The 2017 Women’s March

The 2017 Women’s March is part of the book’s account of a period when women’s collective action and public speech were becoming harder to ignore. The book lists women’s marches among its recurring points of reference, but does not develop the event as a standalone scene; its significance here lies in the broader climate of mobilization around the reporting, protest, and public disclosures of 2017.

Place in the wider mobilization

The reporting on Bill O’Reilly’s conduct helped shape the editorial moment in which Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey pursued a broader investigation. After O’Reilly was fired, Rebecca Corbett asked Kantor to examine both whether powerful men elsewhere were concealing abusive behavior and what systems made harassment so pervasive and difficult to address. The reporting approach therefore joined individual accounts to questions about settlements, institutional practices, and the silences surrounding them.

The book describes that work as occurring when women seemed increasingly ready to express their frustration publicly. For journalists, the moment presented an opportunity to invite candor, but speaking to a reporter about painful experiences remained difficult. Twohey proposed framing the request around helping protect other people, an appeal that gave potential sources a reason to take the risk without promising that disclosure would undo what had happened. The contrast between painstaking efforts to build trust with sources and the later visibility of collective public speech is central to the book’s account of how mobilization grew.

From disclosure to accountability

After the first Weinstein article appeared in October 2017, tips poured into The New York Times and other news organizations. The book describes the ensuing work as a wide-ranging journalistic project, extending from restaurant workers and domestic and factory workers to ballet dancers, prison guards, models, and employees in technology. That expansion made public disclosure more than a sequence of stories about prominent individuals: it exposed experiences across workplaces and levels of visibility.

That autumn, women also posted #MeToo accounts on social media, often coming forward without the months of persuasion and relationship-building required in the Weinstein investigation. Megan Twohey, reading posts from women she knew, was moved to tears. The book links the growing volume of testimony to a developing sense of accountability: when women believed that telling their stories could lead to action, more spoke, and institutions investigated and dismissed leaders. Those consequences, in turn, encouraged further disclosure. The Women’s March belongs to this broader setting of collective expression, though the account does not claim that the march itself caused these developments.

Protest and unequal routes to public voice

The book’s account of action beyond the marches makes clear that collective protest took different forms. Kim Lawson described filing a complaint against McDonald’s with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and joining a September strike. She recalled chanting, solidarity, new relationships, and men deliberately marching behind the women. She also spoke of giving interviews and pushing her daughter in a stroller along the march. This workplace protest is distinct from the 2017 Women’s March, but it illustrates how the book connects public action to efforts to challenge harassment and gain recognition at work.

The women’s experiences were not interchangeable. At the later gathering hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawson was earning $10 an hour and had been homeless six months earlier; the setting of Paltrow’s home made the difference in their circumstances visible. Rowena Chiu, meanwhile, said she had not yet made her story public and that even her family, apart from her husband, did not know it. She reflected on the pressures on Asian women not to make a fuss or cause waves, and on the fear that disclosure could shock friends and change her life. The book’s portrait of collective action thus includes both the possibility of solidarity and the unequal risks that shape who can speak, when, and at what cost.