metroactive.com | sanjose.com | metrosiliconvalley.com | JANUARY 11-17, 2017
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NASTY WOMEN UNITE! M
ARILYN CARTWRIGHT SHOWS me her phone case, which isn’t glitzy or cute—instead, it’s decorated with a tank she helped design. The “armored multi-purpose vehicle” is deserttan and hulking, with giant chains on the wheels and the red symbol for medical aid painted on the side. The 61-year-old has worked in the defense industry for 35 years, ever since moving to San Jose with an engineering degree. “If a plane crashes,” she says, “I could probably tell you why.”
The only protest she’s ever been to was at the previous Mercury News headquarters in the mid-’80s, when she and her co-workers picketed over the paper’s coverage of a military vehicle they’d built. That’s about to change. On Jan. 21, the day after Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the United States, Cartwright will join an expected 200,000 protesters at the Women’s March on Washington D.C. San Jose will host its own satellite march that day, from City Hall to the
Plaza de César Chávez, and similar marches are planned for Santa Cruz, Oakland and San Francisco. A cohort of South Bay women, terrified that Trump will reverse decades of progress on women’s rights, will fly more than 2,800 miles across the country to express their dissent in person at the Capitol. Besides repealing Obamacare, which provides 47 million women with access to health insurance, Trump has promised to defund