March on, ladies.

• Author: Drake, Nora
• Position: Life in America

It is estimated that more than 5,000,000 people worldwide participated in marches on Jan. 21, gathering together to show support for women's rights, reproductive rights, gender and racial equality, and many other interconnected causes--but how did a march that started as a simple Facebook post, created by a group of women who planned to protest the outcome of the presidential election, garner so much attention? What are the implications of the gathering, and in what ways is it a continuation of the suffrage movement--which sought to give women the right to vote in the first place--and the women's movement of the 1970s?

In some ways, the 2017 march was not so different from meetings to discuss women's right in the 1840s. In other ways, it was a quintessentially 21st-century phenomenon. "Research on social movements and women's activism helps us to understand how change occurred in the past and provides signposts for how to make change happen in the present and future," says Leila Rupp, professor of feminist studies and interim dean of the Department of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-rape movement, the reproductive justice movement, to name a few, mobilized women--and men--and made a difference."

The mission of the Women's March on Washington, in the language of its founders, was "to send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights." One major deviation from earlier movements, however, was how that message was relayed: by way of a website.

"The nationwide nature of the protest was undoubtedly the result of the preexisting organizational, network, and Internet ties of the participants," contends Verta Taylor, professor of sociology and feminist studies. "This is in sharp contrast to the early days of the suffrage campaign, when activists had to rely primarily on print media and letter writing to mobilize participants." Activism, she adds, always has been community based, but the size and shape of the community has shifted with the advent of Internet-based social networks.

Taylor is coauthor of The Oxford Handbook of Women's Social Movement Activism, the largest collection of original essays on U.S. women's social movement activism to date. The volume presents the words and stories of women who have participated in activism throughout history.

"Participating in protest, demonstrations, and other forms of activism is one of the major ways that women forge solidarity, raise their gender consciousness, and create a feminist collective identity. The issues that are leading women to become social movement activists today are remarkably similar to those that sparked protest by suffragists and so-called second- and third-wave feminists--gender inequality in all spheres of life, from intimate relations to the workplace to politics."

Zakiya Luna, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, points out that online activism did not stop with organization of the January marches. "Social media was incorporated in different ways at the marches, too. For example, the D.C. march had an app with a schedule and forums for sharing information."

Luna is a principal investigator on a project called "Mobilizing Millions--Engendering Protest Across the Globe," which aims to survey those who chose to march, as well as those who chose not to participate, in order to understand the complex framework of identity, discourse, politics, and other factors that affected participation. "Our preliminary findings from the observations and survey highlight that, one, there were a range of reasons people attended marches and, two, across and within sites, there were varying experiences of 'the' march in any location."

Taylor emphasizes that, while publicity methods may change, the themes that inspire women to mobilize for social causes remain the same, if perhaps more inclusive. "A big difference that I observed during the most recent women's marches was activists' embrace...