“Girl, we broke Zoom,” Erin Gallagher said over text at 8:10 a.m., less than nine hours after wrapping up “White Women: Answer The Call! Show up for Kamala Harris,” a meeting held over Zoom Thursday night. So many more women than anticipated logged into the call that the platform crashed several times, forcing many participants to watch the livestream on YouTube until Zoom was back up.
Over 164,000 women logged on to hear from women like the singer P!nk; the actor Connie Britton; the writer and podcaster Glennon Doyle; athletes Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird and Abby Wambach; and a long list of elected officials, including Congresswomen Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas. Their goal: Push White women to recognize their privilege and the way they have frequently failed to use it as political capital — and get them to avoid making the same mistake again.
The motivation was clear: This year, White women have the opportunity to elect — and make other White women elect — the first woman of color as president.
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The money came in at a volume and pace so intense the Democratic National Committee’s fundraising site went down several times during the call on Thursday night. By Friday afternoon, the group had raised over $8.5 million.
The idea for the call came from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, the group that changed the face of the gun safety movement by organizing mothers — including many White, wealthy and suburban ones — against gun violence. Watts told The 19th that she wanted White women to follow the lead of the Black women who quickly organized behind Kamala Harris’s candidacy; on July 21, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, 44,000 of them gathered for the Win With Black Women Zoom call and raised $1.8 million.
“When I started Moms Demand Action as a White woman in the suburbs of Indiana, even though I was a progressive woman, I was surrounded by the women who were the people they call ‘the 53 percent’ — the White women who have voted Republican in every single presidential election since the 1950s except for two,” Watts said. “I know these women and I learned how to organize them through Moms Demand Action, because so many of these women would come into the organization after there had been a school shooting, some national tragedy or because they sent their own kid to school to do a lockdown drill.”
Once White women became engaged, Watts understood that her mission was to get them to think holistically about the toll of gun violence — not only in schools, but in communities of color, where shootings and killings rarely garner national media attention.
In the current political moment, she said, her task is the same.
“My role has become to help White women understand the political and economic power they have to make the world better for everyone, not just their own family or their own community,” Watts said. “We are the 39 percent. We are the largest single voting bloc and yet many of these women — a majority of these women — in recent presidential elections have voted in a way that upholds White supremacy, that upholds the patriarchy. And as my friend Brittany Packett Cunningham says, ‘Your Whiteness will not save you from what the patriarchy has in store for you.’”
Gallagher shares the same beliefs, which is why when Watts texted her on Monday, asking “You want to do this with me?”, she said yes without knowing the details or considering the work it would entail.
“Everything in my life has been turned completely upside down these past three days, but for all the right reasons,” Gallagher said. “We were just, like, ‘We have to own this. We need to own the fact that White women have deeply fucked this up every fucking time.’”
Gallagher has a name for this pattern: “toxic White women.” Very often, she said, White women are the ones who get to be alone in a room full of men and, because of that, have the power to represent all women. They also get to join only women in spaces and, more often than not, have enormous power and influence over them.
“The truth is that there are many places where White women hold more power than White men and in the wrong hands, that can be so deeply dangerous,” Gallagher said.
The call to rally White women to support Harris was intended as a first step to course correct on this demographic’s voting history in the most recent past presidential elections. It was also a response against what some of the call participants characterized as assaults on women’s rights, in particular the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 that ended federal abortion rights.
Gallagher said that she, Watts and the other co-organizers — progressive influencer Liz Minnella and former South Carolina congressional candidate and gun safety advocate Dr. Annie Andrews — spent six to seven hours a day on calls from Monday on, talking to one another and also consulting with the women behind the Win With Black Women call. There were multiple conversations with Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of Win With Black Women, about “how to highlight the organizations and the women who have been doing this work since its inception while also taking the responsibility on ourselves to actually do the labor,” Gallagher said.
Black women are the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc; 91 percent of Black women voted for Biden in 2020. In organizing this call, Watts channeled a key lesson she learned from them through the gun violence prevention movement, that “gun violence prevention activism is a marathon, not a sprint, but it’s also a relay race.” To her, organizing White women on the call last night felt as if she had “taken the baton” from Black women.
“It isn’t just one donation. It isn’t just one conversation. It isn’t just one call,” Watts said. “This is about unleashing your political power, your privilege, and making a plan to hold yourself accountable and to be in it for the long haul. And that doesn’t end the day we elect Kamala Harris as president.”
Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run For Something, an organization that recruits and supports young people running for office on progressive platforms, was also on last night’s call. As she listened, she couldn’t help but think about how this level of mobilization could not have happened before 2020. “Logistically, there was not Zoom,” Litman said. But now there was also the kind of cultural awakening brought by the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring and summer of 2020 — “the way it gave rise to a really forward-facing, very public and very popular conversation about White supremacy, White fragility and in particular the role that White women play in these things.” One of the changes the movement brought about was to turn language around the work of active allyship that belongs to White women — something that once felt “foreign, academic and disorienting” — into something familiar.
She recalled how Doyle, the writer and podcaster, talked about grappling with her own discomfort in this work and told the other women on the call that if they were feeling that way, they were not alone and could all work through it together. Watts and Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow gave guidance on some next steps: make a list of friends to call, create a voting plan and commit to volunteering for the campaign.
“Mallory made the point of saying, ‘This is not the time to start a book club’ and that’s actually a really interesting way of raising that in 2020, there just weren’t a lot of concrete action items that White women could do to combat racism and prove their allyship in a meaningful way,” Litman said. “This is a moment where there actually are really big ways you can do just that.”
In addition to the money raised, the call also resulted in “tens of thousands” of new volunteer sign-ups for the Harris campaign, Watts said over text Friday morning. The response was so intense that a Women for Harris coalition call planned for Sunday to bring together the various identity groups that have organized over Zoom this week has been pushed to Monday to ensure the technology is in place to accommodate the number of women who are bound to attend it.
Sali Christeson, the founder and CEO of the women’s workwear brand Argent, grew up in the South where, she said, “women are taught to vote alongside their parents or their spouses and to not have conversations.” Last night’s call had “a different energy,” she said, adding, “I think that women, individually, feel really defeated and really beat up, and then all of a sudden, with Kamala on the ticket, collectively, there’s this enthusiasm and this confidence and this power and this force that I have never felt before.”
Since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing Harris, Christeson has been texting friends, telling them about the stakes of this election and asking if they are going to vote for Harris, she said. A lot of those friends — even conservative ones — have told her they will. Christeson has heard the same from her own childhood friends who have been lifelong Republicans and others whose husbands still say they are voting for Trump.
Thinking back to the 2016 election, Christeson said, “We could have done more. We could have all done more. We should have done more. We shouldn’t have just been in this Pantsuit Nation group behind the scenes. We should have been very vocally supportive.”
She said she feels an urgency from other White women that was missing in 2016 and even in 2020. “I think we as women are tired from the years of Trump and the rhetoric and just having our rights stripped away….It’s just too many slaps in the face and too many direct assaults on women’s rights”
Last night’s call was so encouraging, she said, because “we all have access to the woman that needs to be voting for Kamala.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously included Erin Gallagher on the list of speakers. The article also misspelled Liz Minnella's surname.
