For International Women’s Day, which falls annually on March 8, people across the world are celebrating with a variety of tones. Some festivities are commemorating the achievements of women, others are protesting in an effort to end gender inequalities and gender-based violence.
In Bangkok, women took to the streets and marched, equipped with banners, as did activists in Berlin. Meanwhile, across the U.K., some women marked the day by participating in sunrise swims.
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Across the U.S., Women’s March—a network born out of Trump’s first presidency and dedicated to building a base of feminist activism—and affiliates organized marches to mobilize and celebrate their “Unite and Resist” call to action.
According to Women’s March executive director Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the goal of the day is to help people “build community” and “practice democracy,” particularly at a time when democratic resistance to President Donald Trump’s Administration presents as fractured.
This was seen most plainly at Trump’s congressional address on Tuesday, during which varying responses from Democrats—including some congresswomen who were dressed in pink to denote their disapproval with how Trump’s policies affect women and families, other members of Congress wearing blue and yellow in solidarity with Ukraine, and some lawmakers who walked out of the speech in protest—showed a fragmented and broad messaging from the left.
Carmona says that just because the left has different priorities and goals, does not mean they cannot be united in their “fight against” what she describes as “authoritarianism.” And Carmona sees these International Women’s Day actions as a moment to practice this unity.
“Just because different folks are building different things, does not mean that everyone is not running in the same direction,” Carmona says. “I think the country is fragmented across the board… some people are focused on feminism, some are focused on immigration rights. But when [people] just say, ‘Oh, the left is fractured.’ I think that is how they stop people from building power.”
Women’s March—which held a worldwide protest the day after Trump’s first Inauguration Day in 2017—was seen as a heavily unifying force during Trump’s initial term, bringing an estimated 500,000 marchers to Washington, D.C. and over 4 million throughout the United States. Carmona calls the first march “historic” and “the tip of the spear” of resistance. The iconography of the original march and its message lives on.
However, these are different times.
“We are eight years later. Two presidential terms later. We’re post-COVID, post-Jan. 6, [2021], post-Dobbs,” she says. “[We have] struggled to meet the moment, as so much of the moment has changed.”
Women’s March has worked to rebrand along with the times. In the years after 2017, the network faced internal fractures with concerns that participants were “overwhelmingly white” and accusations of anti-semitism.
Now, Women’s March is keen to revive its unifying X-factor amid Trump’s second term, attempting to meet the moment with multi-racial, intersectional, and multifaceted activism.
This means welcoming back previous activists and participants, but also breathing life into the cause with new voices. Ashley Parys and Kailani Rodriguez are two first-time organizers who spearheaded International Women’s Day 2025 events in their respective cities.
For Parys, organizing in the Boston area has been a whirlwind, but she says that women who have led marches in the past have helped her find her footing. She says she’s grown from a “baby activist” to someone who will continue to show up for Women’s March in the future. Ahead of the big day, the Women’s March Boston action website page logged close to 1,500 RSVPs.
“People [emailed me] saying they’re going to bring buses of women of all ages to the protest,” Parys says.
Rodriguez, 19, graduated high school in 2023 and organized a debut Women’s March in her small town of Port Angeles in Washington State. When she looked for Women’s Day actions to participate in, the closest one she could find was in Seattle, which is a few hours away.
She began organizing a more local action only a few days ahead of the big day, and ended up receiving hundreds of messages from prospective attendees and others hosting similar activism sessions.
“I wasn’t expecting this to happen. I wasn’t expecting to be the one in charge of it…it just fell into my lap,” Rodriguez says, noting that she has received a lot of support from older generations.
For Carmona, International Women’s Day 2025 is about people like Rodriguez and Parys helping their community practice democracy, and in doing so, practicing democracy themselves.
“What we’re trying to do is help folks build community. Give folks a chance to organize something in their communities at a time that’s not a trigger moment, because things get very heightened inside of a moment of a Supreme Court decision that doesn’t go our way, or a right that’s been stripped,” she says. “We want to build relationships 1741463061 so that when the time comes, we’re able to be with each other in principled struggle.”
