Amid a government shutdown, feminists once again filled city centers on Saturday to resist oppressive social structures — less than a year after millions participated in the global Women’s March to protest President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I’m proud to have joined the hundreds of community members who participated in the CNY Women Rising march in Syracuse on Saturday, coordinated by two local organizations, Women TIES and New Feminists for Justice.

While last year’s marches vocalized resistance against a Trump presidency, this year’s was  about inciting political change. In Syracuse, speakers called for unification of our individual passions and causes in an effort to better identify and combat oppression of all women, no matter their ability, economic standing, ethnicity, racial background, religious beliefs or sexuality.

Tracy Chamberlain Higginbotham, the president of Women TIES, said this blending of activist agendas was a central component of this year’s local march.

“It’s about what individual women can do together with whatever their passion is, with like-minded women, to change things,” Higginbotham said.

In addition to the march, several CNY Women Rising events took place over the weekend to bring attention to the issues that resonate most with local women. Friday’s event focused on the importance of supporting women-owned businesses, as well as pay inequality.

The march Sunday drew attention to the disparity with which Syracuse University women’s basketball games are attended, urging community members to attend the game on Sunday in an effort to break the team’s previous attendance record.

While the atmosphere of the Syracuse march was still celebratory and cathartic, attention remained on what still needs to be done. Like the national march’s theme of “Power to the Polls,” the Syracuse march also emphasized the importance of more women in political and leadership positions.

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Rachel May, a Syracuse University staffer who is running for the 53rd district of the state Senate, spoke briefly at the march, as did Colleen Deacon, an SU alumna working in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office who challenged Rep. John Katko (R-Syracuse) in the 2016 election. In a press release Saturday, Cuomo condemned the Trump administration’s oppressive and sexist policies.

“You have a president of the United States who simply does not respect women … coupled with a Congress that is an extreme, conservative, socially conservative Congress that is rolling back all the progress that we’ve made,” Cuomo said Saturday at the New York City women’s march.

As we celebrate the women’s movement and its achievements over the past year, including the #MeToo movement and the record number of Democrat women running for office in 2018, we must remain cognizant of the challenges we still face.

The number of women in office is still nowhere near equal representation of women constituents. Over the past year, the Trump administration has rolled back Title IX protections for sexual assault survivors on college campuses, prevented contraceptive care and authored a tax law that will disproportionately hurt women and children. On Friday, Trump allowed states to block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood.

Change must start from within the women’s movement. As feminists, we must be critically self-reflective of our own complicity in the oppression of women. We can’t escape the fact that feminist movements in the past have often been whitewashed, excluding women of color and the oppressions they face. Nor can we ignore that the majority of white women voters voted for Trump.

The importance of the movement’s emphasis on intersectionality moving forward was not absent from the Syracuse march, as one speaker reflected on the rightful criticisms lodged against last year’s women’s march as privileging white women. Donations were then collected for the Syracuse chapter of Black Lives Matter.

For the women’s march to truly evolve and respond to gender equality, we must respond to all women’s oppression. First, we need to strive for a racial and cultural consciousness of inequality, both in ourselves and others. And we must make more spaces for women of color as leaders, both within the greater feminist movement and society at large.

For these reasons, it’s imperative that the momentum of these local and national marches translates into measurable action. As one speaker on Saturday succinctly put it: “Our resistance continues.”

C.C. Hendricks is a doctoral student in composition and cultural rhetoric. Her column appears biweekly. You can reach her at crhen100@syr.edu.

Published on January 21, 2018 at 11:09 pm