STRIKE March 8, 2017-- A Day Without A Woman

[liminalOyster]

At least 3 school districts are canceling classes because of the women’s strike
A Day Without a Woman may be gaining some serious steam.

Updated by Emily Crockett@emilycrockettemily@vox.com Mar 7, 2017, 8:59pm EST

At least three US public school districts have announced that they are canceling classes on International Women’s Day — because too many of their teachers will be taking the day off in protest to support women’s rights.

The “Day Without a Woman” protest and general strike on March 8 has apparently attracted a lot of interest among teachers in Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia, Prince George’s County public schools in Maryland, and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district in North Carolina. All three school districts have announced that they simply won’t have enough faculty members and staff present for the district to function on Wednesday.

In Chapel Hill-Carrboro, about 75 percent of employees are women, and a “significant” enough number of them have requested leave that the district can’t operate safely without them, according to a statement from the district. At least 300 staff members have requested leave in Alexandria City, according to a statement from superintendent Alvin L. Crawley. And as of Tuesday in Prince George’s County, the Washington Post reported, about 1,700 teachers and 30 percent of the transportation staff had asked for the day off.

All three school districts are in blue areas that voted for Hillary Clinton. But superintendents emphasized that the decision to cancel classes was not a political statement, and was not made lightly.

A Day Without a Woman, which organizers have dubbed a “general strike,” is intended to draw attention to the often invisible or underappreciated work that women do for society and the economy, and to protest President Trump’s record on women. It’s taking place alongside an International Women’s Strike in more than 30 countries worldwide.

Women and gender-nonconforming people are encouraged to wear red, take the day off from work, and avoid shopping except at small women- or minority-owned businesses. Male allies are encouraged to show support by tending to chores and child care, and by starting conversations about gender equality in their workplace.

It’s not clear how many people will participate in the strike, or how much of a visible impact it will have. But these last-minute school closures are an early sign that a lot of people are interested, and that the impacts could be quite disruptive and visible indeed.

Most protests rely on people showing up. A Day Without a Woman is doing the opposite.
A Day Without a Woman was put together by organizers of the Women’s March on Washington, who are trying to keep up the momentum of their hugely successful protest. This strike is the fourth of 10 major protest actions that the Women’s March is planning for the first 100 days of President Trump’s administration.

“A Day Without a Woman is a very different type of action than the march,” Women’s March organizer Bob Bland told Vox. “The march was all about people getting out, coming together, and showing themselves very explicitly. A strike can be very different from that.”

A strike is much more distributed and local than a huge march and rally, Bland said. People plan to take action wherever they are. And while that action will be local, people won’t even necessarily be publicly gathering in state capitols or town squares like they were at local Women’s Marches in January.

There will definitely be some outlets for public protest. The US branch of the International Women’s Strike has a website for finding and setting up local meetings with others who plan to strike. The Nation also published a somewhat more detailed list of suggestions on how to get involved from Tithi Bhattacharya and Cinzia Arruzza, two US organizers of the International Women’s Strike.

Either way, Bland said the protests will be visible in many ways — on social media, for instance, or in the sheer numbers of people who are wearing red that day.

But, Bland said, the action is just as much about women not being present as being present and visible. It’s about showing what society looks like when women don’t actively participate in it.

It’s really hard to pull off a successful general strike
Usually the point of a general strike is to do something so disruptive that daily life grinds to a halt and society can’t help but pay attention to your grievances, experts on social movements told Vox. A general strike of, say, transit workers in smallish European countries such as France can definitely accomplish that goal.

But general strikes just don’t work very well in the United States — at least not the way they used to in the 1930s. The US is too big and diverse, and union membership has been shrinking for too many decades.

But when schools close for a teacher strike, for instance, it’s incredibly disruptive. Parents may have to find alternate child care or meal arrangements, for starters. That’s why the Alexandria City district is still offering breakfast and lunch at six of its schools. (Neither of the school districts canceling classes will have to make up the day later, though, since the warm winter caused fewer snow days than usual.)

So it’s entirely possible that this strike could exceed the usual expectations for how disruptive or effective a strike can be in the US. Either way, calling this action a “strike” also has both practical and symbolic significance.

