UPDATED: Jan. 21, 2018, at 10:24 p.m.

Until a few weeks ago, Marlowe Reardon hadn’t changed her phone’s home screen photo in nearly a year.

Each time she used her phone, she’d see a picture she took of two young children, holding a makeshift sign that read “fight like a girl.” Reardon snapped the photo on Jan. 21, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

Reardon, the young girls and an estimated 500,000 other people had taken to the streets of the United States’ capital in the first Women’s March. That photo provided a constant reminder of her experience.

“It always just brought me back,” said Reardon, a junior television, radio and film major at Syracuse University.

Dozens of SU and SUNY-ESF students were included in the half-million people that marched in the capital on that chilly Saturday in January 2017. Some made the six-hour trek on buses that left Syracuse as early 5 a.m., and returned late that night.

The Women’s March on Washington, which took place the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, was organized in support of women’s rights and as a peaceful protest of Trump’s election. Demonstrators also marched in support of groups they thought were marginalized by Trump’s controversial campaign, including the Muslim, Latinx, black and LGBTQ communities.

Similar protests took place in New York City, Syracuse and cities across the country and the world. An estimated 5 million people worldwide participated in some form of a women’s march that day. The Washington protest was the largest.

The march itself only lasted a day, but some said the experience in Washington was a life-changing moment that continues to have an impact on their lives, one year later.

“It was, I think, a wakeup call to everybody to be like, ‘look how strong we are when we can come together,’” said Lyla Rose, currently a senior television, radio and film major at SU. “That’s kind of something that’s been keeping me going through the last year.”

Reardon, like others, said she felt helpless after Trump’s election, and hoped that attending the march would give her a chance to have her voice heard.

She lined up in Schine Student Center two hours before the SU College Democrats, a group she was involved in, released a limited number of bus tickets for people who wanted to travel to the march, Reardon said. Rose, who was also a member of the College Democrats at the time, helped organize that trip after SU’s Student Association agreed to fund costs of the buses.

Courtesy of Lyla Rose

Marlowe Reardon (right) traveled to the Women’s March on Washington with the SU College Democrats.

Katie Conti, now an SU senior international relations and public communication studies and geography dual major, initially tried to get tickets for the College Democrats’ bus.

Conti and Charlie Orr — her roommate, who’s currently a senior environmental studies major at SUNY-ESF — along with two other friends eventually found a bus, coordinated by the Syracuse Peace Council.

Compared to the inauguration, which Conti and Orr called “desolate,” Orr said seeing the thousands of people at Women’s March the next day was “powerful.”

“The movement’s purpose was to get everybody together, at the onset, and encourage them to break off in any way they can,” he said.

The march’s organizers urged protesters to continue with activism. Rose was then a member of the SU College Democrats, but she said she felt she needed to do more.

“You didn’t accomplish anything by going to the Women’s March and then coming back and not doing anything,” Rose said. The best way for her to not feel helpless was to “get out and do something,” she added, referencing a quote from former President Barack Obama.  

After the Women’s March, she joined the CNY Solidarity Coalition, a group that aims to protect marginalized groups and organizes protests against Trump, Rep. John Katko (R-Camillus) and other politicians. The coalition also plans community events and door-knocking campaigns, among other things, according to its website.

Though some people said they viewed the march as a protest against Trump, Conti said she saw the Women’s March as an opportunity to work toward a better future.

“I found that (the march) was not a protest necessarily against something,” Conti said. “But it was a protest for something.”

The march started conversations about women’s roles in places beyond political science and women’s and gender studies classrooms, she said.

Some attribute recent, public movements protesting sexual misconduct in part to the energy of the Women’s March.

In the year since the first march, the dialogue surrounding women’s rights and workplace sexual misconduct has moved further into the mainstream. Sexual assault allegations against dozens of men across several industries sparked movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up, which protest gender inequity and sexual misconduct.

Reardon said she believed those movements are indirectly linked to the Women’s March.

“I think the discourse has really opened,” Conti said.

But she added that women of different backgrounds have for years paved the way for global women’s rights movements. The HeforShe campaign, launched in 2014, was a movement that existed before the Women’s March that also aimed to advance women’s equality around the world.

Conti still wishes she could have done more activism in the last year, which she said was a common sentiment shared among many people who went to the Women’s March.  

“I should’ve gone to more protests,” Conti said. “I should’ve done more things.”

But Conti also said she continued to be an activist for women’s equity in other ways. She has taught her mom about her experience at the march and the ideas of the feminist movement.

“I think just learning … and arming yourself with knowledge is a really good way of protesting,” Conti said. “It made me realize how much I didn’t know and how much I wanted know.”  

She said she’s been cognizant of intersectional feminism, or the idea that a woman’s race, religion, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation overlap with their gender identity, and can also impact their place in society.

Daily Orange File Photo

Both Conti and Rose said they noticed the lack of racial diversity at the Women’s March, which they said was primarily attended by white women. Conti said she felt organizers tried to be inclusive of all. But many still believe the march is not inclusive as it could be.

The march was initially criticized for leaving out non-white organizers. After similar protests were organized across in the country in 2018, many women said they would sit them out. Black Lives Matter Cincinnati said on their website the march was more focused on electing Democrats and protesting Trump than addressing the concerns of women of color.

And Conti said there’s still a need to push for women to achieve social and economic parity across the globe.

“We’ve got a long ways to go,” Conti said. “The glass ceiling’s still not shattered.”

This post has been updated for appropriate style. 

Published on January 21, 2018 at 10:05 pm

Contact Jordan: jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18