Last Friday, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. I can’t stop the flow of tears—tears for the millions of women and young girls that will be affected by this; tears for all the women that braved the system to gain control of their bodies over the last fifty years; tears for the women who marched and were beaten and jailed when they fought for our rights.

And all that work, for what my generation thought was lasting progress in our equality, just dissipated with the vote of six justices, against the will of two-thirds of the American people. 

In 1989, Genevieve, my daughter who was attending Smith College, called.

“Mom, I’m calling to let you know I will be going to Washington, D.C., with a busload of friends next weekend.”

I knew without asking why. Like her mother, whenever there was a chance to protest for women’s equal rights, or any equal rights or injustices, Genevieve would participate. 

The bus she mentioned would take a full load of Smith women to march for Women’s Equal Rights. I had been reading about it and anxious to be involved. Forty-nine? No way was that too old. 

“Mom, why don’t you meet us there?” 

“How will I find you?” 

“At the northeast corner of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.”

She’s kidding, right? How would I find her among hundreds of thousands of people?

A backpack filled with snacks and water sat on the front seat of my Subaru as I left Maine and headed south early in the morning. In just under ten and a half hours, I arrived in D.C. Trying not to be overwhelmed (though, of course, I was), I found a parking lot as close as I could get to the Lincoln Memorial Center. Then walked. And walked. And walked. 

Squeezing my way through shoulder-to-shoulder women, younger and older than I was, adolescent girls and a few men, I asked a hundred times if I was heading in the right direction for the designated spot.

Suddenly, “Mom?”

I couldn’t believe I found her. She and all her friends gave me big hugs and handed me a T-shirt like the one they were all wearing. It had a fist in the middle of the feminine gender sign.

We chanted and cheered the speakers, way into the night.

With last week’s Supreme Court decision, women’s rights are heading backwards. No, running backwards. I can’t believe how fast most of this country’s equal rights are being undone. Every day, another part of our democracy is being eroded.

I participated in the 1963 protest when Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

I was one of the protesters at the October 21, 1967’s Anti-Vietnam demonstration in front of the Pentagon.

And here we are again. Women’s bodies ruled by politicians. People of color still struggling for equality. And here we are, still fighting wars.

And, here again, we must FIGHT BACK. I’m thirty-three years older, but count me in.

Marilyn Moss Rockefeller lives in Camden