For instance, strikes are about pushing for change in the workplace. But in every workplace, whether it’s the home or the corporate boardroom, women’s work is often taken for granted.

Women tend to take on more chores and child care duties at home than men, and women are more likely than men to take on tasks at work that nobody else wants to do. Meanwhile, women tend to get paid less for all that trouble, or not get paid at all.

The idea behind a women’s general strike is that if women refuse to do all of their typical work for a day, it will force people to notice how important and underappreciated that work is.

The strike raises serious questions about economic privilege, and who can “afford” to participate
Women who walk off the job on March 8 do so at their own risk. There are no legal protections whatsoever for striking in the US unless you have a specific grievance about your own workplace, Bryce Covert pointed out at ThinkProgress. If you want to participate in a “general” strike in solidarity with other workers or to prove a political point, you’re on your own, and you may or may not have a job when you come back the next day.

That’s why some feminists have raised concerns about class and privilege around the women’s strike. If the only women who feel empowered to participate in a strike are the ones who already have secure jobs and good benefits, then who is the strike really for?

In an article for Elle about the historical context of the strike, writer Sady Doyle asked what it really means for women to go on strike in 2017 — when all women still face discrimination, but some women have opportunities that previous generations only dreamed of. This inequality, Doyle writes, can make it harder for women to really empathize with each other’s struggles when it comes to work:

In an earlier era of highly segregated career paths, a "women's strike" had a specific, tangible effect: It made invisible work visible. No women meant no food on the table, no mysteriously emptied trashcans, no one to change diapers or type letters. No women meant no sex. (Yes, going Lysistrata is a real thing—and it occasionally works.) Forcing men to handle "women's work" was the only way to get those men to admit that it existed.

Today women have better access to education and high-paying jobs than ever. But because of these changes it's harder than ever to define women's precise relationship to "work," or to pinpoint a specific problem that female workers can address through striking. Sure, we can walk out of our jobs—but we won't all be walking out of the same jobs, for the same reasons, and some of us can walk out much more safely than others.
Then again, Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths argued at the Nation, it’s a little strange to think of a strike as “privileged” when strikes are usually a tool of last resort for the least privileged workers. They say that our current situation is closer than we might think to the dire 1908 origins of International Women’s Day, when a group of women garment workers went on strike to demand suffrage and the right to form a union:

Unions were virtually nonexistent then, to say nothing of the brutal working conditions that resulted from their absence (146 people, mostly women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911). Union membership today is at a historic low (10.7 percent and decreasing in 2016). Was it a privilege for garment workers to strike then? Would it be a privilege for us to strike now?
And just because the strike could reflect elite concerns, Alcazar and Griffiths said, doesn’t mean it has to; it can also be a powerful chance for more elite women to connect with more marginalized women, and for both groups to develop more kinship and solidarity with each other.

Bland puts it another way: “Those of us who are able to strike on March 8 are striking on behalf of those who can't,” she said. “We have to be there to represent each other.”

http://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/6/ ... man-strike

[American Dream]

https://viewpointmag.com/2017/03/08/str ... the-roots/

Striking at the Roots

K.J. Gawel March 8, 2017 |


Drew Gawel, MakeMe/TakeMe II Guardians

The March 8 international women’s strike has come together in response to the extreme violence with which we are confronted today. It has come together to call for a feminist practice adequate to this historical need: indeed, to call for a feminist international.

Organizers in New York, across the country, and around the world are following the Argentinian coalition Ni Una Menos in acknowledging that violence against women has many facets. It is domestic violence, but also the violence of the workplace and of debt; the violence of state sanctioned racism and xenophobia; of homo- and transphobia; the violent criminalization of migratory movements. It is the violence of incarceration and deportation; violence against the earth; violence against native women and their struggles; and institutional violence against women’s bodies through lack of access to free abortions, healthcare and childcare. It is violence against our very means of social reproduction: against the relations that form the conditions of our lives and our freedom.

This threat to the reproduction of our material and social existence changes our perspective on the problems we confront. It forces us to understand and interrogate the relation between institutional and domestic violence, between productive and “unproductive” labor, between our bodily autonomy and our collective capacity to struggle, between the violence of capital and the state and existing hierarchies amongst women.

