March 22, 2017
Michael Heaney (University of Michigan)
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States has proved to be a highly contentious decision. During the campaign, he made many statements that were offensive to women, Muslims, immigrants, and other broad social groups. In the aftermath of the election, leaders in these communities have sought to organize opposition and resistance to the policies of the Trump Administration. These efforts have manifested both as large, central demonstrations and as smaller, decentralized actions. The underlying premise of this project is that the actions of Trump and his administration have the potential to stimulate new lines of political conflict and organization in the United States. I am particularly interested in understanding who gets organized, how they organize, and to what effect. In this specific paper, I examine efforts to organize women as a broad social group in response to Trump. It does so by drawing upon surveys of activists attending counter-inaugural protests and the Women’s March on Washington in 2017 on January 20 and 21, respectively. Analysis of the data shows that there were notable similarities and differences between the activists who were mobilized using a broad frame of “resist” (at the counter-inaugural) and those mobilized using a gendered frame at the Women’s March. While the two groups were nearly identical in their ideological positions, attitudes about women in the workplace, and their race/ethnicity, women’s marchers were significantly more partisan, older, more advanced educationally, had higher incomes, and we’re more likely to be female. Moreover, women’s marchers were more likely to use gendered frames to explain their motivations for participation than were counter-inaugural protesters, other factors held constant. Interestingly, women’s marchers observed at the counter-inaugural protest used frames that were more similar to other counter-inaugural protesters than to other women’s marchers. This analysis reveals the potential to organize women as a broad social group in opposition to President Trump. The Women’s March, in particular, demonstrated the ability to systematically influence the way activists express their motivations for participation.