WASHINGTON – Hundreds of thousands of women and supporters marched in the nation’s capital Saturday after a huge and raucous rally meant to send a message of defiance and hope to President Donald Trump on the day after his inauguration.
Oorganizers said half a million people — double earlier estimates — were thought to be attending the Women’s March on Washington, with bigger-than-expected crowds in other cities, too.
Similar marches were held around the world in 673 “sister” cities – a total of up to 2.5 million protesters, organizers said, in cities all over Europe and in Kenya, South Africa and Australia.
In Washington, protesters craned their necks to listen to the many speakers, sometimes tramping through bushes and climbing trees to hear the messages broadcast over sound systems scattered around the area.
The crowd was so big that attendees began marching before the speakers were done. They paraded informally down Constitution Avenue, past the Washington Monument, a noisy procession broken with cheers and chants.
They also carried a seemingly endless array of colorful signs, bearing messages like “My body, my choice,” “Weak men fear strong women” and “Michelle Obama 2020.”
The rallies were organized under the rubric of women’s rights, which many fear are threatened by the new administration. But the march’s platform also incorporated other progressive causes, such as health care, the environment and racial justice.
A sea of pink knitted hats – the movement’s signature headgear – supplanted the red baseball caps worn a day earlier by Trump supporters who had come to Washington for his inauguration.
“Yesterday was their day; today is ours,” said Kim Crawford of Clinton, Md. Of Trump, she said: “I’m not sure he’ll hear our voices, but we’re raising them.”
Organizers – and many of the marchers – said they did not want the event’s focus to be in opposition to the new president, but rather on the causes they sought to promote.
But disdain for Trump’s past words and actions during a bitterly divisive campaign were on full display, and often reflected in signs that played off explicit language employed in a video in which Trump talked about sexually assaulting women.
Many said they were braced for an unraveling of rights and freedoms they had come to take for granted.
“I’m pretty disheartened,” said Louise McAfee of, N.Y., spurred by her concerns about access to health care. “But I’m also pretty hopeful.”
While most of the marchers were women, men also turned out in considerable numbers.. Jacob Osterman traveled from Boston with a group of friends to participate.
“I love and care about the women in my life, and this is a way to show that,” he said. “Women are part of humanity, like all of us. How can anyone not understand that?”
Creature comforts were hard to come by. Long lines stretched out of coffee shops and fast-food joints close to the gathering point on the National Mall.
“People are really frightened about losing their health insurance,” said Gretchen Stanford of Alexandria, Va., just across the river from the District of Columbia. “And frightened about lots of other things.”
The turnout for the march was a show of force that gave signs of exceeding the attendance of the presidential inauguration a day earlier. Washington Metro trains that had been lightly used Friday were jammed so full of protesters with signs and pink hats on Saturday that crowds on platforms had to wait for more trains. Outside the Capitol, a constant stream of thousands of cheering women emerging from Metro stops headed for the march’s starting location.
Actress America Ferrera got the rally off to a rousing start, nvoking her birth in Los Angeles to Honduran parents.
“It’s been a heart-rending time to be both a woman and an immigrant. Our dignity, our character, our rights have been under attack,” she told the crowd. “But the president is not America. We are America.”
Gloria Steinem, a longtime leader of the feminist movement, scorned the notion of male patriarchy, declaring, “No more asking Daddy!” Actress Scarlett Johansson mounted a passionate defense of Planned Parenthood, threatened with defunding under the new administration.
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(Seema Mehta and Hailey Branson-Potts in Washington and special correspondent Christina Boyle in London contributed to this report.)
