Viviane Michel says she felt sick to her stomach at the idea of watching U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday.
“Sorry for using this word, but I felt the urge to vomit,” Viviane Michel, president of the Quebec Native Women association, told hundreds of cheering people gathered outside Place des Arts in downtown Montreal on Saturday.
“I can’t understand a country that could elect someone (like that), could give him power.”
Michel said the rally — Montreal’s answer to Saturday’s massive Women’s March on Washington — and similar events around the world are the beginning of an international fight against Trump and against racism and misogyny. “We have fought for our rights and we will continue to fight,” she said.
A woman holds an anti-Trump sign at the Montreal rally. (Dario Ayala / Montreal Gazette)
Many in the crowd, which spilled on to Ste-Catherine and Jeanne-Mance Sts., held banners denouncing Trump, whose campaign many considered sexist, racist and anti-immigrant.
Many women were wearing knitted pink “pussy hats,” a response to a recording in which Trump privately brags about being able to grab women’s genitals without their consent.
The Montreal Raging Grannies warmed up the crowd with songs about the environment and feminism. To the tune of “Oh! Susanna,” they sang: “Women’s power, we’re here to make a stir / Don’t mess around with women’s rights, we roar as well as purr.”
The crowd at the Montreal rally spilled on to Ste-Catherine and Jeanne-Mance Sts. (Dario Ayala / Montreal Gazette)
Rachel Zellars of the Girls Action Foundation urged women to keep up the fight.
“For so many of us the world has radically shifted over the last two months,” Zellars said. “We have been in blackness and in mourning at the state of things.”
The U.S. election “sent a strong reminder of the work still to be done between women,” Zellars said, noting a majority of the female white women voters in the U.S. cast ballots for Trump “despite his racism and misogyny.”
“Today signifies the end of our grieving because right at this very moment, 675 other women’s marches are happening globally. We have never needed one another so much as in this very moment.”
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Speakers included Sue Montgomery, a former Montreal Gazette reporter who created a hashtag (#BeenRapedNeverReported) that went viral.
“United we are stronger than any misogynist, racist, moronic president,” Montgomery told the crowd.
“We are stronger than all those who believe our bodies are for their taking, all those who believe they can grab our pussies.”
She asked women in the crowd to put up their hands if they had ever been sexually assaulted or harassed. Many hands were raised.
“Look at those hands — it makes me so sad to see that. I’m here today for all the young girls out there. One day, I would love to stand before you and ask the same question and I’d like to see not one hand be raised.”
