Seven-year old Laney, who lives across the courtyard from me, attended the Woman’s March in Chicago with her mother. Her comments afterwards were that there were lots of people, most of them were women and she was proud to be there.
That memory could last for her entire lifetime.

LeAnn Spencer, a retired fellow Chicago Tribune staff writer, shared her personal experience of being in the march in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Today the people marched. They came wearing hiking boots and parkas, pushing wheelchairs and baby carriages, sporting knitted pussy hats and fancy tutus, carrying signs and bigger-than-life effigies. They chanted songs of power and support, clicked photos, shook hands, and shared hugs in solidarity for social justice, peace, free speech, and human rights. It was one of the most meaningful and moving experiences of my life.

President Trump may have inspired the marches, but it was about far more than him.

Much of America’s current greatness can be attributed to the extent we have changed in the last half century. It was merely a century ago that women acquired the right to vote and the climb upward toward political parity has been very gradual.

The women’s marches in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere were about the future, but they were also about the past and the women who suffered in a million ways because of it.

The marches said loud and clear, “Never more!” The masculine culture of the past did not represent a time when America was “great.”

“We don’t want to go there and we do not want the future to be like what it was,” the tone of the marches screamed.

What do most women still want?

Mostly, what men do, along with seeing that others receive the care and concern they require along with full and equals rights.

The millions who marched and the hundreds of millions of women around the world who supported them seek a vision diametrically opposed to that of President Trump, the majority in Congress and the autocrats and plutocrats of the world.

Are there parallels to the women in the Paris “Bread Uprising” in 1789 who, for want of lower bread prices, may have initiated the French Revolution? They too marched—to the royal palace at Versailles—and brought King of France back to Paris as their prisoner.

The women who marched and participated in rallies around the world on Jan. 22, 2017 did so both for bread and respect.

They said they will stand with immigrants and refugees when they are unjustly labeled rapists and drug dealers instead of receiving refuge in the United States from terror and persecution.

They want regulations to protect the environment and the civil and political rights of all.

They want safety programs to reach out to the many people charity can never reach, and they want our leaders to do something decisive about man-made climate change.

They are prone to see guns as a danger to our children rather than a right by which an individual can own dozens of guns capable of killing hundreds of people.

They recognize politics is for, of and by the people.

They would prefer negotiated agreements to avoid conflict or war.

Their millions of voices called for Abraham Lincoln’s “new burst of freedom,” based on human rights rather than on the greed and self-serving policies of the few.

Their movement is forward in the form of a feminine-cultural-political revolution, the likes of which the world may have never seen before.

Mark down its birthdate: Jan. 22, 2017.

One woman expressed it poetically at the Washington rally quoting a Mexican proverb:

“They can bury us, but they do not realize that we are seeds.”

Indeed the ground, by the efforts of women through the ages, has been made fertile. The spirits of those who suffered and died along the way have again arisen in women today and marched alongside those who went into the streets on this, our day.

Thank you to the marchers and spirits who walked beside them to raise feminine values to their rightful place in our society.