How Will Women Protest In a Second Trump Term?

In 2012, I was fresh out of university and living, quite literally, in a closet. Too poor to afford a deposit on a rental in London, I had set up camp next to my best friend’s hot water boiler, under a blanket her grandmother had knitted; my pantyhose and underwear hung from a single coat hanger suspended from the ceiling—there was nowhere else to store them.

It was 2012. #MeToo hadn’t yet exploded around the world. Donald Trump was best known for his role on The Apprentice and women’s magazines were still coaching young readers on “how to please your man.” The fourth wave of feminism was only just being whispered about. And if you published a blog—remember when blogging was a thing?—there was actually a good chance that people might read it.

In the weeks I lived in that closet, I’d work at an office job during the day, then come home and read Cosmopolitan at Rhiannon’s kitchen table, while she rustled up dinner. 

“Please your man twice by making him a nice bolognese sauce before he gets home from work; then put on your heels and rub some sauce on your nipples for sexytime before dinnertime!” I’d read out the tips in a practiced monotone, before we both collapsed in laughter. The comedy routine turned into an online magazine called The Vagenda. And The Vagenda—just 24 hours after launching—attracted over 60,000 readers. (👋 For those seeking it, I'm sorry to say Vagenda magazine is no longer available online, but its namesake book may serve as a decent substitute.—Francesca, your ed.)

I eventually moved out of the closet. By that point, The Vagenda had a book deal, both my co-founder Rhiannon and I had gotten newspaper columns, and I’d even managed to find myself a proper (shared) apartment. 

Years later, Rhiannon and I text one another across the ocean (I now live in New York; she remains in London) about the toll of domestic labor, the dismal state of international politics and the reversal of women’s reproductive rights. We’re feminists now just as we were feminists then, but in 2012, the landscape was fundamentally different. In 2012, we were called pioneers for pointing out that not every woman laughs daintily when she eats salad and not every woman is a size zero. Our book launch, in 2014, featured glittery cupcakes with pink and brown frosting molded into the shape of vaginas. Trust me, it really was novel at the time. 

But by 2017, something had changed. Harvey Weinstein was all over the news. And Trump was elected into office after unleashing tirades of misogynistic insults toward Hillary Clinton, the person so many people believed would become the first woman president of the U.S. And then there was the “grab ‘em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape. GamerGate had happened, and 4Chan had moved from a little-known niche site for nerdy chat into an army of enraged incels. Jordan Peterson was about to publish (in January 2018) his "12 Rules for Life," the pseudoscientific, sexist tome that became phenomenally popular among college-age men. 

It was no wonder that Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 found women marching through Washington D.C.—and indeed around the world—wearing pink woolen hats. To protest Donald Trump’s sexism during the week of his first inauguration, what could be better than vagina-shaped headgear popularized by a tongue-in-cheek feminist organization called The Pussyhat Project?

Women had much to protest about, but still, we were joyful. Activism was more in-your-face and humor-led; less academic. There was talk of getting everyone involved (talk, admittedly, that didn’t entirely translate into successful action,) and of making feminism accessible—of wrestling it out of its ivory tower. There was grief, of course, following the failure to elect the first female president, but there was also an energetic defiance.

Now, having failed again to elect the first female president, what does feminist protest look like? 

“The mood is definitely different,” Debbie Deland, of the non-partisan group Florida’s National Organization for Women (Florida NOW), told me during a Zoom interview. “It's gonna be up to us to figure out a different path [than last time] because protests and rallies with Trump don't work. He just ignores them. So, do we do boycotts? What do we do to counter what he’s doing? What are our strategies?” 

Picking Wins Off the Bones

This year, the People's March is scheduled Jan. 18 in D.C. (and everywhere)—the Saturday before Trump will be sworn in. 

Deland plans to attend, though she acknowledges that protests like these, under Trump, are more about finding solidarity with other women—psychological exercises—than about anything practical. In the past, thousands of people protesting on the streets put enough pressure on politicians that they were often forced to do something; Trump is much more inclined to ignore protests entirely.

Practical victories, small though they may be, take place out of sight. They’re not glamorous and they rarely involve big “eureka” moments, but they are important in terms of what they mean for women in the ground. As an example, Deland’s group has been trying to change the wording of the six-week abortion ban in her state of Florida.

“We can’t really get bills passed… but we do have an impact on changing really bad bills,” she explains. “For example, we want the six-week ban law cleaned up so that physicians can [perform medically necessary procedures and abortions] in terms of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriages, dead fetuses, fetuses that can’t live outside the womb without risking their licenses.”