In order to confront these myriad forms of socially connected violence, our struggles must be connected as well. This means that we cannot build a genuinely radical or transformative feminist practice that ignores or downplays structural racism, the legacies of colonialism, homo- and transphobia, or the extreme inequalities and environmental devastation generated by global capitalism.

Our social conditions place demands upon our struggles. They force us to change what it means to strike, requiring that such a practice orient itself to structures of care, to sex and domestic work, to global chains of capitalist, state, and intimate violence. A feminist practice adequate to our times can only be an anti-capitalist feminism. It can only be a feminism by and for working class and unwaged women, women of color, immigrant women, indigenous women, Muslim women, queer and trans women, sex workers, domestic and care workers, and mothers.

The stakes are high. I would like to ask, then: what is a feminist practice adequate to the task of responding to this historical need?

We hope it will begin to emerge on the streets on March 8. In New York, our march will not stop at City Hall, but at an immigrant detention center, at the African Burial Ground, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where immigrant women workers burned at the stake of capital over one hundred years ago. It will stop at Stonewall and at Zuccotti Park. We hope that bringing our strike to these sites will reveal lines of connection and solidarity not visible before.

In New York and around the country the strike has brought together collectives of women who have struggled for years against police violence, prisons, deportation, gentrification, and imperialism; it has brought together women who are obliged to care for free and who are obliged to care by capital. Here and around the world radicals of many persuasions are mobilizing a diversity of tactics to protect each other from such things and to bring visibility to our struggles and their relation to each other.

But this is just the beginning. A truly transformative feminism requires us to constitute affinities, but also to draw lines and cut ties. It requires us to revalue as political the sites of our reproduction and the reproduction of our struggles. It requires new forms of collective practice, but also that we politically reconstitute the feminized and racialized practices of care, of harboring, of collective solidarity and affective response that have been rendered invisible by our own political formations, yet which have kept these struggles alive. It requires us to recognize that the formation of struggle and the production of knowledge and vision are inseparable.

A feminism adequate to our times requires a militancy that speaks to these things: a militancy that emerges from the conditions of our social reproduction and not from the tired impasses of macho politics. We must bring our militancy to care, to sex, to the border, the bathroom, and the barricade.

Such a feminism must stand with the water protectors of Standing Rock; with the queer women of color around the country who galvanized the struggle against killer racist cops; with teachers and mothers rising across this continent and around the world; with Palestine; with feminist cultures of resistance from Kurdistan to Poland and many other places known and unknown. It must stand with the mothers, sisters, witches, whores and lovers who against all odds have tended to the traditions of the oppressed; and with the women whose labor holds this world together and who thus have the capacity to shut it down.

We are in the midst of re-creating ourselves as political subjects, potentially as revolutionary ones. This requires collectively situating ourselves in relation to a moment of danger and possibility. In this moment, we thus strike not only as “paro,” but, in the words of Ni Una Menos, we strike “[b]ecause freedom implies definitively dismantling the patriarchy.” This kind of dismantling cannot happen without radically transforming both our consciousness and our social being. Today we strike at the roots of our oppression to make room for this possibility.

The spirit of this piece was conceived collectively.

[Luther Blissett]

There were a few pink pussy hats there yesterday but for the most part the rally and protest were led by women of color and radicals. Minimal cop interference or roughhousing, a killer speech by Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and some actually fair tv coverage.

[American Dream]

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/31 ... on-mayday/

Solidarity and Continued Struggle: International Women’s Strike on May Day

National Committee of the International Women’s Strike March 31, 2017


Jacob Lawrence, The Ironers (1943)

May Day 2017 will be a day of struggle against the Trump administration. A day in which workers, waged and unwaged, across the country will strike, march, rally, boycott, and make our voices heard against the sexism, racism, xenophobia and homophobia of this administration.

Trump has declared an open war on immigrants, from building a wall between the US and Mexico to bans on Muslims. We stand for dismantling all borders and all walls. This is why the International Women’s Strike will strike with all those organizing for May Day.

