THE 2017 WOMEN'S MARCH: A NATIONAL STUDY OF SOLIDARITY EVENTS*

On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (such as demographics of participants or types of speakers) and mobilization processes (such as composition of organizing teams or recruitment efforts). We situate the descriptive findings in the broader literature on protest events and the women's movement to identify how they converge or diverge from established patterns. In addition, our study shows that many event-level characteristics of the sister marches were distinct relative to a recent national study of protests. Also discussed are the ways in which our results contribute to understanding the sister marches' success in mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets.