NOT JUST MAKING COFFEE

Why Protests Succeed When Women Lead

A remarkable trend is flying above the radar — and we’re missing its vital lessons

Some trends lie so low they fly under the radar. Others soar so high they fly above it.

Take a remarkable trend by described in a recent story in Time magazine, “Why Women-led Protests Are More Successful.”

Your first reaction to that article might have been similar to mine: Come on! The most successful political protests have been led by men ever since patriots like Sam Adams dumped British tea into Boston Harbor to protest their “taxation without representation” by King George III.

Yes, women have led efforts focused on their rights, such as the suffrage and feminist movements.

But no American protest of the modern era has had more benefits for more people than the civil rights movement, which has brought vastly greater legal rights not just to black Americans but for women, minorities, and other groups. And who led the civil rights movement?

You might say: Obviously, Martin Luther King Jr. and other men, including Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP. The arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which led the Supreme Court to find segregated buses unconstitutional, but male leaders of the NAACP chose Parks to take her famous stand against the discrimination.

That, at least, was how I saw it until I dug into the research behind the Time story, which drew on work by Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A cross-national study by Chenoweth found that women’s participation really does increase the chances that a resistance movement will succeed.

That’s true, in part, because more women typically means more participants, from more social groups. But something more complex is also going on: Women are getting bolder, and joining political protests they used to sit out.

Female activists used to complain that men stole the limelight while expecting them to make coffee and fetch the doughnuts. While that may still be true in some movements, women are increasingly claiming their place on the front lines even in ultra-conservative countries.

An example involves the fury that erupted in Iran after the young protester Mahsa Amini died in custody of Iran’s morality police. Her alleged crime? Failing to cover her hair properly with her hijab. The usual mourning period in Iran is 40 days, the journalist Yasmeen Serhan wrote in Time.

“But what began as an outpouring of grief over Amini’s death has evolved into a transformative national movement. The predominantly women- and youth-led demonstrations and their clarion call for ‘woman, life, liberty’ have touched nearly every corner of Iranian society.”

Iran cracked down violently on the demonstrators, leading to hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests that outraged men and women worldwide. Some of the arrested protesters had cut their hair or burned their hijabs. A bill pending in its parliament would impose even stiffer penalties for headscarf-related offenses.

But a year after Amini’s death, many women still aren’t wearing the hijab, the Associated Press found in August. A lawyer warned that the proposed law won’t work because “the majority of women do not believe in it.”

Beyond Iran, support for the protests has grown amid the crackdowns — most notably, when the Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize in October “for her fight against the oppression of women and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

Active in nonviolent campaigns

Women are taking the lead elsewhere, too. Among nonviolent campaigns from 2010 to 2014, about 70 percent had women involved or on the front lines, Cheotsow Tenzin wrote in the Harvard International Review, summarizing research by Chenoweth and Marks.

Around the world, women are spearheading movements devoted to some of the century’s most urgent issues.

• Climate change. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has won international fame for her “School Strike for Climate” campaign, which inspired young people worldwide to skip class to call out environmental risks.
• Racial justice. Perhaps no recent rallying cry has had more impact than #BlackLivesMatter, which sparked global protests after Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi used it to protest the killing of Michael Brown and other black men by white police.
• Voting rights. Politician Stacey Abrams founded Fair Fight Action to combat voter suppression, an effort that helped elect Joe Biden in 2020 along with two candidates who gave Democrats control of U.S. Senate.

How much difference does women’s involvement make? A lot, Serhan’s reporting for Time showed.

Strong female participation tends to make mass movements “more inclusive, innovative, nonviolent, and, crucially, likely to achieve their goals.” It can also involve new forms of resistance that go beyond street protests and that bring media attention to a cause.

• In Iran, women cut their hair and burned their headscarves after Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody.
• In Mexico, they protested government inaction on violence against women by staying away from schools, workplaces and social events during a one-day wildcat strike known as “a day without us.”
• In the U.S., Abrams fought voter suppression in creative ways intended to appeal to the disenfranchised. Among them: She recruited 18 “Star Trek” stars for a virtual event called “Star Trek: The Next Election.”

Why are protests by women succeeding? Harvard’s Marks told Time:

“It’s the ordinariness of women’s participation that has all of these knock-on effects.”

Marks added that women may help movements gain sympathy and retain the loyalty of supporters. They may also limit police brutality: Nobody really wants to arrest a pregnant woman who might deliver in a jail cell or a frail elderly protester who looks like your grandmother.

Given that the trend is so wide-ranging, you might wonder why more people don’t recognize it as relatively new and valuable.

Perhaps it’s because female leaders “never seem to receive as much attention as their male counterparts,” Tenzin suggested in the Harvard International Review. Even today, “male figures dominate the conversation and news stories” about political protests.

That may change as female voices grow more vocal. In the meantime, there’s a risk of greater pushback against them, or more of the kind of repressive legislation that’s been introduced in Iran.

When movements don’t achieve their main objective after extensive women’s participation, Marks says, “there’s almost always a regression or a backlash in gender equity and democracy after the movement ends.”

Neither Marks nor Time says so, but you could argue that the overturning of Roe v. Wade represents such regression. If so, there’s a two-fold lesson in the surging protests led by women: Celebrate the successes — but be ready for the backlash.

@JaniceHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been a writer and editor for Glamour and the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper. Her work has appeared in many major print and online media.

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