A woman carried this sign to the Trump International Hotel on the night after the election. (Photo by Alex Edelman)

Add a massive mobilization of feminists in D.C. to the list of ways that people hope to combat the presidency of a man who has repeatedly insulted, shamed, and bragged about assaulting women.

Several people came up with the idea independently and created different event pages. As they spread on Facebook, they found each other and agreed to team up on a Million Woman March, since renamed the Women’s March on Washington.

“It’s the most organic thing you’ve ever heard of,” says Bob Bland, a New York-based entrepreneur, fashion designer, and activist. “We made the decision to collaborate and consolidate early yesterday—right after we found out about each other.” She teamed up with Fontaine Pearson, who is based in Tennessee, and Evie Harmon, in South Carolina—none of whom knew each other previously—to help lead the growing interest in showing up en masse in Washington.

Within hours of consolidating their efforts, tens of thousands of women (and men) said they planned to attend a march from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House on January 21, Donald Trump’s first full day in office. State-level coordinators are helping lead efforts to bring people in, and a group in D.C. is already working on permitting and other logistics.

“We had no idea how quickly this was going to snowball,” says Bland, though she had some experience with rapid-fire rallying against Trump. After he called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” in the third debate (a mere three weeks ago), she created nastywoman.co and sold more than a thousand shirts within 48 hours.

After his election to the country’s highest office, despite (or perhaps, because of) such comments, so many people “are looking for direction or looking for something they could do,” Bland says. They’s asking: “Is there some light? Is there some positivity, some path forward that doesn’t involve moving to Canada?”

The march has emerged as one of those lights, a way to come together and publicly demonstrate so many women’s deep-seated outrage.

Pretty much everything about it is in the early stages of planning. But they do know it will be an inclusive event that stands in solidarity with all groups that the president-elect has maligned. “No one person’s pain through this experience is more important or greater than another,” Bland says.

They’ve reached out to people with experience in large-scale mobilizations for advice and also hope to hear from female legislators who want to speak. But regardless of experience, everyone interested in taking part is encouraged to get in contact (preferably through the state-level organizers, who can be found through various Facebook event pages).

“The most qualified person to ever run for president of the United States could be beaten in the electoral college by a buffoon with no experience and no integrity, who doesn’t mind grabbing our pussies and saying its an awesome thing—that that person won, it has the potential to completely marginalize all 51 percent of the population that’s women whether they know it or not.”

Pregnant with a due date in just two weeks, Bland isn’t stopping; she’ll be in D.C. in January with both her daughter and new baby in tow.

“In this particular tragedy, we have no choice … but to find some intense optimism out of nothing and then create some sort of solution.”

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