Teresa Shook (born 1956) [1] is a retired American lawyer from Indiana who now lives in Hawaii. [2] She is best known as the founder of the Women's March. [3]
The Women's March idea arose soon after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016. [2] A friend had signed Shook up for "Pantsuit Nation", a Facebook page created to rally Hillary Clinton supporters, and Shook went there to find like-minded people. She posted on that page the statement: "We have to march." [4] After eliciting a response, Shook subsequently created a Facebook event for a march in Washington, D.C., following the inauguration. Meanwhile, Bob Bland, a mother living in New York City, also created an event. Within a single day hundreds of thousands of individuals were "attending" the march's Facebook event. This surge in interest was a catalyst for creating the organization that led to the 2017 Women's March. [3] "I didn’t have a plan or a thought about what would happen," Shook told Reuters. "i just kept saying, I think we should march." I was in such shock and disbelief that this type of sentiment could win,” said Shook, a retired lawyer from Indiana with four grandchildren. “We had to let people know that is not who were are." [2]
In November 2018, Shook criticized the leadership of the Women's March national organization as being "anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQIA rights". Specifically mentioning Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Bland, she called for them all to step down. [5]
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer (COO) of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org. In 2008, she was made COO at Facebook, becoming the company's second-highest-ranking official. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Before that, Sandberg served as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, and subsequently as his chief of staff when he was Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury.
Asra Quratulain Nomani is an Indian American journalist and author. Born in India to Muslim parents, she earned a BA from West Virginia University in liberal arts in 1986 and an MA from the American University in international communications in 1990. She subsequently worked as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal with her colleague Daniel Pearl in Pakistan post-9/11. Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by Islamist terrorists while following an investigative lead. Nomani later became the co-director of the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigative-reporting project which has looked into Pearl's murder.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Sandra Julieta Torres Casanova is a Guatemalan politician who served as the first lady of Guatemala from 2008 to 2011, as the wife of president Álvaro Colom. As the candidate of the National Unity of Hope party, Torres ran for president in 2015, 2019 and 2023, coming in second place in each election.
Tulsi Gabbard is an American politician, United States Army Reserve officer, and conservative political commentator who served as U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. She became the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. She ran in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries with her campaign for the 2020 presidential election. She left the Democratic Party in October 2022 to become an independent. She joined the Republican Party in 2024.
Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman is a Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist. She co-founded and leads 'Women Journalists Without Chains', a group established in 2005 to advocate for press freedom and human rights. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that was part of the Arab Spring movement. She was often referred as the 'Iron Woman' and the 'Mother of the Revolution" in Yemen. She is a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work". She became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize.
Amy Kremer is an American political activist known for her roles in the Tea Party movement and as a supporter of Donald Trump. She became involved in the Tea Party movement in 2009 and campaigned as part of the Tea Party Express until 2014. During the 2016 presidential election she was a co-founder of two political action committees supporting Trump's campaign, and following Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election she supported attempts to overturn the election result. In 2017 she unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in Georgia's 6th congressional district as a Republican.
The Proud Boys is a North American far-right, neo-fascist militant organization that promotes and engages in political violence. The group's leaders have been convicted of violently opposing the federal government of the United States, including its constitutionally-prescribed transfer of presidential power. It has been called a street gang and was designated as a terrorist group in Canada and New Zealand. The Proud Boys are opposed to left-wing and progressive groups and support Donald Trump, the former president of the United States. While Proud Boys leadership has denied being a white supremacist organization, the group and some of its members have been connected to white supremacist events, ideologies, and other white-power groups throughout its existence.
Protests against Donald Trump have occurred in the United States and internationally since his entry into the 2016 presidential campaign. Protests have expressed opposition to Trump's campaign rhetoric, his electoral win, his first inauguration, his alleged history of sexual misconduct and various presidential actions, most notably his travel ban in 2017 and aggressive family separation policy in 2018. Some protests have taken the form of walk-outs, business closures, and petitions as well as rallies, demonstrations, and marches. While most protests have been peaceful, actionable conduct such as vandalism and assaults on Trump supporters has occurred. Some protesters have been criminally charged with rioting. The largest organized protest against Trump was the day after his inauguration; millions protested on January 21, 2017, during the Women's March, with each individual city's protest taken into consideration, makes it the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States.
Linda Sarsour is an American political activist. She was co-chair of the 2017 Women's March, the 2017 Day Without a Woman, and the 2019 Women's March. She is also a former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. She and her Women's March co-chairs were profiled in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2017.
The Women's March was a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. It was prompted by Trump's policy positions and rhetoric, which were considered misogynistic and represented a threat to the rights of women. It was at the time the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, being surpassed 3 years later by the George Floyd protests. The goal of the annual marches is to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, including women's rights, immigration reform, healthcare reform, disability justice, reproductive rights, the environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, workers' rights and tolerance. According to organizers, the goal was to "send a bold message to our new administration on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights".
Mari Lynn Foulger, better known as Bob Bland, is an American fashion designer and activist. Bland co-chaired the 2017 Women's March but later resigned from the 2019 Women's March board following accusations of antisemitism and various internal controversies. She is the CEO of Manufacture New York, promoting "ethical work practices and sustainable fashion".
Tamika Danielle Mallory is an American activist. She was one of the leading organizers of the 2017 Women's March, for which she and her three other co-chairs were recognized in the TIME 100 that year. She received the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award from the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in 2018. Mallory is a proponent of gun control, feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Joseph Owan Gibson is an American right-wing activist and the founder of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, which is active in Portland, Oregon and other cities within the Pacific Northwest.
Carmen Beatrice Perez is an American activist and Chicana feminist who has worked on issues of civil rights including mass incarceration, women's rights and gender equity, violence prevention, racial healing and community policing. She is the President and CEO of The Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit founded by Harry Belafonte which is dedicated to ending child incarceration and eliminating the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. She was one of four national co-chairs of the 2017 Women's March.
Rebecca Nagle is an Native American activist, writer, public speaker. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Nagle is one of the founders of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an organization led by artists and activists dedicated to promoting a culture of consent. Nagle has also served as a coordinator of the event "Pink Loves Consent."
The 2019 Women's March was a protest that occurred on January 19, 2019, in America. It follows the 2017 Women's March and 2018 Women's March.
Amy Siskind is an American activist and writer. She is the author of The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year (2018) and organizer of the We the People March.
Women for Trump is a political group in the United States who have supported the presidency of former U.S. president Donald Trump.
Since its foundation in 2016, members of the Proud Boys, a far-right, neo-fascist, and exclusively male organization, have been involved in a number controversial and violent events. This list contains a number of those events, some of which have resulted in criminal charges being filed against participants.