Politics & Polls #28: The Women’s March on Washington with Katha Pollitt

Jan 26 2017
By Julian Zelizer & Sam Wang (Produced by B. Rose Kelly and Edited by Bonelys Rosado)
Source Woodrow Wilson School

Hailed as one of the largest protests in American history, the Women’s March on Washington gathered hundreds of thousands of people in the district and millions in sister marches across the world.

Held just a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the protest was an opportunity for Americans to bring gender and reproductive rights to the forefront, an issue many feel is under threat by a Trump administration. 
 
In this episode of Politics & Polls, professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang discuss the march and reproductive rights with Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation. Pollitt’s column, “Subject to Debate” has been cited as “the best place to go for original thinking on the left.”
 
​Pollitt is an American feminist poet, essayist and critic. In 2007 Random House published her collection of personal essays, “Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories.” Her most recent book is “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights,” which The New York Times listed as a Notable Book of 2014. Pollitt has also written essays and book reviews for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper’s, Ms., Glamour, Mother Jones, The New York Times and the London Review of Books.
 
 
ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 
Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics. He has published more than 600 hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com

Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum and autism.