It’s now been six dizzying and nauseating months since Donald Trump took the oath of office, and the brightest spot on the American political landscape is the grassroots resistance that has sprung up to counter his regime. No previous president ever faced so many protests so early in his term, and the millions who have taken to the streets since January can already take significant credit for stalling and frustrating key aspects of Trump’s agenda, from his Muslim ban to his bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

There are numerous qualities that distinguish this organizing upsurge from past waves of protest in the United States, but the most striking and significant is its composition: the resistance, by and large, is women.

The movement kicked off, of course, with massive Women’s Marches in more than 650 cities and towns across the United States the day after the inauguration, which together added up to the single largest day of protest in American history.



Women have anchored nearly every aspect of the resistance work since. Women made up a solid majority of those who marched on Washington time and again last spring: sociologist Dana Fisher found, for instance, that 54% of participants in the Peoples Climate March and 57% of those who attended DC’s March on Science were women. A March survey of phone calls to Congressional offices found an even more striking gender gap, with women constituting 86% of those making calls.



Women have taken the lead in using stronger resistance tactics since the inauguration, from blockading Trump Tower in support of immigrant rights to holding sit-ins against Trumpcare at Senate offices in Washington.

And women have spearheaded many of the most noteworthy creative actions to counter the broader Trump agenda in recent months, from the #MamasDayBailout organized through the Movement for Black Lives network in the spring to counter mass incarceration to the recent Quinceañera-themed immigrant rights protest at the Texas Statehouse organized by 15 young women in splendidly poufy gowns.



Though hard data isn’t available, all indications are that women predominate in the resistance movement’s most distinctive expression: the thousands of small, local groups that have sprung up all around the United States, including more than 5,800 groups aligned with Indivisible, the grassroots project launched by two former Congressional staffers shortly after the November election.



The women behind these ground-level groups are often new to activism, but certainly not to life: many are in their 40s and 50s, seasoned multi-taskers with children or elderly parents or both to care for alongside their other responsibilities.

The sprawling movement they’ve helped build is emphatically decentralized, continuing a decades-long trend in grassroots organizing. It’s tactically nimble and refreshingly pragmatic. Resistance groups are working both outside and inside established channels, marching in the streets while also registering voters and recruiting candidates to run for office. The gender make-up of the resistance isn’t adequate to explain these other movement characteristics, but it’s clearly a factor to consider.



Women, of course, have long played key but under-acknowledged roles in the great movements of American history, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to Ferguson and Standing Rock. With the anti-Trump resistance, though, the preponderance of women is so noteworthy and significant that failing to name it obscures the movement’s basic nature – and distorts the larger political conversation surrounding it.



Why have so many articles, blog posts, and tweets invoked the resistance without acknowledging who is doing most of the day-to-day work of resisting? It might be because the majority of pundits, commentators, and advice-givers on the left still come from the very demographic group that’s so strikingly underrepresented among the forces fighting Trump: men.



If this disparity were more widely noted, just imagine how it might change our discussions. Instead of debating whether the Democratic party should be chasing after white male voters, we might be grappling instead with why men as a group have been comparatively so reluctant to march, organize, or even pick up the phone and make a simple call to Congress in response to the threat of Trump.

In the meantime, each time Trump’s agenda stalls and you find yourself thanking the resistance, remember who you’re thanking.



LA Kauffman is a longtime grassroots organizer and author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (Verso, 2017).

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