Capitalism was alive and well, as numerous merchants hawked buttons, t-shirts and pussy hats, among other things. I didn’t find anyone selling for the Women’s March, whose e-mails asked recipients to buy their swag online. I spoke to one seller who said his proceeds would go to a DC women’s shelter. Prices dropped throughout the day; there were plenty of left-overs.
There are no official estimates of crowd size anymore. Sometimes march organizers give out their own figures which are usually grossly exaggerated. Newspaper reporters also make their own estimates. Using all of these, my best guess is that there were a few hundred participants in the Indigenous March, two-hundred thousand in the March for Life and one-hundred thousand in the Women’s March.
Numbers have more meaning in context. The Indigenous March didn’t have a large base or finances. The MLK march is a local march, rather hard to get to without a vehicle, which was held on the coldest day of the weekend. The 46th March for Life was held on the least cold of those days. It has drawn as many as half a million, but not every year. The Woman’s March numbers will always be lower than the roughly one million people who came in 2017; there haven’t been enough of these for there to be a "normal."
©2019 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
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