Don’t Discount the Power of Female Protestors – We’ve Been Successful Before

Over the weekend, global society witnessed something quite spectacular. In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th POTUS, people protested, and protested on a huge scale. Indeed, some figures suggest that protests took place in over 20 countries, with as many as one out of every 100 people in America marching to reject Trump’s anti-women, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-anything-but-white policies in its entirety. In the USA alone nearly 3.5 million women marched for the sake of themselves, their sisters, their daughters and their future granddaughters, an enormous percentage of them wearing all pink and donning so called “pussy hats”. Since the heat of the protests have died down, I’ve read many a cynical column online in high-brow news outlets (mostly written by men, I fear, for men) touting that while the marches were of a high ethical standing, they will do little do spur any change. They asserted that the protests were nothing more than symbolic and Donald Trump, they wrote, doesn’t fear symbolism. But, on some level at least, I think they’re wrong. A symbol, a protest, can change everything. They only need to look at history… events such as this alter people’s lives. At the least, protesters make themselves heard by how they inconvenience the elite and engage the common man and woman in the moral and ethical quandaries that affect society today, while at the most they thrust big and complicated political questions into lives of routinely depoliticised people and catalyse a revolution.

Trump, his staffers and the journalists sympathetic to him need look no further into history than the events of the 5 October 1789, a date that fell during the earliest days of what would become the French Revolution. On that crisp autumn morning, a great mob of women took to the cobbled streets of Paris. These women, furious and forgotten, were protesting enforced bread shortages in the city. They were hungry – both literally and figuratively – in the same way women around the world this weekend were hungry. Both were energized with a desire to rebel against decisions made about their very livelihoods by the elite, and both were fighting for the present and future health of themselves and their children. The Parisian women – some 7,000 strong – descended on the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of Paris’ government, and forced their way into the city hall, where they pillaged the armoury. Now armed with weapons more lethal and tangible than their determination, a revolution, The Women’s March on Versailles, was suddenly birthed. They marched all the way to that glorious palace, where King Louis XVI had residence.

The March on Versailles by the famished women of Paris was the first of its kind in modern history, and was wildly effective, in a way the common folk had never thought possible. After the women broke into the palace, The King was forced to march with the 60,000 strong group all the way back to the city. That march, in the same way the marches across the world a couple of days ago also attempted to assert, sent a clear message to the powers-that-be that the power is, ultimately, with the people, and democracy will have its say. As historians now agree, the March on Versailles marked the point of no return for the French royal family.

The conclusion to be made is that, simply symbolic or not, futile or not, the act of protesting by women who cannot be fired upon, who are impassioned by a fight they perceive to be for their children, plays a unique and powerful role in not only revolutions gone but revolutions yet to come. When a woman takes matters into their own hands, acts swiftly and with conviction and groups together with thousands of other like-minded ladies, there’s nothing she can’t achieve.

Watch this space.

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