After Women’s March, can a march become a movement locally?

Before the event had even officially started, every table at Iowa City Brewlab was full.

A room of mostly women, but with some male supporters, converged Jan. 28 on the brewery to write postcards to their legislators.

Their concerns were varied - education, immigration, Black Lives Matter, women's rights, health care and the environment. But all the writers were there out of determination to have their voices heard.

'We're old, and we're tired of having to protest this stuff,” said Jefri Palmero, 63, who attended with her wife, Pat Brockett, 70. 'As lesbians, we're worried about becoming second-class citizens overnight. We're going to resist every day.”

A week earlier, the Iowa City couple traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Women's March, an event that brought hundreds of thousands of women and men into the streets of the capital a day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. Huge crowds also turned out at similar marches around the world and in cities and small towns across the United States.

The question now is whether that groundswell of action will become a sustained political movement.

Sandy Mostaert, co-chair of the Iowa chapter of the Women's March, thinks it can. The Cedar Rapids resident, who owns a marketing and consulting business, helped organize the Des Moines sister march.

Before the event, she thought it would be a big deal if 1,000 people showed up - instead, some 26,000 descended on the Iowa Capitol.

'We never thought we'd get that many people in Des Moines,” she said. 'We pulled off something that was never pulled off before in that magnitude.”

She said the goal is to keep the people who showed up active and moving now that the march is over.

'We started realizing that many of the people participating have never done this before, have never been politically active,” she said. 'So we asked, ‘How do we keep this going with people for whom it sparked something?' We did not design this to be one and done.”

To that end, national organizers followed up the march with a call to action, asking supporters to take 10 political actions over the next 100 days. The first was to send postcards to lawmakers highlighting policy concerns.

If the Women's March was largely a grass roots effort organized through social media, the follow up actions have been so, too: Several Facebook events quickly were created in the Corridor inviting people to write postcards together.

When Johnson County Supervisor Kurt Friese created one of those - the 'Postcards and Pale Ale” gathering that Palmero and Brockett attended - he said he thought a couple dozen of his friends would show up. In less than 24 hours, however, more than 100 people had RSVPed they would be attending. After the event, which was so packed at times it was hard to walk through the room, he said he collected more than 1,000 postcards.

Damita Brown, 52, of Iowa City, was one of the postcard writers. Co-founder of Midwest Telegraph, an organization aimed at bringing social justice groups together and fostering conversations, she said it will be important for activists to be inclusive if they want to keep building political coalitions.

'I think, really, when it comes to sustaining momentum, we have to start getting out of our comfort zones and trying things we've never done before,” Brown said. 'Class, gender, racism, sexism ... single-issue organizing should be a thing of the past. We've got to get all these voices in the room, and then there's nothing that can stop us.”

Jillian Moore, 35, of Iowa City, attended the march in Washington and showed up to write postcards at Postcards and Pale Ale. She also is a member of Bluestockings Feminist Art Collective, which is hosting an event to write valentines to politicians Sunday in Iowa City. She said it is important for new activists to remember that a lot of women have been protesting for a long time - and to listen to and learn from them. One challenge the Women's March faced was criticism that marchers were mostly white women who too often ignored the concerns and needs of communities of color.

'I know there has been a lot of talking within the community about how people of color and LGBTQ people have been dealing with this for a long time, and now that's the new normal for all of us,” she said. 'I think allies, especially white allies, are going to have to listen and be willing to be uncomfortable, and when there are events like this, we need to make sure we reach out to activists in those communities and invite them in and realize we can't always see or know everything that is their reality.”

Ion Vasi, an associate professor in the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, who studies social movements and political sociology, said movements can fall apart for a number of reasons, including fracturing of leadership and loss of momentum.

But in something like the Women's March, which pulled from such a wide array of causes, he doesn't think loss of motivation will come anytime soon, as long as activists commit to solidarity across issues.

'The size of those protests suggest it's not just a demand for specific benefits, it's a more general emotional response,” he said. 'People marched not just for abortion rights and women's rights. The march resonated with a lot of women on many levels. ... As there are more grievances created, it's going to be easy to continue to mobilize.”

He said protests are the most visible sign of a movement - other effects could be felt years down the road in changes of public opinion and if a new generation of women activists emerges and more women become involved in politics and civic engagement.

That could be happening. A new Washington Post poll found 40 percent of Democratic women say they will become more involved in political causes this year, compared with 25 percent of Americans in general and 27 percent of Democratic men.

Nearly half of liberal Democrats said they will become more politically active, as did 43 percent of Democrats under age 50. Interest was much lower among independents and Republicans, at 21 percent.

Only time will tell whether the newfound engagement will be maintained. For now, however, many women, like Postcards and Pale Ale attendee and Democratic organizer Kate Revaux, 34, of Iowa City, are fired up.

'I think we're in unprecedented territory,” she said. 'We may not win all the battles, but we're not going to go down without a fight.”

l Comments: (319) 398-8434; alison.gowans@thegazette.com