Lucy Gellman Photos
The hat-clad crowd masses for the march.
Washington, D.C.—After marching with hundreds of thousands of women on the national mall, New Haven bus captain Maggie Quinn had one more stop to make. Trotting up the gentle slope of Capitol Hill, she headed toward the Rayburn House, where U.S. Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Elizabeth Esty were inside at a reception and in severe need of hand-knitted pink pussyhats.
DeLauro receives her hat at post-march reception for the locals.
“I have something for you!” Quinn told DeLauro, handing her the hat in a plastic ziplock bag. DeLauro grinned with delight, did a little twirl, and put it on.
In doing so, she picked up a message seen and heard all day in D.C.: She was ready to “grab” back, show solidarity with “pussies” across Connecticut, and fight a new administration.
That was the message New Haven and Connecticut women delivered at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, the anchoring event for hundreds of anti-Trump sister marches worldwide. The D.C. event alone drew as many as half a million protesters a day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.
And everywhere you looked, you saw a sea of pussyhats.
Quinn, with friend.
For Quinn, a New Haven area activist, the Trump Era movement in which she enlisted began in her Bethany living room, where she has knitted close to 40 pussyhats since the election.
Conceived as a reference to Trump’s 2005 recorded statement that he could “grab women by the pussy,” the pussyhat has since become a symbol of the march itself. It signifies a determination to “grab back” — to dig in, organizing at both the grassroots and national levels for abortion rights, equal pay for equal work, paid medical and family leave, and protection for victims of sexual assault and intimate partner violence among other issues.
Quinn is not alone: Leading up to Saturday’s marches, a national movement has encouraged women to knit pussyhats and display them at rallies. Dubbed the “Pussyhat Project,” it offers a pattern for knitters to copy. And it offers this explanation:
“We love the clever word play of ‘pussyhat’ and ‘pussycat,’ but yes, “pussy” is also a derogatory term for female genatalia. We chose this loaded word for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment. In this day and age, if we have pussies we are assigned the gender of “woman.” Women, whether transgender or cisgender, are mistreated in this society. In order to get fair treatment, the answer is not not take away our pussies, the answer is not to deny our femaleness and femininity, the answer is to demand fair treatment. A woman’s body is her own. We are honoring this truth and standing up for our rights.”
In preparation for the Saturday’s March, Quinn took that message to heart. Even before the electoral college had confirmed the president’s candidacy, she began knitting pussyhats for everyone she knew, furiously working through ball after ball of dark pink yarn. She started giving them away “to friends of friends of friends” on request. Then to the women who boarded her bus that left Wilbur Cross High School around 1 a.m. Saturday for the DC march. And then, specifically, for her legislators.
“I’m really angry, but we can’t let our anger stop us from being adults, from behaving like adults, and stop us from trying to engage the people who disagree with us in constructive ways,” said Quinn. “Yelling and ad hominem attacks are not the answer.”
“I just did it myself to try and make some creativity out of the agita that I’ve been feeling since the election,” she said. “We are exhausted, but we are so glad we came.”
Chanting “Hey hey, ho ho/ Donald Trump has got to go!,” “This is what Democracy looks like!” and “My body my choice!,” Quinn — with 80 busloads of women from Connecticut, and hundreds of thousands of others from across the U.S.— was in good company. Marching along Constitution Avenue with her friends Allie Pang and Sayoko Blodgett-Ford, former (and possibly future) New Haven Alder Abby Roth (pictured above) rocked a striped purple-and-pink pussy hat that a woman on her Friday afternoon train had given her.
Valerie Horsley Photo
Meanwhile, Action Together CT Organizer Valerie Horsley was gathering advocates who had made the trip with her. She prepared to march down Pennsylvania Avenue with homemade signs of multicolored uteri and a banner for their advocacy group, which was started as a place for grassroots organizing in the wake of the election. Around them, mothers and young children in their pussy hats cheered them on.
Outside DeLauro’s post-walk reception reception at the Rayburn House, recent New Haven transplant Niko Scharer motioned to her own pussy hat, speaking about why she’d made the trip to DC.
“I needed to be here,” she said. “If I hadn’t come, I would have gone crazy.”
Scharer with a friend.
Inside the Rayburn House, as the reception wound down, DeLauro and Esty proudly sported their hats, talking to constituents who were still streaming in about the importance of the march.
Quinn smiled as she listened. “I really think there were 800,000 women out there, and I feel like I have 800,000 new friends,” she said.
(Click here to read a report about Branford’s contingent at the march.)
Quinn, DeLauro and Esty.
The View From NYC
Jacob Zonderman Photos
Jacob Zonderman sent in these photos from New York City’s women’s march.
