part of the drive, Hunter-Keller said. “The same year as the Women’s March, we had our election for mayor, and a just under 50% turnout,” she said. More than half of registered Seattle voters decided that the fate of the city wasn’t worth the five minutes and a postage stamp. “It’s discouraging to see 135,000 people in the streets, and know that many of those people did not then vote… It will be my life’s mission to make sure that percentage goes up,” she said, “because it is absolutely essential that we win elections in November.”

Saturday’s march, meanwhile, brought somewhere around 100,000 people into the streets of Capitol Hill for a second year of protests for women’s rights.

Thousands fill streets of Capitol Hill for 2018 Seattle Women’s March

On Capitol Hill Sunday, Larsen asked the panelists at The Riveter to speak about how Seattle’s cultural inequity affected them. Affordable housing consultant Patricia Julio talked about her experiences as a woman of color in Seattle.

“It’s interesting to walk around this city and be mindful about how your body feels when, say, I’m on Capitol Hill versus where I like day-to-day on Rainier Beach,” said Julio. “My body feels a little bit tenser versus when I’m in Rainier Beach, because I’m also seeing a lot of other black and brown people.”

Julio said that many of her black and brown female friends have moved away because they don’t feel comfortable in the majority-white Seattle.

“I’m trying to tease out the intersection of racism and sexism, especially in my work,” said Cara Bilodeau, associate director at progressive organizing network Win Win Network. “As a white woman I really want to push myself to step up into my leadership.”

Bilodeau emphasized the importance of self reflection in producing change.

“I’ve been really dismantling in my own world how I do my work, and thinking about how to get beyond this idea that there is this finite sense of power that we especially as women are taught to believe,” Bilodeau said.

Larsen engaged the audience, many of whom had been at the Saturday’s march and had their signs still with them, by frequently having members talk with the strangers near them. She emphasized that this was to be a safe and fun space. She asked the panel and audience to talk about the women who had been most valuable in their lives.

Larsen and the panelists often kept the tone light with jokes ranging from avocado toast to dating, and encouraged the audience to take action and stay optimistic about the feminist movement.

As the session came to a close, Larsen asked the panelists and the audience to speak about what they like best about themselves. But the question was soon posed to her.

“What do I like about myself?” Larsen pondered. “I think I’m hella funny.”

The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.

To learn more about Seattle Womxn Marching Forward, visit seattlewomxnmarchingforward.org.

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