Museums around the world are working to collect artifacts from Saturday’s Women’s March. What made the protests such a historic event? For starters: the movement’s sheer size. In the United States alone, low estimates suggest at least 3.3 million people showed up to marches. But there are other factors beyond pure numbers.
Stef Dickers, special collections and archives manager at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, told me that the varied motivation of marchers made the protests especially unique. Unlike so many other demonstrations, Saturday’s march wasn’t about one political party or a single subject matter. “We were partly excited because people were telling their own story,” Dickers said. “They went to this for their own reasons.” The global reach of the demonstrations also “brought an extra dimension,” he said.
Dickers and his colleagues put out a call on Saturday for donations of signs, t-shirts, photos, and videos from the march that took place in London. So far, there’s been a slow trickle of contributions, but there’s a sense of urgency to the effort. “We need to do this quickly,” Dickers said. Otherwise, “very soon, this history gets lost.”
While Dickers fears that the historic nature of the march will be forgotten, it turns out some didn’t recognize it to begin with. An analysis by Quartz shows that one out of five newspapers failed to put the event on the front page and the Washington Post argues that in the lead-up to the march, mainstream media largely overlooked its growing momentum.