Hundreds march in Philadelphia for International Women's Day
Philadelphia, PA – Drawn into the streets by the Trump administration’s broad attack on women’s and LGBTQ s rights, nearly 1000 protesters marched through Center City for International Women’s Day on March 8. The march disrupted traffic along the busy shopping district of Rittenhouse Square.
Women and young children held the front of the march with hundreds of handmade signs advocating for abortion rights and equal pay. One woman paraded two cardboard cut-outs of Trump and Elon Musk wearing prison jumpsuits. Shoppers and restaurant-goers crowded the doors and windows to hear chants of “Fuck Trump – go birds!” and “Working women give ‘em hell; it is right to rebel!”
Pausing along the intersections, the speakers covered on a wide range of issues affecting women and LGBTQ people. “For years we have received meager concessions in the form of reformative legislation and temporary ideological change. For my whole life I have seen these ebb and flow, and at times be stripped away fully,” a Freedom Road Socialist Organization member told the crowd, “Time and theory have proven over and over that reform will never be enough. The only option is total revolution, changing our material conditions into a socialist mode of production!”
Koyuki Chen, a member of Refuse Fascism and an organizer of the 2023 IWD march in Philadelphia told the crowd, “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept the punishing and cruel attacks on women. The overturning of Roe v. Wade put women and girls in medical jeopardy with horrendous mismanaged pregnancies and delayed care to preventable deaths. It was never about abortions but forced motherhood, control, and enslavement of women.”
Pausing at Rittenhouse Square Park for more speeches at sunset, an activist from the International Jewish Labor Bund led the crowd in chants.
Along the marching path, an officer of the Philadelphia Police Department pleaded with the protest leaders to remove the marchers from the street intersection, threatening to disperse the march otherwise. Despite the threat, the protesters began sitting down in the street to hear the remainder of the final speech of the evening, signifying to the police that they would not be moved.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization organized the march in collaboration with groups like Workers World Party, Anakbayan, Philly Pheminists, Democratic Socialists of America and more.
The organizers hope that the large number of attendees, many who did their first protest since the beginning of Trump’s first term, were able to leave the action with new perspectives on the role of monopoly capitalism in perpetuating gender oppression worldwide; that the struggle for the liberation of women is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.