By Julie Alvin
A few days after the 2016 presidential election, I gathered with some friends at a bar in lower Manhattan. We had come together to grieve Donald Trump’s win, but in the course of the conversation we found that we were all feeling oddly energized – fueled by our rage at the outcome. The four of us worked in women’s media at the time – two of us at Bustle and two of us at HuffPost Women – and though we were scared about the future and bewildered by the country’s choice, we were also struck by the combined powers of our outlet’s audiences, and motivated to turn that power into something useful. Between tears and cocktails, we hatched a plan.
We would go on to throw an event called Watch Us Run in Washington D.C. on January 20, 2017, billed as a day of counterprogramming to Trump’s inauguration. There were phone-banking and sign-making stations, a photo booth, an interactive art project, and panels about grassroots organizing and how to turn resistance into art with the likes of Ashley Judd, Aisha Moodie-Mills, and Michael Moore. The next day we all attended the Women’s March together. At the time, it felt so good to make something out of our anger and to be around like-minded people. It felt like the start of something.
This feeling was replicated across the country during those weeks and months following Trump’s win. People knitted pussy hats and declared themselves members of Pantsuit Nation. The Women’s March staged subsequent events and protests. Countless local Democratic clubs and political action groups were formed. A million rabid group chats were initiated. There was a tsunami of support for “the resistance.”
And yet, eight years later, here we are. Donald Trump is about to serve a second term as president. Republicans have control of Congress. There is a 6:3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Roe vs. Wade has been overturned. The Women’s March organization itself has been tainted by allegations of antisemitism and racism, and mentions of a People’s March before Trump’s second inauguration were met with a collective groan. It begs the question: How did we get here? Did we actually accomplish anything? And what should resistance look like in 2024 and beyond?
“The Women’s March is an example of something that more privileged people were able to show up for for one day and then kind of tune out,” said Emma Gray, a writer, podcast host, and author of the 2018 book A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance. Gray was part of that small group that gathered at a bar in November of 2016 to plan Watch Us Run, and she and I went on to help form a political action group called Women To The Front (WTTF), which raises money for progressive causes but has been mostly inactive for the last couple of years. “I look back on those years and I see people trying to do their best to respond to the moment. I see that we did things that built community, but perhaps did not move the needle in a material way as much as we wanted them to.”

Marching needs to be the start of something, not the action in and of itself, Gray says. And some actions born out of the Women’s March community created meaningful change. The subsequent #MeToo movement changed the culture around sexual harassment. Record breaking numbers of women ran for office in the 2018 midterms, and their victories helped propel Democrats to retake the House. Grassroots women’s groups like WTTF funded organizations already doing the work to support communities that were imperiled under a Trump administration – WTTF raised money for organizations like Higher Heights, The Florence Project, and The Human Utility. After Roe was overturned, the communities formed during the Women’s March era were able to effectively mobilize to help pass ballot measures protecting abortion access. And the November 5 election had its bright spots for Democratic candidates further down the ballot. It was not all for nothing, even if it was not enough to halt a second Trump term.
“It was beautiful to see mass participation as opposed to mass apathy,” says Nelini Stamp, Director of Strategy for the Working Families Party. “But eight years later, it’s good that nobody’s calling for a mass march. People need to do some introspection and reflection in their communities.”
Some of that introspection needs to focus on the lessons of past women’s movements. They often prioritized white feminism (though let’s not forget that white women broke for Trump in the last three presidential elections) and the experiences of privileged people rather than widening the aperture to center race and class. The Flavia Dzodan quote “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” was widely circulated as a reminder and admonishment in the Women’s March era (it was printed on pink tote bags and sold on Etsy, actually), but much of the movement fell short on that front. By now even the word “feminist” has fallen out of favor for some due to its associations with movements that failed to serve the most vulnerable. Not to mention how the word has been weaponized against its adherents (see the term “feminazi”), and what that says about the cultural response to women’s activism. In her recent New York Magazine piece, “The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?,” Rebecca Traister reminds us that public criticism often sets out to “demean and dismiss” the women doing this work. Political parties and the media have “never been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women,” she says. We must remember this, and do the work anyway.
