American Women Are Furious — and It’s
Sep. 19th, 2018 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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American Women Are Furious — and It’s Changing Our Country Forever:
kawuli:
Repeatedly, during 2017 and 2018, I was asked — of the Women’s March, of #MeToo, of women running for elected office: “Is this a moment or a movement?” In part, the questioners craved reassurance that all this work, this pain and risk, was in service of something long-term and important. But the binary on which the question relies is a false one. Because movements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades.
They become discernible as movements — are made to look continuous and coherent — only after they’ve made a substantive difference. It was nine years between Emmett Till’s murder and the passing of the Civil Rights Act. It was more than 80 years between the first meeting of abolitionists and suffragists and the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 130 years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That law was recently gutted by the Supreme Court, a body that in 2018 also defended states’ rights to purge voter rolls, disproportionately affecting minority voters. Which means that the push for full enfranchisement in the United States is ongoing, two centuries hence. It’s easy to feel defeated by this, but more worthwhile to feel inspired: to know that in resisting today, we are playing our parts in a story with deep, proud roots.
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American Women Are Furious — and It’s Changing Our Country Forever:
kawuli:
Repeatedly, during 2017 and 2018, I was asked — of the Women’s March, of #MeToo, of women running for elected office: “Is this a moment or a movement?” In part, the questioners craved reassurance that all this work, this pain and risk, was in service of something long-term and important. But the binary on which the question relies is a false one. Because movements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades.
They become discernible as movements — are made to look continuous and coherent — only after they’ve made a substantive difference. It was nine years between Emmett Till’s murder and the passing of the Civil Rights Act. It was more than 80 years between the first meeting of abolitionists and suffragists and the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 130 years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That law was recently gutted by the Supreme Court, a body that in 2018 also defended states’ rights to purge voter rolls, disproportionately affecting minority voters. Which means that the push for full enfranchisement in the United States is ongoing, two centuries hence. It’s easy to feel defeated by this, but more worthwhile to feel inspired: to know that in resisting today, we are playing our parts in a story with deep, proud roots.
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