Lawyers Molly Reynolds and Nicola Shaver recount their experiences attending the January 21 Women's March on Washington in Washington, DC.
"When I think about standing up for a cause, politically, in my community, in court; when I try to speak out against inequality…I am going to remember those voices."
Molly Reynolds, Torys LLP
On January 20, I left work early and piled into a car with my wife and three friends, including my Osgoode Hall Law School class of 2008 compatriot and OBA lawyer Lisa Del Col, and headed to DC to join the Women's March on Washington. From the moment we hopped on the metro early Saturday morning and saw a sea of pink hats, we knew that our feeling - that being there, in person, in DC, on January 21, 2017, was going to be an experience of a lifetime - had been right.
It's hard to explain why we knew we had to go - we are all activists in different ways and on different scales, in our work, our studies, our community volunteering, our politics, in conversations with friends or strangers. We felt incredibly angry about the Trump campaign rhetoric and despaired over the election result.
After months of joining Facebook groups for women who supported Clinton and lawyers who wanted to protect good government, sending around articles warning of the threats to the US as we know it, and leaning on each other's shoulders as we worried about the future, we needed to do something active to show our support for Americans, for women, for equity-seeking groups under threat in the new administration. We wanted to show that we recognize the threat to gains made in civil rights over half a century in the United States. We wanted to demonstrate that we – Canadians, lawyers, women, feminists, people with myriad forms of privilege – will stand against threats to a free press, to hard fought rights of women, people of colour, LGBT people, those who need health care. We wanted to share that we will not ignore threats to the rule of law simply because our passports are issued by Canada.
So what did we see? Solidarity. Hundreds of thousands of people who wanted their voices to be heard, their presence to be counted, who were angry about the threats to America posed, astoundingly, by their new President. Yet it was a mob that separated immediately if an emergency vehicle needed to pass through, that cheerfully allowed groups to move through the crowd without losing each other, that amplified, with hundreds of voices, instructions from a bullhorn about where to get medical help if needed.
What stays with me is what we heard. Those voices. Waves of cheers, chants, hollers building blocks behind us, moving toward our section of marchers like a tide, compelling us to raise our voices as they passed over us. A mass of voices expressing fear, anger, hope and relief that there are so many others feeling the same way, despair and dedication to the years of work ahead. Those sounds cannot be captured in a sign or a newspaper cover or an accounting of how many bodies showed up in cities across the world.
When I think about standing up for a cause, politically, in my community, in court; when I try to speak out against inequality; when I remind myself to listen to those with different life experiences instead of speaking for them, I am going to remember those voices. We wore t-shirts with the famous Nellie McClung quote that ends "get things done and let them howl." For this movement, the howl may have spurred the action.
Molly Reynolds is a senior associate with Torys LLP in Toronto and an executive member of the OBA Privacy and Access to Information Law Section.
“I became a lawyer because I believe in justice and equality and human rights for all.”
Nicola Shaver, Stikeman Elliott
When a giant roar went up from the crowd, reverberating from street to street, I knew this was going to be far bigger than anyone had expected. I was on my way to the Women’s March on Washington from my lodging on Capitol Hill and already there were women in pink hats as far as the eye could see. I bought my plane tickets to D.C. back in November, before the sister marches had been planned, when I knew I had to do something in response to the results of the U.S. election. I became a lawyer because I believe in justice and equality and human rights for all. The success of a candidate like Trump left me very concerned that any progress made on these issues over the past ten years could slide backwards.
Three months later and here I was, in the midst of a crowd the likes of which I had never seen, surrounded by people who cared enough about rights to come out and throw their bodily support behind the cause. I saw signs evoking, either pictorially or through words, the spirits of the four female justices who have sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. One of these was a life-size cardboard cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself carrying a sign that read “I dissent”. Demonstrators tightly covered every inch of ground over every street I squeezed into, yet 
there was not a hint of aggression. We were told there would be no march because protestors already populated the whole mapped course. But we marched anyway. One street was not enough. Down the Mall and three parallels roads we streamed. From the Capitol building, to the Monument, to the White House, and then beyond.
Police looked befuddled by the kindness of the masses (I saw women buying officers coffee) and by the absence of violent incidents. Occasionally the crowd parted in a way that seemed impossible to let through a wheelchair, one carrying an octogenarian with a sign: “Not usually a protester but Geez…”. Waves of emotion wafted over me, veering from hope and delight that so many people (over a million in this city alone, a cop told us) had come together for this, to despair that it is still necessary to demonstrate for women’s rights, gay rights, black lives, immigrant lives, gender choice, the right to choose, respect for people living with disability.
Every chance they got, people would climb up high, clambering up trees and lamp posts and trucks and buildings to get a better view or a better podium from which to lead a chant. On the lawn in front of the White House, someone switched on a speaker and the crowd started dancing and singing to classic female anthems, like Aretha Franklin’s Respect. When I left the march, eight hours after I started, it was still 
going, up past the city, and I wondered where it would end. Later, protesters left all of their signs on the fence in front of the White House and along the walls of the Trump hotel, the minimal grey sun of the day setting pink on pleas to the President to hear us, to listen.
Nicola Shaver is an Australian-trained lawyer who currently works as Director of Knowledge Management at Stikeman Elliott LLP. She believes in standing up for a cause and has written and published numerous articles on privacy and free speech. Nicola is studying to sit the Ontario Bar.
Want to get involved? Forge bonds with other women lawyers, advance women in the legal profession and critically examine, from a feminist perspective, how the law affects women in society. Learn more about the OBA Women Lawyers Forum.
Images provided courtesy of the authors.
Cover image: Ms Jane Campbell / Shutterstock, Inc.