Recently we were treated to a news photo that will live in infamy: two dozen white male Republican congressmen (and zero women) around a White House conference table talking about dumping maternity and newborn care as part of their replacement for the Obama health-care law.
It instantly went viral: "A rare look inside the GOP's women's health caucus," tweeted Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State.
A week later the infamy was compounded when Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate that would allow states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Since the heyday of the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, American women have assumed they were on a rocket to a future of assured gender equality. But even as individual women continued to break records and barriers in recent years, the engine began to stall.
Pay inequity festers. The rolling scandals at Uber remind us that the frat clubs of Silicon Valley are often rife with sexual harassment. Women in the military are beleaguered by so-called revenge porn and sexual assault.
The United States still ranks with Swaziland, Lesotho and Papua New Guinea as the last countries on earth, advanced or not, that don't mandate paid maternity leave.
In corporations, it's turned out that the trouble isn't the glass ceiling; it's the sticky floor.
Male chief executives of Fortune 500 companies brag at Davos, Switzerland, about their healthy pipeline of women headed for the C-suite. (But the boast is undermined by statistics that show a paltry 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women in the top job.)
And a woman who commanded nearly three million more votes than her opponent did not become president.
Women who took steady, linear progress for granted are experiencing an unfamiliar and unsettling sensation--a wary, scary feeling of real and present danger. Meanwhile, it's dawning on millennials who thought a tweet was the same as a vote that activism means showing up. Hillary Clinton's ultimate loss in the electoral college is motivating women in a way her campaign never really did.
It was a hopping-mad Pantsuit Nation granny in Hawaii who first planted the idea on Facebook of a Women's March on Day 2 of Donald J. Trump's presidency. In sheer numbers of participants--up to four million in at least 500 marches across the country--it turned out to be the largest day of protest in American history.
It was good-humored, confident and marked by determination, not anger, and utterly nonviolent: not a single arrest. It was a triumph of organization and mobilization.
In its wake, women are packing local forums offering information on how to run for office. Millennials are assertively organizing support groups and protests on behalf of immigrants and refugees. The new energy has edge, and it suggests that the resistance to the young administration's signature policies is going to be led and (as it were) manned largely by women.
The greatest gift that President Trump may end up bestowing on the women of America could be to purge trivial umbrage from feminist discourse and force renewed energy on big priorities.
There has been too much focus on mildly offensive asides by male professors, on clueless comments by chief executives. Annoying as those things are, they don't compare to a federal budget proposal that slashes support for victims of domestic violence.
The marches in January and the activism since have demonstrated the breadth of women's concerns. They encompass criminal justice reform, immigrant protection, LGBT rights and gross economic inequality, as well as equal pay and reproductive rights.
Tamika Mallory, one of the four energetic young women who headed the Women's March, is a leading voice for African American involvement in the feminist resurgence. Exasperated over the years by white women's lack of recognition of the deeper inequity in black women's lives, she said that the January protest was an education for her in working with others.
"My work is mainly on criminal justice reform and police accountability, and I had to, for a moment, focus on climate justice and social justice and economic justice. It was a way for us to build power by bringing everyone together. We all come from different experiences, but we all feel and bleed the same, which is why this movement is growing in the way it is."
And it would be more powerful still if the new buzzword of intersectional feminism--which advocates greater racial, economic and religious inclusiveness in the women's movement--could intersect across the political and cultural aisle.
Cutting after-school programs for kids is calamitous to working mothers, but it isn't just a women's issue. It's a family issue and an education issue. Defunding Planned Parenthood means millions of hard-pressed women will be denied cancer screenings as well as birth control. "The average woman in America spends five years trying to get pregnant and 30 years trying not to," Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood's president, told me wryly. "This is a bread-and-butter economic issue."
Eight years ago I started the Women in the World Summit at a small midtown Manhattan theater to give voice to a rising global women's movement that hadn't gotten much attention in the United States.
I was inspired by the female firebrands I'd met through my service on the board of Vital Voices, a Washington-based NGO that mentors emerging women leaders from developing countries. I was stunned by the courage of resourceful women from Pakistan, Guatemala, India and sub-Saharan Africa.
They had risked their lives in repressive cultures to act against child marriage, honor killings, genital mutilation and systemic domestic violence, and to advocate for basic freedoms American women (and men) take for granted, such as the right to get an education or own property or win child custody in a divorce.
There was Chouchou Namegabe of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who defied death threats and kept broadcasting rape testimonials on her radio show, breaking the taboo of silence. There was tiny, fearless Sunitha Krishnan, beaten up by corrupt Hyderabad cops for rescuing little girls and their mothers trafficked in brothels. There was Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian force of nature who, in 2003, united Christian and Muslim women in a protest movement that helped topple the brutal dictator Charles Taylor. There was nothing "micro" about the aggressions these women confronted.
Perhaps the most moving moment in a Women in the World Summit was in 2015 when Robi Damelin, an Israeli peace activist whose son was killed by a Palestinian sniper, took the hand of Bushra Awad, a Palestinian woman whose son was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. "The tears on the pillow are the same color," Ms. Damelin said.
The women we have brought to our stage to tell their stories are living proof that feminism is a movement of basic rights for all human beings. Yet they understand that women bring something different to the debate, the table and the street. Their gender is their glory. They don't just lean in. They rise up.
They make us in the audience examine our own lucky discontents and ask ourselves: What can I do for a cause bigger than myself? It is a question many women in America are asking anew.
Tina Brown is chief executive of Tina Brown Live Media and founder of Women in the World. She was editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk magazine and Newsweek, and founding editor of The Daily Beast.
Editorial on 04/09/2017