Behind the scenes at the March for Women's Lives

While older feminists were awestruck at meeting Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, some of the young ones probably had no idea who they were. But the movement's generational divide didn't stop a million women from hitting the streets in D.C.

By Rebecca Traister

Apr 26, 2004 | A small group of anti-abortion advocates were gathered around the entrance to the National Geographic Society in Washington on Saturday, April 24, at 4 p.m., protesting a cocktail reception being thrown by the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority and Ms. Magazine in preparation for the next day's March for Women's Lives rally. The protesters held pictures of mangled fetuses; a young woman with a bullhorn shouted, "Abortion causes breast cancer! Cervical cancer! Liver cancer!" I was almost inside the building, accompanied by attorney and head of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW Shelly Mandell, when the voice grew sharper.

"Gloria! Gloria!" yelled the woman through the bullhorn. Gloria Steinem, the feminist, writer and founder of Ms. magazine, was gliding up the stairs behind me. Dressed in fitted black pants and a top, her colorless hair long and recently washed, a brown leather knapsack thrown over her shoulders, and her big trademark brown-tinted sunglasses, the impossibly slim Steinem looked like she had stepped directly out of 1978. Mandell and other organizers greeted her warmly and were ushering her into the party when a young Asian woman, who looked to be in her early 20s, stopped still on the way down the hall. "Are you -- are you Gloria Steinem?" she stuttered. When Steinem, who last month turned 70, answered in the affirmative and shook her hand, the woman simply held it, shocked. "Oh! Oh my god! I love you!" she said.

It was a moment that very much captured the spirit of this weekend in Washington. Part reunion tour, part celebrity-sighting smorgasbord, part multigenerational get-to-know-you session, the march and its party-studded lead-up were filled with equal parts blank looks and rapturous handshakes, as the women's movement -- all three or four or five generations of it -- gathered en masse for the first time since 1992 to rally for the protection of women's health and reproductive rights. And as the march sponsors grappled for attention and mingled as longtime sisters-in-arms, there was a lot of staring going on: 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and teenagers and feminist heroes and grandmothers and children all gaping at each other, wondering if they had enough in common to reinvigorate a movement that has lain fallow for over a decade.

The March for Women's Lives was organized by seven sponsors: the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, the Black Women's Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and the American Civil Liberties Union. It was impossible to charter a bus on the East Coast because so many were booked to come to D.C., Mandell told me. Now that it looked as if the event was going to draw hundreds of thousands, the organizations that had planned it were jockeying for the attentions of the press and of the handful of luminaries descending on Washington. In addition to the National Geographic reception, Saturday saw a Moby concert, high tea with California Sen. Barbara Boxer, featuring Steinem and a performance by Carole King, a party at California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's home, a kickoff rally for volunteers at the Armory, and a private dinner with Steinem.

"I think the [multi-organization] planning has been constant compromise," said Mandell, who said she had known most of her fellow planners for more than 20 years, "but not open warfare." At the National Geographic Society, as a single-file line of women in their 30s formed to shake hands and have their pictures taken with Steinem, "Jaws" actress and Feminist Majority board member Lorraine Gary sat with her husband, former Universal Studios head Sid Scheinberg. "It's a reunion, and a handing off of sorts, to young women and women of color," she said. Gary, who had greeted friends as she walked into the party by announcing that she'd had "the pleasure of walking out on [NARAL president] Kate Michelman earlier today," explained: "There's always tension [between organizations] when there's branding involved." The march was not officially branded by any of the sponsors, but groups were wrestling for visibility: Upon arrival in the city, every sentient being was fitted for a T-shirt, hat and sign emblazoned with the logo of whichever nonprofit organization spotted her first.

Next Page: "I wanted the cast of 'Friends,'" Daly said, of organizing for the march. "But it's hard to get people out"

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