Body Politics
Today's Feminist, It Turns Out, Looks Like a Lot of People -- Maybe a Million
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 26, 2004; Page C01
Women were screaming and whooping as they got off the Orange Line deep down in the Smithsonian Metro station, and their happy, combative squeals bounced off the concrete corridors: It reminded you of the eighth-grade girls in PE class after that surprising upset victory against the boys in dodge ball, a noise that both enthralls and terrifies. Up the escalators and into the gray, slightly chilled Sunday midmorning, where there was --
Whoa.
Wouldja lookit.
A sea of pink. This was a lot of people already, and if you're surprised by the turnout, that could be because, like us, you've been watching the wrong channels of (or got confused by the cacophony of) the so-called American culture war. Perhaps you thought it was about Iraq, or gay marriage, or the FCC.
Your mistake. The March for Women's Lives, an impressive and congenial amassing of hundreds of thousands of abortion rights advocates held yesterday, succeeded where other lefty assemblages on the National Mall of late have stumbled: It felt both urgent and singularly focused on its cause, instead of coming at you jampacked with multiple issues and distracting freak shows.
This was a big multi-generational Vagina Monologue, starring everyone. The vibe of the day-long rally was at once good-humored and yet deadly serious. It was aggressive and even occasionally, almost delightfully, profane:
Not long after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) welcomed the crowd and begged them to vote against President Bush this November, Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman! Always and forever! Her hair still dark brown and windblown, only she's in a white tennis visor this time, and a yellow windbreaker with pink top) took the mike and said the Amazing Amazon wouldn't stand for mixing church and state, and she'd escort the president "back to Texas."
Then a spoken-word poet stood onstage and waved her arms around and riffed on the Con-stitution, the coun-try, coun-ter-revolutions -- except in each of those c-words, please insert the naughty c-word. (The one we're not supposed to say in print.)
Now you're speaking the language of the modern movement. The only gift this White House administration has given the women's movement in the last four years, it seems, is a president surnamed Bush and vice president named Dick. This has meant limitless poster and T-shirt slogans, most all of them present yesterday. Lick it, stomp it, conquer it. Keep its laws off your body. Some of the elder women veterans of the abortion debate who marched tried to get into these more bawdy "Buck Fush"-type stylings of the day, but you could see them wince here and there.
And the young ones! Here was the 1990s "grrrl power" influence come to fruition on the new century's contentious poliscape. They have mastered the perfect combination of cute and powerful. Every obscene gesture or slogan or T-shirt comes with Magic-Markered flowers or bubbly lettering. There was a poster of an animated uterus with eyes and boxing gloves on each ovary, looking for a fight. Tight white and pink T-shirts, many of them declaring: "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like."
This is what a feminist looks like:
Like a Powerpuff Girl went to college and got tattoos and somehow managed to keep great skin. Like, with magenta stripes in her cascading curly hair. Walking around with a precious paper parasol, only with that pernicious c-word painted on top. Like the Mall had been turned into an enormous aisle of pink books filled with assertive heroines, a mixing of chick lit, "Charlie's Angels" and ferocious politics.
A Texas Republican comes into the White House, makes moves on an already humiliated welfare system, starts preaching an abstinence-only campaign. Of particular disdain to these Powerpuff Girls is the day last November, in the Ronald Reagan Building of all places, when the president sat onstage and (surrounded by nine, count 'em nine, white men in gray business suits -- Attorney General John Ashcroft, Sens. Rick Santorum and Orrin Hatch, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- you know, them) and signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. (The picture from this event seems especially tone-deaf to feminists: There wasn't one conservative woman who could have been up on that stage with those guys?)
It's that sort of climate that brought so many women out yesterday. They've had it.
Granted, a lot of them have always had it up to here with something. But there hadn't been an abortion-related demonstration of comparable size since before the 1992 election, and in listening to people in the crowd talk about why they were here, it felt as if 1992 might as well have been an ancient era. And Roe-vee-wade, 31 years ago and now its own evolved pronoun, even more ancient, and therefore more fragile.
And the guys! These could be, like, some of the best boyfriends and husbands ever. They all have perfect three-day stubble and look like Gideon Yago from MTV.
"I want all you guys to know your presence here will keep you safe in the upcoming feminist revolution," Gloria Steinem said from the stage at the post-march rally. (Steinem, who turned 70 last month and has grown her hair long again and was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with a star on one side and "Another Youth for Choice" on the back. She practically glowed as she looked out over the crowd and seemed to be almost gazing back at her life and career. The TV news stations were using the word "million" in reference to the turnout, calling it the largest in history -- even, she marveled, "Nineteenth-Century Fox.")
Many of the men were also wearing "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like" T-shirts. One Asian American guy had on a pink shirt that said "Cute Guys for Women's Lives," and he was cute, and they swooned and took pictures of him with their tiny cell phone cameras, then there was a guy in a shirt that read "Feminist Chicks Dig Me," then came a guy in a long pink sarong-style skirt with a white dress shirt and necktie and pink do-rag on his head.
Men chased toddlers across the long grass near the Museum of the American Indian, while their wives listened to the endless speeches from the directors and co-founders of the national organization for this and council for rights of that. There were guys on the make, who brought giant picnic lunches in backpacks, and offered women grapes in Ziploc bags and fresh-baked flat breads. Guys would hoist their girlfriends on their shoulders for a better view, or so they could wave their many signs. ("Leggo My Eggo" was a favorite.)
The march, you ask? The march sort of just happened, and it was more of a short stroll, up toward and then across the Ellipse, back down Pennsylvania, and past the brief row of antiabortion demonstrators standing behind the barricade gates with their huge pictures of fetuses. A guy with a megaphone kept chanting, "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do," over and over and over.
They marched back around to the Mall's east end, where a choir was singing about what the world would be like "if Ashcroft could get pregnant," then a rock band called Betty played a song, then the Indigo Girls, who introduced Whoopi Goldberg, who brandished a coat hanger, then introduced House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was followed by Madeleine Albright.
Now throw Ted Turner up there. Now the movie actress Ashley Judd ("who was a women's studies major," Steinem effusively noted), then labor activist Dolores Huerta, still going strong, still making people chant "Si se puede," and Susan Sarandon, and Eleanor Smeal, all of them hoarse, exultant yelled-out voices.
Carole King came on just as the wind picked up, and reminded the crowd, a cappella, what it feels like when the earth moves under your feet. Such an old chestnut, this endless abortion debate, yet it all sounded somehow renewed.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
