Dear ones,

I am writing to you from Barcelona, ahead of Election Day.

My visit here happened to coincide with a wave of protest that began in France with student demonstrations and has since rippled out into many major European cities. People are in the streets for livable wages and fair housing, and in some places against the genocide in Gaza. As a student of social change movements in my undergraduate years, and as someone who has stood in protest myself, I have been sitting with a curiosity. What makes protest effective? What actually makes a difference?

One thing stands out to me here. Businesses in Spain seem to take a more human-centered approach, and I wonder whether that creates a cultural expectation that you can protest without losing your house, your job, and your community. I can't begin to say for certain, as I am only a guest here. So I am turning my gaze back to the United States, pulling up what I remember and what I learned from the incredible social change instructors and professors who taught me at Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz, and sharing some of that research with you here.

There are many movements I have not included. Please know I am picking only a handful to help illustrate this point.

A number worth holding

The most cited research on this question comes from political scientist Erica Chenoweth, whose work found that nonviolent campaigns rarely failed once they drew active participation from 3.5% of a population. Her research looks at movements around the world, many of them standing against their own national governments, and she is careful to call it a pattern rather than a promise. Still, I want to bring it home. In the United States today, 3.5% is roughly twelve million people. Not a majority. A committed, visible, sustained few.

What protest has changed in the United States

Women's suffrage. From 1917 to 1919, the Silent Sentinels picketed the White House day after day. Many were jailed, went on hunger strike, and were force-fed. President Wilson reversed his position in 1918, and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. A part of this story is told less often: suffragists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage looked to their Haudenosaunee neighbors, where Clan Mothers held real political authority, including the power to choose and remove chiefs, as living proof that another way was possible. Matriarchal governance was already here, on this land, before the movement had words for what it was reaching toward.

Civil rights, 1963 to 1965. In Birmingham, the nation watched police turn dogs and fire hoses on children who were marching peacefully. Within weeks, President Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill, and that August some 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed. Two years later, state troopers beat peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on what became known as Bloody Sunday. A week later, President Johnson stood before Congress and asked for a voting rights bill. The Voting Rights Act was signed five months after the march.

Dolores Huerta (RIP) and the United Farm Workers, 1965 to 1975. In 1962, Dolores Huerta co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers, alongside César Chávez. In 1965, Filipino farmworkers led by Larry Itliong walked out of the vineyards of Delano, California, and the union joined them. What followed was a five-year strike and a national grape boycott. Millions of ordinary people, at their kitchen tables and in grocery store aisles, simply stopped buying grapes. In 1970, the growers signed the first union contracts in the history of table grapes. Dolores negotiated them herself. They brought higher wages, clean drinking water and toilets in the fields, and limits on dangerous pesticides, including a ban on DDT. In 1975, after years of her lobbying, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. It was the first law in the country to protect farmworkers’ right to organize. They had been left out of the federal labor protections of the 1930s. It was Dolores who gave the movement its rallying cry, “Sí, se puede”: yes, it can be done. A mother of eleven, she was too often left out of the telling of the story she helped write. She was still organizing this year, in her nineties, until she passed away this past week.

Stonewall, 1969. In June 1969, the people in the Stonewall Inn in New York, among them trans women, drag queens, street youth, and queer people of color, refused to submit to a police raid. The uprising lasted several nights. It did not change a single law that year. What it changed was willingness. Within a year came the first Pride marches, and after them decades of organizing, lawsuits, and coming out to family and coworkers one conversation at a time. The legal changes arrived slowly, mostly through the courts: laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy were struck down in 2003, marriage equality came in 2015, workplace protections in 2020, and Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022 (codifying same sex marriage). Stonewall reminds me that some protests are seeds, not harvests.

The American Indian Movement, 1968-1970s. I want to honor this one with particular care, as a guest and settler on Turtle Island. The American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, and the years that followed brought the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan to Washington in 1972 and the 71-day stand at Wounded Knee in 1973. In 1974, Native women formed Women of All Red Nations to carry their own leadership forward. Across that decade, federal policy turned away from "termination," the effort to dissolve tribal nations, and toward self-determination: the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). In 1978, the Longest Walk crossed the continent from San Francisco to Washington to oppose bills that would have broken treaties, and those bills did not pass. These laws came from many hands, including Tribal leaders, Native lawyers, and organizations working inside Washington. But the movement made visible what the country could no longer ignore. It also came at a great cost: deaths, prosecutions, and imprisonments that rippled through families and communities for decades.

Disability rights, 1977 and 1990. In 1977, more than one hundred disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for nearly four weeks, until the government signed the long-delayed rules enforcing Section 504, the first civil rights protections for disabled people. The Black Panthers brought them food. In 1990, dozens of activists left their wheelchairs and crutches at the foot of the US Capitol and pulled themselves up its steps. The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed four months later.

I could go on: the labor strikes of the 1930s that brought us the right to organize, the minimum wage, and the 40-hour week; the first Earth Day in 1970, when twenty million people gathered and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts soon followed. Each is its own story.

Why they worked

When I lay these stories side by side, a few threads run through them.

• They asked for something specific. A bill, an amendment, a signature on a set of regulations. Not only a feeling, but a door that could be opened.

• Nonviolence made injustice visible. When peaceful people were met with dogs, clubs, and fire hoses, the country could see clearly what was being asked of it.

• They lasted. These were campaigns of months and years, not single afternoons.

• Protest was one practice among many. Lawsuits, boycotts, voter registration, quiet conversations with lawmakers, and the vote itself all carried the urgency the streets created.

• They were held in community. Unexpected allies brought food, opened doors, and carried messages inside the halls of power.

• They invited everyone to take part. The grape boycott carried the protest into homes across the country, so that people who would never march could still stand with farmworkers through what they chose not to buy.

• Some harvests take decades. Stonewall and the American Indian Movement remind us that what we plant may bloom long after we have stood up.

On the shoulders of giants

I feel incredible appreciation for the baby boomer generation, for their efforts in participating in protests throughout their lifetimes, and for those of the generation before, who in some cases, put their lives on the line to advocate for laws that benefit not some, but all of us.

For me, reading this list invoked the stirrings of what it means to stand up for what we believe in, to speak truth to power, and to do what we can as ordinary citizens. I notice it in my body before I can name it or fully envision it.

I think about the privilege of seeing, in our lifetimes, a bill, amendment, or regulation advanced by leaders in the United States that brings forward the principles of matriarchal governance. I wonder what it will take, in how many years' time that might happen, and whether it will happen in our lifetimes or not. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice (MLK Jr). These examples remind me, and should remind all of us, that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and it is up to us to honor those legacies.

Today, one of the ways we stand is at the ballot box. If you have not voted yet, please do. And tomorrow, let us keep standing together.

With care,

Maija

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: November 3, 2026