The Persistent, March 2026
On a Monday night this winter, exhausted after getting my 1-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son to bed, I logged onto Zoom to join more than 4,000 women across the U.S.—mostly mothers—concerned about the violence unfolding in Minnesota. Of course, so much has happened since then, and so much continues to happen—much of it terrible for girls and women (read: war in Iran and a school full of young girls killed; and, of course, horrific Epstein revelations every. single. day). But the one thing all of us had in common that evening, a thing that remains true now, is that we didn’t like what was going on and we wanted to do something about it. From the outside, it might be easy to dismiss a gathering like this with an eye roll. I mean, what could a group of ordinary mothers bring to the table to stop any of it? As I settled in front of my screen, I could almost hear the chorus of (male) critics: “Stay in your lane, ladies.”
What better way to keep us women in our lane than to reduce us to a mere punchline?