As antiracist feminists of the 99%, many of whom are ourselves immigrants, we stand against the vicious ICE raids that have in recent times tried to terrorize our communities and split up families. As cis and trans women we have been in the forefront of organizing against such raids, of defending our families. We are threatened by the loss of our children, not only by ICE but by the barbaric new rules that propose to take our children from us and separate our families at the border. We also face the sexist and racist child welfare system that profits from stealing our children from us and putting them in care or up for adoption with wealthier strangers, where they all too often face abuse and trauma.

The violence of ICE against immigrants is part of the systemic police violence against Black people, Latinx and Native Americans, and the mass incarceration of people of color. This violence and systemic sexism and racism oppresses and humiliates women of color, including Native women and immigrant women, every day of our lives. To those who want to narrow down feminism, we say feminism cannot be narrowed down only to demands over reproductive rights and formal gender equality. Feminism is a struggle against poverty, racism and immigration raids. The women who are part of or aspire to be the 1%, rely on the rest of us, especially immigrant women and women of color, to do the caregiving and service work for low pay or no pay. This is why we will strike on May Day.

To those who dismiss the work that women and non-binary people do in the formal and informal economy, starting with mothers, we say that feeding, clothing, housing, and educating whole communities, providing more unwaged health care than all health care institutions combined, cleaning and maintaining everyone’s homes, is real work and fundamental to sustaining society despite being unrecognized and invisible. Also hidden and disrespected is the work of immigrants, especially women. This is why we will be striking on May Day.

To those who say immigrants have no right to be here, we say that we have fled countries that were bombed, occupied and impoverished by the US military industrial complex and the brutal governments they imposed or supported. U. S. wars are stealing land and resources, exploiting, raping, imprisoning, and torturing people – from Afghanistan and Iraq to Egypt and Syria, from Palestine and South Sudan to Haiti and Honduras. On May Day we strike to reclaim the wealth we immigrants helped produce and to establish our right to be here.

March 8th taught us the power of unified action. We marched, struck work, boycotted and rallied. We will do the same on May Day.

We will do so because an injury to one is an injury to all.

We will do so because as on March 8th, and so on May Day, solidarity is our weapon.


National Committee of the International Women’s Strike is a network of grassroots feminists from across the US who initiated the call for the March 8 women's strike in the US.

[American Dream]

The First Strike

March’s Women’s Strike was an electric first step towards forging a new feminist movement.

by Cinzia Arruzza & Doug Henwood


An International Women's Day demonstration in New York, NY on March 8, 2017.


What was the agenda for the US women’s strike?

For the United States, we put together an expansive agenda that included demands concerning the welfare state — universal health care and public services, reproductive services — and also a minimum wage of fifteen dollars and pay equality. It is very important to combine those two things because clearly wage equality across genders can be achieved also by compressing male wages to the bottom. It’s not sufficient just to demand wage equality.

Then we had a very strong profile in terms of antiracism, opposition to white supremacy, opposition to US wars, imperialist wars, and also the opposition to Israel’s policies in Palestine. We demanded the decolonization of Palestine, which was probably one of the most controversial demands in our agenda, as we were attacked for this demand that was actually key to our platform. We also articulated demands concerning support in favor of indigenous women, especially in Standing Rock.

The idea was to have a platform that addressed the various problems that affect women in a different way according to class, gender, ethnicity, race, or ability. The idea was, in order to have a really universalistic platform, a platform that responded to the demands and needs of the larger majority of women, we needed to emphasize the demands and needs of the most oppressed women, which means immigrant women, women of color, working-class women.

Otherwise, the risk is to put forward very generic demands for women’s rights that actually don’t take into account the fundamental differences in conditions of life and social situation of the women who live in the country.


The women’s march that happened just after Trump’s inauguration was criticized for not having any demands at all. I’ve heard people criticize your women’s strike for having demands that would alienate a broad constituency. I guess women can’t do anything right. How do you respond to that critique?

First of all, it is not entirely true that the women’s march did not have demands. It is true they elaborated a platform only in a second moment, and the platform was relatively progressive, as it included demands concerning minimum wage and social provisioning.

Clearly, the mass mobilization for the women’s marches can be explained also by the fact that although the platform was there, this was not the main mobilizing factor. The main mobilizing factor was opposition to Trump, which means that the people who participated in the marches had not necessarily the same politics, or did not necessarily embrace radical left politics. Certainly, they shared in common an opposition to Trump.

Our platform was set to be more radical and also more articulated, but the reason why we chose to do this was precisely because we wanted to make an intervention in the feminist debate in the United States, and also in the process rebuild a feminist movement for the 99 percent in the United States.

What we wanted to rebuild was precisely a class and left perspective within the feminist movement. In order to do this, we needed to articulate a more complex and more radical platform that would allow us to build a bridge among social groups and women working on different issues and putting forward different struggles.

In a sense, the platform was meant to work as a catalyst, to carry on the work of the re-groupment of the various struggles that are going on in the country.

We were perfectly aware that the size of the women’s strike would not be the same as the size of the women’s marches. This was impossible because, again, the profile of the strike was much more defined and much more on the Left, but this was a precise choice because we felt that our contribution would be significant precisely in delineating a leftist current within the feminist movement.



There was a critique that there was something wrong with singling out women, having this be a women’s strike, and not something that included men. How do you react to that?

Honestly, in the organization of the women’s strike, we had the help and support of a lot of men. I’m not sure how strong this position is. It is very vocal on social media. I’m not sure how much it really represents a widespread feeling or an opposition among men on the Left. I would be more optimistic.

That said, I think the accusation is absurd in the sense that there is the tendency to think that by emphasizing struggles on issues that are key for specific sectors of the working class, for example, race, one then gives up about universalistic political projects. I would say it is the other way around.

Of course, there is a risk of falling into a kind of identity politics that makes solidarity and universalistic politics impossible. We have seen this in the last two decades. However, I don’t think the correct political response to this is to then suggest that we should make abstraction from differences and hierarchies that are in any case produced by capitalism and divide the working class.

On the contrary, I think the only way to achieve truly universalistic political projects of transformation of social relations is by identifying these hierarchies and these differences, and by articulating demands and critiques that are specific to these different conditions.

From this viewpoint, I would suggest that we’ll achieve true universalistic politics when we will manage to combine together all the various demands and perspectives and critiques that relate to these various positions within the social structure. This is what we tried to do with the women’s strike.

The women’s strike was not based on a strong notion of identity, but rather pointed to the necessity of building a bridge among various women — for example, Muslim women, black women, immigrant women from South America or Central America, working-class women, and so on. The way to do this was not by hiding the differences, but by combining together the various demands in a single platform.

Excerpted from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/wome ... ers-trump/

[American Dream]

Feminist Organising and the Women's Strike: An Interview with Cinzia Arruzza



George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić: What were the formative experiences for you politically and personally?

Cinzia Arruzza: This is a difficult question to answer, as I became an activist at the age of 13, and since then my whole life has been shaped by this fact. If I had to identify the experiences that have most shaped my political commitments and way of thinking, I could come up with the following list. First, coming from a poor working class family from Sicily, which exposed me to class injustice and inequalities, sexism, and Italy’s internal soft cultural racism against people from the south (especially in the Nineties, when the Northern League had a surge in the North on an anti-South agenda). When I was a teenager, the turning points in my politicization were my conversations with a Marxist high school teacher of history and philosophy, who was a neighbor and a friend, reading the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution, and participating as a high school student in the struggle of the workers of a Pirelli plant in my town, which was shutting down and laying off hundreds of workers who had no hope of finding another job, given the level of unemployment in Sicily. Then the years spent organizing the students’ movement in Rome and subsequently the global justice movement. On an intellectual level, my encounter with Daniel Bensaïd, spending years reading Marx’s Capital and Plato, reading Marxist feminist texts and, later, my discovery of black Marxism once I moved to the United States. Also, I would say that moving to New York City has been a turning point on many levels, one of which was my exposure to the US brand of racism, which made me realize how many of my earlier assumptions about capitalism were either wrong or incomplete. But I would say that I’m still in the process of learning, provided this process will ever end…

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[seemslikeadream]

According to data collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut, marches held in more than 600 US cities were attended by at least 4.2 million people