And what is the most important, effective work to be done now? On an individual level, Stamp recommends funneling your energies into community and contributing locally in small, tactical ways rather than demonstrating on a national stage this time around. This means donating to local abortion funds or food banks, writing to your local government officials about the kind of legislation you’d like to see near you, participating in direct action to protect at-risk communities, or talking to friends and neighbors about your values and the world you want to see. She looks to the rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance as inspiration; people would contribute food, alcohol, and entertainment to local gatherings and charge admission that would go towards helping their neighbors pay for skyrocketing rent. “It is going to be a culture of solidarity that will get us through this,” she says.
Sami Sage, co-host of the Betches Media politics podcast American Fever Dream and co-author of the recently published book Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small In Our Country and In Our Lives, also emphasizes community building. “Talking to your friends and neighbors is actually number one,” Sage says. “Statistically, relational organizing, which means speaking to people about issues, has the strongest effect on voter turnout.”
Sage also recommends getting involved based on the intersection of your skills, interests, abilities, and resources. Democracy in Retrograde offers a civic personality quiz that points readers towards the actions that might best suit them. People with strong leadership skills might run for office, volunteer to be a precinct captain, or participate in their local school board meetings, while people who prefer to be behind the scenes can make regular donations to causes they care about or volunteer at organizations that are meaningful to them.
“We emphasize that politics is local. You don’t have to think ‘this is about getting a Democrat elected.’ It’s about increasing the civic fabric,” Sage says.
When I look back on 2017, I can’t help but think that our efforts – mainly among those who were new to the fight – were naive about the nature of the challenge before us, well-meaning but not particularly strategic. (An interactive art project and a Giphy photo booth?? This would not fell the dark forces taking shape on the right.) Like some have said of the Democratic Party, we had a tendency to prioritize symbolic action (remember the safety pins?) over actual change and coalition building. It’s clear that the frenzied “WE RIDE AT DAWN” energy of 2016 needs to be replaced by something more measured and shrewd if we are to make sustainable change. And there are already hopeful signs that everyone’s gotten the memo. Indivisible and the Working Families Party – organizations relentlessly focused on grassroots organizing, tactical solutions, and policy change – hosted a mass call on November 7, and 137,000 people attended. A week after the 2024 election, 7,000 people had signed up for Run For Something, a pipeline for young progressive candidates.
“Moving forward, personally I want to spend less time performing my goodness and my activism and my values and more time showing up to help people in concrete ways,” Gray says.
As for me, I’ve left women’s media for the time being, and was working on the Harris Campaign’s Get Out The Vote team in Michigan before the election. On Saturday, November 2, our organizers were making thousands of phone calls trying to recruit volunteers to knock on people’s doors to persuade them to vote for Harris and make sure they had the information they needed to cast their ballot. The tight polls suggested that the race was within a field margin, meaning that the ground game in the final days could determine the outcome. On the same day they were making these calls, thousands of women from across the country were gathering in Washington D.C. to march, again, against Donald Trump. From my vantage point in a crucial swing state, that seemed like an infuriating use of time. Why spend the precious few days we had left marching alongside people who already agree with you in a city where 92 percent of residents would vote for Harris, when you could be allocating that energy elsewhere? I certainly wish they’d come to knock on doors in Michigan instead. I hope that in the future, less effort will be put into marching and more will be put into the kinds of concrete action Stamp and Sage describe, and that Indivisible and the Working Families Party are focused on.
As I was writing this article, a text came through from my friend Erin Darke, an actor who founded WTTF after learning about the women’s consciousness-raising meetings of the ‘70s women’s movement while she was filming Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt. “Let’s get the band back together,” it said, along with a date and time for our first meeting in years.