By Monda Halpern, Professor, The University of Western Ontario
On the weekend preceding the November 2024 American presidential election, my sister and I had the opportunity to be in Washington, DC where we attended the pro-Kamala Harris Women’s March. Dressed in costumes and waving clever and humorous placards, approximately 10,000 people gathered in Freedom Plaza and the surrounding streets to demonstrate their support for Harris, women’s reproductive rights, and childless cat ladies. After socializing, buying souvenirs, and listening to speeches, thousands of us marched behind activist leaders and a women’s drum corps to the White House lawn where the optimism was palpable, inspiring, and, as it turns out, misplaced: we were devastated three days later to learn during our CNN vigil that Harris had lost the election.
Since being in DC, my mind has been on the prominent role that Women’s History played in the March. Despite crowd chants of “we’re not going back,” meant to counter the other candidate’s nostalgic pledge to “make America great again,” many demonstrators in the March were doing just that — harking back to the gains of the second-wave women’s movement, most notably the Roe v. Wade victory. A significant number of these women were second-wavers in their late 60s, 70, and 80s whose signs proudly indicated that they had been down this road before: “Same Shit, Different Century” and “My Arms are Tired of Holding this Sign since the 1970s.”
Certainly, the March held a spirit of unity and common purpose, but, for me, as a women’s historian who teaches a course on women’s protest movements, the messaging by these older feminists was in stark contrast to that of the younger activists. While the older women sought to remind the crowd of their groundbreaking feminist achievements, the younger demonstrators and the scheduled speeches were focused on a plethora of intersecting rights, including those of trans, poor, lesbian, Indigenous, Palestinian, African American, and Latin women. Clearly, not every person in the crowd was enthusiastic about using the March to advance the cause of every one of these groups, but most participants obediently repeated the supportive mantras.
The concept of intersectionality is now a core feminist approach meant to recognize and embrace the various identities and concerns of those women who have been excluded from traditional feminist discourse, but it does have its hazards. Rather than recognizing the interplay between sexism and other isms (colonialism, for example), it risks relegating female oppression to a secondary position or even an invisible one. It also has a political dimension, deeming some groups as deserving of feminist alliance and resources, thereby turning others into outsiders or even the enemy. This splintering of feminist support has clear “divide and conquer” potential, a strategy that second-wave feminists warned us about decades ago when they observed how patriarchal culture deliberately tries to create fractures among women.
Even second-wavers admit that they didn’t get everything right in their focus on white, straight, middle-class women, but is feminism today at risk of drowning in the surge of identity politics? Intersectionality is a valuable activist and analytical tool; yet, the inclusion of some groups will always mean the exclusion of others, even those that are feminist and enlightened. Undeterred, the second-wave feminists persist, however, rising with the tide of new feminist theories and activism and staying modern and engaged. They were right to remind younger demonstrators of their heroic efforts, of their endangered gains, and of the significance and relevance of Women’s History.