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPuBGcng6Tw

'The real march is on Election Day': Women march around the world for a second day
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 051822001/

How the Women's March Is Turning Protesters Into Politicians

...And everything else from activists and canvassers to phone bankers and fundraisers

35 minutes ago

Protesters attend the Women's March: Power to the Polls rally at Sam Boyd Stadium on January 21st, 2018 in Las Vegas, NV. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
Nearly 100 years after her grandmother was arrested during a women's suffrage rally in New York, Vicki Lambert is protesting in something her elder relative might have worn. "This is an authentic 1898 walking skirt outfit that you would wear to go to a charity event, if you were a lady of means," Lambert says of her ornate red blouse and bustle-less skirt, meant for sitting in trolley cars or carriages.

But she didn't come to sit – she came to rally with thousands of other women at Women's March: Power to the Polls in Las Vegas. The flagship event, which took place exactly one year after the inaugural D.C. march, promoted a simple message: Vote.

Thousands showed up to Las Vegas' Sam Boyd Stadium in support of that message, and more than a million turned out across the nation a​ ​day earlier. Demonstrations in Los Angeles drew an estimated 500,000; 300,000 people turned up in Chicago; over 200,00 marched in New York.

In Las Vegas, ​Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, professor Melissa Harris-Perry, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alisha Garza, Cher​ ​and dozens of others​ delivered successive battle cries for reproductive rights,​ ​immigration​ rights and ​better​ representation for transgender women,​ ​women of color​ ​and sex workers. The issues were as varied as the sign-waving, pink-hat-wearing attendees, but the​ ​implication was clear: Women are poised to take power and they intend to.

This year, women are doing more than just voting – they're volunteering for campaigns and running for office themselves in record numbers. Women's March is doing its part to help the 600-plus women expected to compete in races this year by spearheading a nationwide voter registration drive targeting first-time voters in swing states like Nevada. They aim to register a million new voters in time for the midterm elections.

Lambert, who at 63 is a lifelong activist who has registered voters and worked the polls, says she became disillusioned after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election. She was doubtful a woman could be elected in her lifetime, but the march has drawn her back in because, she says, there's still work to be done.

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Vicki Lambert, 63. Her grandmother was arrested at a women's suffrage march almost a century ago. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
"All the things we're dealing with are things I've already marched for," Lambert says. "I've marched for reproductive rights already. I've marched for equality already. Why am I having to march again?"

She's not alone in her exasperation.

Jody Labb of Los Angeles attended with her 11-year-old daughter, Ila, and her mother-in-law, Gail Shields-Miller, who traveled from New York.

"I was raised by an activist; I've been involved in social justice work for a long, long time, and I cannot believe we're still fighting for the same things we've been fighting for," Labb, 46, says. "I don't want [my daughter] to have to fight those same fights."

Since Donald Trump took office, the three have adopted political activism as a family activity – attending rallies, posting to social media and swapping books, like Together We Rise and Fire and Fury.

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Three generations of a women – Ila Labb, 11, Joby Labb, 46, and Gail Shields-Miller, 72 – attend the Women's March. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
"I've been a thousand percent more active," says Shields-Miller, 73, whose activism goes back to the Vietnam War. "I was very complacent. I think we all were."

Susie Gestrine drove in with a large group of friends from Kingman, Arizona, which they call "the reddest spot in a red state." Since the 2016 election, Gestrine has become president of the Kingman Democratic Women's Club and organized Move On events, registered voters and recruited progressive candidates.

"After Trump was elected I got a lot more involved," she says. "It just became that much more important because it's a terrifying time."

For her efforts, she says Democrats are finally paying attention to conservative Mohave County.

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Susie Gestrine has organized Move On events in the past year. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
But even Arizona's urban centers lean conservative: Trump won Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. Of Arizona's 15 counties, 11 went to Republicans in 2016. Danielle Webster, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, says while she sees the state "turning purple," there are still times when she feels uncomfortable as a liberal.

"For me, as a woman of color, [living in a conservative state] can feel almost dangerous at times," Webster says. "I work in a really rural area where people have gun racks on their trucks or they're flying the Blue Lives Matter flags, and so I feel a little bit stifled. It may not be safe for me to express my opinion there as much."