Having to do such work is somewhat dispiriting for Deland and her fellow women’s activists, considering just weeks ago they conducted an uphill struggle in favor of the doomed pro-choice bill Amendment 4. Otherwise known as the “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion,” that piece of legislation stated that “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” 

In the weeks before the amendment was put to a referendum vote in the state, Florida NOW estimates it sent over 58,000 postcards to inform voters about the issue. But it faced massive organized resistance from Gov. Ron DeSantis and his team, who bombarded the airwaves with anti-choice ads and spread untrue messaging: that the amendment would have allowed children to access abortion without their parents’ knowledge and would have allowed abortion up to the point of birth. Then, on Nov. 5, 57% of Floridians voted for abortion rights—meaning that, according to the state’s highly unusual stipulations, which require 60% for a pass—the amendment failed.

“Oh, it was devastating,” says Deland, shaking her head. “I mean, so many of us all across the state worked so hard. Everybody was horribly disappointed. But we were also very happy from the standpoint of, ‘We got 57% of the vote.’” 

This is how women’s activism looks nowadays: Picking wins off the bones of a larger defeat. 

And Deland knows that’s how it will continue. There’s so much to do, she says. Immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, basic bodily autonomy—and the focus in D.C. will be on convincing Congress, since Trump himself is unlikely to enter into such discussions.

On the ground in Florida, they’ll be reaching out to people who, she says, the Democrats failed to inspire during the general election. Even though Florida NOW was entirely outpaced in terms of finances and opposed by a litany of powerful figures, the 57% in Florida, who voted for Amendment 4, remind Deland that it’s worth continuing the fight, because the majority of people want what she wants.

Working Smarter, Not Harder

Tarah Demant, the National Director of Programs for Amnesty International’s U.S. arm, talks about 2025 as though she’s preparing for battle. Women’s activists need to focus “on how we can build resilience and commitment to continuing to resist an anti-human rights regime,” she tells me. And in this kind of landscape, resilience is tough to build; even tougher to maintain. 

“I think one of the real concerns here is that one of the ways in which an anti-rights regime works is to throw so many things at people that it's exhaustion or you just become responsive,” Demant says. “Like that game whack-a-mole, right?” Building a positive vision for women in the future is basically impossible if all you’re ever doing is reacting to the latest thing a politician has said or done.

Every organization I spoke with echoed this concern: That if women’s activists are only reactive rather than proactive under the second Trump administration, they will burn out. 

“I think the good news is there has been a lot more planning,” Demant adds. “There are people in organizations who have been mobilizing and building power and building resistance…already anticipating the court battles that are going to need to happen, queuing those up [because] obviously, most of civil society was caught flat-footed last Trump term.” 

Working smarter, not harder, is the order of the day. Pussy hats and memes might provide some emotional relief, but the real work will be behind the scenes. 

Some organizations in the women’s activist space are planning to center their work almost exclusively around the work of the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank—often referred to as a “do tank” because of its commitment to making sure its agenda is actioned—that authored Project 2025. Others are hoping to pick away at the Republican Party’s small majorities in the House and Senate by directly approaching more moderate members of the GOP when issues are discussed. 

Work Your Way Up

For Amnesty International USA, activism will mean opening more local- and state-based conversations with people, as opposed to only focusing on national protests. “An anti-rights agenda has been very successfully pushed by far-right actors, and we've seen that happen across the United States, and we've been seeing that for 40 years,” says Demant. “I mean, this is how we lost Roe. There was a concerted effort that had a playbook—a physical book! [And that book says] you go to the [most] local level, you start at the school board, and you work your way up. I think one of the lessons to learn here is that as human rights activists, we have to speak to people where they are.”

Demant underscores the need for people to fight against their own apathy. People are less optimistic and less energetic when they contemplate what a second Trump term might mean, but human rights are chipped away when people stop showing that they care. But like Debbie Deland of Florida NOW, Demant is reassured by the numbers showing most Americans back a number of civil rights issues, including the right to abortion.

“Overwhelmingly, since the fall of Roe, we have seen ballot initiative after ballot initiative after ballot initiative reaffirm the will of the people is for the right to abortion,” Demant says. “But these are the same states that then elect representatives who are working to overturn those rights. I think there's going to be a real challenge in what is a decreasingly democratic space and a decreasingly responsive space. Congress is decreasingly responsive to its constituents. This administration does not anticipate [people] will be particularly responsive to dissent. And so we need to make sure that people are exercising and showing that dissent.”

In other words, she’s saying, don’t anticipate that the struggle will be so hard that you give up before you’ve begun.

Demant says Amnesty depends on people understanding they have to be in it for the long haul—“and that's not just four years.” 

The work doesn’t just include pushing back against specific issues as they come along; it also depends on protecting the infrastructure surrounding activism in the United States. “That includes ensuring people have the right to protest, making sure people use that right, making sure it is a protected right,” she says. 

“The human rights challenges that we're anticipating, they are not inevitable,” she adds. “They are coming. But they are not inevitable.”