What happens in America does not stay in America. The prospect of Trump’s second administration is devastating for many American women, but its reverberations are also echoing for women across the globe, and bringing much more fear and uncertainty than last time around.
Eight years ago, while Trump’s success shocked women in Britain, it also brought rays of hope – in the shape of a resurgence of solidarity. On the day after the election in 2016, I remember going into my workplace, a charity for refugee women, feeling pretty bleak, and looking at other women’s downcast faces. Then, at the end of the day, one of our colleagues had the most unexpected news. The charity’s online donations had rocketed.
Looking at the list of donations, many accompanied by messages of support, my heart rose. I realised that so many women, waking up to that bitter news, had chosen not despair but determined support for those Trump hated most – women and migrants – and had backed up that empathy with action.
A few months later, that rise of solidarity took its most colourful and energising form. The Women’s Marches didn’t just take place in Washington and cities across the US, they took place on every continent. Even women in Antarctica organised a rally on an expedition ship. I saw them as part of a gathering wave of women’s protests. Through the Green Wave in Latin America and other protests against violence and for reproductive rights everywhere from Poland to South Korea, India to Ireland, so many women’s movements were becoming more visible. The Women’s Marches were a kind of icing on the cake, so bright, so lovely – but also fragile, and soon to show cracks.
There are protests planned in Washington for Trump’s second inauguration, but they are likely to be more muted, and they are unlikely be accompanied by pink-hatted crowds flowing through cities across the world. Why?
Some of the cracks that make solidarity so elusive this time were around starting to be apparent back then. The famous image of activist Angela Peoples holding the “White women voted for Trump” sign on the 2017 Washington march is being shared again. And her point is more urgent now. Yet again, a majority of white women chose to put a sexual abuser in the White House and to undermine other women’s reproductive rights.
As one black woman said so pertinently on social media in response to the suggestion of another women’s march: “White women should have marched yourselves down to the polls to vote against Trump.”
And other rifts that started to open then have also gaped ever more widely since. In Britain, arguments quickly erupted in 2017 over whether the Women’s March was either too exclusive of trans women – since those pink hats might be “excluding trans women” – or, on the contrary, too eager to centre them. Since then, winning arguments on gender identity seems to be more important to some feminists than finding common ground.
As the backlash gathers pace, not only in the US, international feminist solidarity has weakened on other fronts too. In the past, there was a bland hope in many international organisations that liberal feminism could be promoted everywhere with the backing of US power and money. That vision became more and more fragile, but it really fell apart when the US withdrew from Afghanistan in summer 2021 and Afghan women, once blithely promised support and protection, were forced back into their homes and brutally punished for speaking out.
And it became even harder to hold on to the rhetoric of global women’s solidarity once western women became helpless witnesses to the conflict in Gaza. While US-made bombs fall on women and children, it’s hard to imagine marching for American women’s freedoms.
In these dark times, maybe it sounds mad to say that I’m not giving up on women’s solidarity. But to me, as to so many women, solidarity isn’t an idea, it’s a practice; it’s not a performance, it’s work – hard work. Recently, I’ve been speaking to women across the globe – from Northern Ireland to Canada, from Iran to Peru – and over and over again I hear how they continue their feminist work, which may not involve so much marching and singing now, but is just as fierce and dogged as it ever was.
Every day, a woman needs an abortion, needs a refuge, needs a lawyer, needs food, needs shelter, and, every day, women are stepping up for one another, feeding, caring, building, healing, planting.
This very material sense of a common struggle, based on shared experiences of marginalisation and disempowerment, has not disappeared. On the contrary, as the populist right rises, it becomes more entrenched where it matters, not so much on platforms and podiums as on the frontline of survival.
So as I listen to these women, as their stories flow towards and through me, I recognise that there at the roots a deep solidarity keeps growing in the dark, and I have faith that one day I’ll see it flowering again.
Natasha Walter is the author of Before the Light Fades: A Family Story of Resistance, and the founder of Women for Refugee Women
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