Webster came to the rally with a friend, Lisa Paz, 36, of New Mexico. Paz attended the D.C. march last year, and since then she has been been canvassing, phone banking and supporting her mother, Alexis Jimenez, who is running for a New Mexico house seat.

"I've been political for a long time," says Paz, who is of Comanche and Pawnee descent. "Some of my first memories are being in strollers going to marches and things, but it's never been like this … it's more exciting and more fun now."

Jimenez is by no means alone. More than 600 women are expected to run for office this year, not including state legislatures, compared to just over 200 in 2016, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.

Amy Vilela is among them. She became a single-payer healthcare advocate after her daughter, Shalynne, died from a blood clot at age 22. Now she's running for a congressional seat in Nevada.

For the first year and a half after Shalynne's death, Vilela locked herself in her room, emerging only to work. But in the second year, she learned about single-payer, traveled to New York for a healthcare conference, and stopped at the Women's March on the way back.

It was there she found the courage to do more. She returned to Las Vegas, organized several healthcare rallies, and is now campaigning for the Democratic primary.

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Amy Vilela, 43, became a single-payer healthcare advocate after her daughter died of a blood clot at 22. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
"The march was such an inspiration to me – to be there, in this huge sisterhood of women, marching out for all different types of issues," she says. "It was empowering for me. It motivated me to be really involved and not be afraid of that process."

It created opportunities, Vilela says, and gave a lot of women the initiative to carry their activism beyond the marches.

Nevada State College professor Shantal Marshal, 35, had a similar experience. She had always considered herself to be above average in her political engagement – she campaigned for Hillary, registered voters and followed the primaries – but says the march inspired her to do even more. "It wasn't until the march that I realized how much power we have politically," she says.

She had planned to go to D.C. to attend Clinton's inauguration, but when that didn't happen, she was determined to go to the Women's March instead. Standing outside, shivering with her friend, she didn't realize how large the crowd had become.

"When I saw it on TV I started crying," Marshall says. "You had no idea how big it was until you saw the massive scope."

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Shantal Marshall, 35, had always been politically active, but the march inspired her to do more. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
Since then, she's testified on behalf of a bill, called her representatives and she's actively considering her own run for Nevada State Senate. "I'm such a groupie now," she says, laughing.

Most of the demonstrators in Las Vegas participated, in one form or another, last year. This year, many were helping organize the march itself.

Denise Lauren Hooks, 26, became a local organizer for Power to the Polls this year, and Jean Munson, 30, became the official artist for the Las Vegas event after attending last year. "Just being there and marching and seeing the intersectionality that took place there, I was like, I really need to dive deeper into this," Munson says.

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Jean Munson, 30, the official artist for the Las Vegas event. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
Dive deeper she has – and not just into traditional political organizing. Munson has gotten involved in Asian Pacific Islander activism, and she's founded two groups. The first, Girls Reaching Radical Levels of Success, or GRRLS, is a mentoring program; the other – Very Awesome Girls Into Nerdy Activities (yes, the acronym is intentional) – is a forum for teaching underrepresented groups about comics and drawing body-positive female-centered cartoons.

Judy Grell, 75, and Maureen Wilson, 59, met at the Las Vegas march in 2017 and returned this year together. Since the first march, the two joined Indivisible, the anti-Trump grassroots organization that, in Grell's words, is a group that "takes positive actions to overturn the things that are wrong in the country – mostly get[ting] rid of Republicans."

Wilson, a soft-spoken woman, says she's found community in the march. "We feel great; we feel powerful," she says. "Sometimes it's easy to feel powerless. There's so much chaos. You can't keep up with it from day to day. But then you get here and you feel powerful."

Women's March: Power to the Polls las vegas
Judy Crell, 75, (left), and Maureen Wilson, 59, met at the march last year and attended this year together. Roger Kisby for RollingStone.com
But it's not just a feeling they're looking for. It's action – action that they're sure is coming. "I've noticed on my own that the tide is turning," Wilson says.

"Yes," Grell chimes in, clutching her homemade "Impeach" sign. "The tide is turning."
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