TIME

NEW FRIENDS, COMMON FOE

How the Women’s March brought progressives together
The Women’s March was organized by Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour

THE IDEA STARTED WITH WOMEN ON Facebook. On the night of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, a grandmother in Hawaii named Teresa Shook went online and called for women to storm the capital on Inauguration weekend.

“At the same time, 5,000 miles away, I was doing the same thing,” explains Bob Bland, a female manufacturing entrepreneur in New York City. “Within an hour we’d found each other and merged our events, and we were off to the races.” By the next morning, thousands of people from across the U.S. had signed up to join the event that would become the Women’s March on Washington.

Bland quickly realized that in order to transform the march from an angry Facebook group into a progressive

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from TIME

TIME4 min readInternational Relations
Fighting To Free Russia’s Political Prisoners
Vladimir Putin’s presidential victory this march was more of a coronation than an election. With the political system heavily skewed in his favor and all significant opponents disqualified, jailed, or dead, the vote was almost entirely pro forma. Sti
TIME3 min read
Stepping Up
Where do you find influence in 2024? You can start with the offices of the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Vilnius, Lithuania, where TIME met with Yulia Navalnaya earlier this spring. There, the activist is working with 60 supporters—whose anti-Kremlin
TIME1 min readCrime & Violence
A Gang Crisis In Haiti
A police officer guards the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince on March 14, 12 days after gang members stormed the country’s two largest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates. Gangs were implicated in the 2021 assassination of the last elec

Related Books & Audiobooks