On January 21,2017 after the inauguration, a protest march in Washington, originally billed as a “Million Women March” has been pared down by three quarters to an expected 176,000 (weather permitting) participants and is now billed simply as a “Woman’s March.”
The somewhat disappointing numbers do nothing to dampen enthusiasm. In fact, a sub group named the “Pussyhat Project” is busy crocheting, knitting and sewing 1.7 million (????)”pussyhats.” (https://www.pussyhatproject.com/)
And Vogue Magazine, whose editor is a big Hillary supporter has run a tribute to the women who planned the parade. (http://www.vogue.com/13520360/meet-the-women-of-the-womens-march-on-washington/)
In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”
Here is just a snippet of adulation:
“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic-the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.
Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”
Incidentally, the column has been taken down from their site but is available in its entire idiocy:
(http://gawker.com/asma-al-assad-a-rose-in-the-desert-1265002284)
So, this is how Vogue describes the forthcoming march:
“……., a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.
Perhaps you’re planning to be there? Perhaps you’re bringing your mother, your grandmother, your daughter, your sister? You’ll be in good company. Per the event’s Facebook page at press time, 176,000 people are planning to attend, with another 250,000 still on the fence. It seems likely, said Linda Sarsour, one of four national cochairs acting as spokeswomen for the movement, that it will be “the largest mass mobilization that any new administration has seen on its first day.”
That fluidity says something about the Women’s March and how it functions; it’s an organic, grassroots effort that prides itself on being inclusive, intersectional, and nonhierarchical, on taking what Bob Bland (one of the movement’s cofounders, now serving as a national cochair) called “a horizontal approach to leadership.” Horizontal????Huh????
And this is how the epic event’s founders describe their goals:
