[It takes effort to track the impacts of mass mobilizations like
#MeToo, Occupy or Black Lives Matter, but understanding social change
is impossible without such work. ]
[[link removed]]

THINK #METOO DIDN’T MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE? THINK AGAIN  
[[link removed]]


 

Mark Engler and Paul Engler
December 28, 2023
Waging NonViolence
[[link removed]]


*
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*
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*
*
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_ It takes effort to track the impacts of mass mobilizations like
#MeToo, Occupy or Black Lives Matter, but understanding social change
is impossible without such work. _

,

 

What difference did #MeToo actually make?

In 2017 and 2018, the viral hashtag became a global sensation that
motivated millions to speak out about sexual assault and harassment.
But more recently, critics have questioned whether the flurry of
activity ended up leaving much of a legacy.

This questioning is hardly surprising. If there is one thing that is
most consistent when it comes to mass protest movements, it is that
these mobilizations will be dismissed by mainstream political
observers as being fleeting and inconsequential. Time and again, they
are labeled as fads
[[link removed]],
scolded for being too “confrontational and divisive
[[link removed]],”
and written off as flash-in-the-pan eruptions with little lasting
significance.

The latest round of such dismissal came this fall with an article
[[link removed]] in
the _New York Times_ entitled “The Failure of Progressive
Movements.” In it, columnist David Leonhardt notes that several
movements have achieved prominence in recent years: Occupy Wall
Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. However, “none of the three
movements have come close to achieving their ambitions,” he argues.

Leonhardt grants that “All of them have had an impact,” with
Occupy popularizing “the idea of the 1 percent and the 99 percent”
and #MeToo leading “to the firing (and sometimes jailing) of sexual
predators, as well as the hiring of more women in prominent jobs.”
But, following author and Substack writer Fredrik deBoer, Leonhardt
considers the gains of the movements to be primarily “immaterial and
symbolic,” and he closes with the admonition that “Calling out
injustice isn’t the same as fighting it.”

Certainly, the limitations of these movements can be debated.
Organizers themselves tend to be keenly aware of the missteps and
shortcomings they have encountered, as well as the tremendous amount
of work that remains to be done in their pursuit of justice. At the
same time, outside dismissals of protest movements rarely result from
serious attempts to investigate the afterlives of popular
mobilizations and trace their effects. Rather, they appeal to cynicism
and ignorance: It takes no real evidence to shrug off movements as
having little consequence. In contrast, it often requires dedicated
labor to track how mass action can reshape the political landscape
around an issue, and in doing so have wide-ranging and sometimes
unexpected impacts. Yet such work is critical to genuine analysis of
how social change happens.

All of the movements of the past decade cited by Leonhardt deserve
closer attention before being written off. We have previously
[[link removed]] written
[[link removed]] about
how, contrary to popular belief, Occupy and Black Lives Matter each
had diverse and tangible policy impacts. Occupy, among other effects,
pushed forward a variety of city- and state-level millionaires taxes
[[link removed]],
responsible banking
[[link removed]] ordinances
[[link removed]],
and protections
[[link removed]] for homeowners
[[link removed]], while also playing a crucial role
in preserving
[[link removed]] labor
rights in Ohio and launching a campaign
[[link removed]] that
was critical in later prompting President Biden to grant billions
[[link removed]] of
dollars in student debt cancellation.

Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives had far-reaching impact on an
array of criminal justice reform initiatives, helping to propel
progressive prosecutors into office in major cities and to secure
public support for advances
[[link removed]] such
as Measure J in Los Angeles County, which is redirecting
[[link removed]] hundreds
of millions of dollars per year in public funding toward a “Care
First, Jails Last agenda” to combat mass incarceration. Detractors
rarely bother to weigh such outcomes when discussing the purported
irrelevance of these movements. But they are just a few of the
meaningful consequences that can be documented.

With #MeToo, the impacts have been even more varied and expansive,
making it an important case study into how mass mobilization can seed
change in many different arenas of society.

There is no doubt that the movement changed the cultural conversation
and dramatically increased the amount of attention paid to issues of
sexual assault, harassment and discrimination. It also led to the
downfall of a long list
[[link removed]] of politicians
[[link removed]],
business executives, media personalities and other influential men
accused of sexual abuse or harassment — Harvey Weinstein, Bill
O’Reilly, Andrew Cuomo, Matt Lauer, and Les Moonves among them. Even
critics will grant these outcomes, although that is generally where
they stop.

In reality, this only scratches the surface of what #MeToo has
accomplished.

THE LAWS THAT PASSED

Detractors often point out that the #MeToo movement has yielded no
landmark national legislation, comparable to the Civil Rights Act of
1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although this is true, the
critique is wrong-headed for several reasons.

First of all, a lack of progress in pushing laws through Congress is
not unique to #MeToo. Rather, it reflects the deep polarization on
Capitol Hill that has, in recent years, created Congressional gridlock
and stymied virtually all major legislative drives. In 2022, lawmakers
did pass and Biden signed into law the Speak Out Act,
which constrains
[[link removed]] the
use of non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement clauses in
cases involving sexual harassment or sexual assault, freeing more
victims to seek justice. But for the most part, the movement has
circumvented unfavorable conditions at the federal level by instead
passing a myriad of state laws.

As the National Women’s Law Center explains
[[link removed]],
“Every year since #MeToo went viral in October 2017, state lawmakers
have worked with new energy to reform workplace anti-harassment laws,
which the outpouring of stories and experiences had revealed as
outdated and ineffective… Now six years since #MeToo went viral, 25
states and the District of Columbia have passed a total of more than
80 workplace anti-harassment bills, many with bipartisan support”
— in addition to other measures that pertain to sexual assault and
gender-based abuse outside of the workplace.

Among these measures are: laws that expand the number and type of
employees to whom existing workplace protections apply; laws
prohibiting public officials from using public money to fund
settlements with victims; laws protecting people who speak up from
defamation lawsuits; and further measures to stop non-disclosure
agreements and forced arbitration from limiting victims’ ability to
speak out.

A half-dozen states from Oregon to Texas have extended the statute of
limitations for discrimination and abuse claims. Others have expanded
the definition of what qualifies as workplace harassment. And more
than a dozen now require businesses or public agencies to create
anti-harassment policies and train their employees in these policies.

Connecticut, Nevada, New York and Virginia have passed laws increasing
both the compensatory and punitive damages available to victims, while
Georgia was among those that strengthened protections for victims
against retaliation by bosses. Louisiana, Maryland and the District of
Columbia passed transparency laws requiring businesses or public
agencies to disclose data about the scope of sexual harassment
complaints. And other states have established new agencies or working
groups to improve enforcement, or have approved legislation
specifically designed to expand protections for workers at bars,
restaurants, hotels, casinos and adult entertainment facilities.

As just one high-profile example of the new measures, in 2022 New York
State enacted the Adult Survivors Act, which created a one-year
“lookback window” for sexual assault survivors to seek civil
damages. Intense public attention was devoted to the fact that five
women used the law to sue Bill Cosby for assault, battery, false
imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and
also that the writer E. Jean Carroll was able to use the law to
successfully sue Donald Trump for defamation and battery, resulting in
a jury finding the former president liable for sexual abuse and
ordering him to pay $5 million in damages.

But at least as significant, although less well-covered, was the fact
that nearly a thousand imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women in New
York State filed claims under the act
[[link removed]] alleging
that guards raped or sexually abused them in prisons and jails.

Of course, advocates do not consider the many dozens of laws that have
passed thus far to be sufficient, and they are right to keep pushing
for more — to demand changes that both go further and reach into
more jurisdictions. Yet certainly some review of the movement’s
legislative track record should be taken into consideration before
accepting at face value Leonhardt’s assertion that “Above all,
[movements] made decisions geared more toward changing elite segments
of American society — like academia, Hollywood and the national
media — than toward passing new laws and changing most people’s
lives.” Even as critics such as Leonhardt hold up
[[link removed]] the
patient, state-by-state work of anti-abortion activists as a model of
how to successfully and incrementally pursue change, they make no
effort to appreciate post-#MeToo efforts to do exactly that.

Although prosecutions of celebrity abusers and high-level executives
receive a disproportionate amount of media attention, it is noteworthy
that many recently passed laws have special salience for groups of
working-class women: whether they are service workers who now have
access to panic buttons, prisoners who have made claims against their
jailors, or the unpaid interns, contingent workers and apprentices who
have gained legal protections from which they were previously
excluded.

MAKING THE LAW REAL

A second reason that criticism faulting the movement for not securing
national legislation is misguided is that a main impact of #MeToo has
been to give teeth to existing laws. Prior to the movement, rape and
sexual harassment were already illegal. The problem was that too many
women found that pursuing justice in the courts meant frustration and
re-victimization.

As the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it
[[link removed]] in _The
New York Times_ in 2018, “The #MeToo movement is accomplishing what
sexual harassment law to date has not.” After the movement’s
emergence, complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
increased quickly, and the agency filed
[[link removed]] more
than 50 percent more sexual harassment lawsuits in 2018 than it did
the year before. Since then, research
[[link removed]] has
demonstrated that #MeToo produced an increase in the reporting of sex
crimes across 31 OECD countries. Academic papers have also shown that
#MeToo created a long-term decrease
[[link removed]] in
the tendency of Americans to dismiss or downplay sexual assault
claims, and that, based on data from college-age survivors, the
movement resulted
[[link removed]] in increased
recognition, acceptance and acknowledgment of past unwanted sexual
experiences as assault.

The process through which such changes in attitude are absorbed into
the legal system can be frustratingly
[[link removed]] slow.
Nevertheless, changes are becoming evident. Villanova law professor
Michelle Madden Dempsey argues
[[link removed]] that
#MeToo has helped to create a “feedback loop across the many parts
of the legal system,” in which there is an interrelated rise in
“victims being willing to come forward, prosecutors being willing to
hear them and take their cases forward, judges being willing to allow
the evidence, and jurors being willing to credit the evidence.”

“It’s a change in how society views the cases,” said
[[link removed]] former
federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Shan Wu in 2020. “And the
judges are human like everyone else in their thinking and also in
their training. They’re being trained to be more sensitive to sexual
assault victims.”

As for those responsible for bringing criminal cases, in an
2020 interview
[[link removed]] with
NPR, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance attested to the
movement’s impact as he scrambled to explain why he had failed to
prosecute Harvey Weinstein prior to #MeToo, even though evidence had
been available: “2017 was a watershed moment for, I think, all of us
in America and certainly all of us in law enforcement,” he stated.
Echoing the many politicians who rapidly shifted
[[link removed]] their
stances on gay marriage around 2013, once the tide of public opinion
had turned, Vance concluded: “We have definitely evolved.”

Already we have seen some major appellate court
[[link removed]] rulings
[[link removed]] uphold
arguments made by the movement. And not for nothing, it is now common
to hear prominent defenders of men in abuse cases objecting
[[link removed]] that
the “pendulum has swung too far” in favor of believing women — a
contention that serves as a notable contrast to the idea that the
movement has not done much at all.

SHAKING THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY

Mass mobilizations that spread virally across society function
differently than targeted, localized campaigns that make narrow
demands of isolated power brokers — for example, a drive by a
community group trying to win affordable housing in a specific
development project. As we have written elsewhere
[[link removed]],
“Movements at their most transformative produce tectonic shifts that
make the ground tremble. Although the impact is undeniable, predicting
exactly which buildings or bridges will buckle as a result can be
difficult. Because of this, the activists who generate the tremors
often do not receive the credit they deserve” for the changes
ultimately produced.

Serbian revolutionary Ivan Marovic explains, “In classical politics,
you’re interested in the direct route to victory. But in building a
movement, you’re interested in the more fundamental change that
happens through the activation of citizens. It’s indirect. And a lot
of the things that are going to come from this, you’re not going to
see in advance.” Or as scholar Aristide Zolberg observes,
“Stepped-up participation is like a flood tide which loosens up much
of the soil but leaves alluvial deposits in its wake.”

A great many things may bloom in this newly fertile ground.
Accordingly, it is a mistake to see social change as something that
emanates only from federal legislation. In the socialist tradition,
theorist Antonio Gramsci insists
[[link removed]] that
the power of a hegemonic order is sustained not just by the formal
structures of state, but by institutions throughout civil society.
Likewise, the tradition of civil resistance argues that a regime is
necessarily held up by the “pillars” of society: schools,
churches, civic organizations, the media, businesses and the arts
among them. It is when these pillars of support start to sway
[[link removed]] that
the architecture of the status quo collapses.

In the case of #MeToo, the movement’s impact is clearly evident
throughout many of these pillars. Religious institutions, for one,
are grappling
[[link removed]] with
a cascade
[[link removed]] of scandals
[[link removed]] related
to abuse
[[link removed]] and misbehavior
[[link removed]] of
faith leaders. Perhaps most prominently, the Southern Baptist
Convention in 2022 released what the _New York Times_ described
[[link removed]] as
a “bombshell report
[[link removed]],”
which detailed claims against hundreds of ministers and other church
officials over a two-decade period. “The reckoning, across the
nation’s largest Protestant denomination, was a broader, deeper
#MeToo event than [recent celebrity courtroom battles], and a sign of
the movement’s durability,” the _Times_ reported.

Movement effects are apparent in educational institutions — not only
on university campuses, although those certainly are significant sites
of contention, but also in countless primary and secondary schools. As
just one testimony to the effect, Sarah Soileau, a high school teacher
in Washington, D.C. contends that #MeToo has provided an opportunity
to discuss issues such as consent and sexual harassment in the
classroom. “It’s important to teach our students when they’re
younger so they don’t grow up in a culture where they think it’s
OK,” she told
[[link removed]] _NPR_,
adding, “I’m just trying to give these girls and boys the voice to
say, ‘This is not OK, and I’m not going to tolerate it.’”

Women in the armed forces are coming forward about sexual harassment
and assault, challenging the prior preferences of commanders to sweep
complaints under the rug. “The voices of those survivors have never
been louder or more clear,” California Rep. Jackie Speier told
[[link removed]] the
Associated Press in 2020. “This is the military’s ‘#MeToo
moment.”

In the world of business, the movement has resulted in stronger
harassment policies, new trainings and stricter enforcement.
“There’s a financial interest,” Chai Feldblum, a former E.E.O.C.
commissioner, told
[[link removed]] the _Times._ “It’s
a real liability for businesses.” And while media attention has
tended to focus on wealthy or famous individuals who have been fired
or disciplined, the lists of hundreds of powerful men
[[link removed]] who
have been taken down in #MeToo-related scandals are perhaps most
important as indications of a shattering of impunity — a challenge
to a state of affairs in which even well-known abusers were protected
and their actions could persist as open secrets in their industries.

Organized by Fight for $15, McDonald’s workers went on a one-day
strike in 10 cities to protest sexual harassment on Sept. 18, 2018.
(Twitter/@JayuCanada)

Workers’ organizations including UNITE HERE
[[link removed]] and
the National Domestic Workers Alliance
[[link removed]] have
incorporated #MeToo issues into their public messaging and campaign
demands. Likewise, Women In Hospitality United
[[link removed]] formed in 2017 to tackle
abuses specifically within the restaurant industry. Task forces within
the organization formed
[[link removed]] to
take on issues as diverse as harassment, mental health, financial
literacy, the pay gap between men and women in the industry and the
need for mentorship for women.

The range of such activity illustrates that the movement has had
sometimes unexpected consequences that go well beyond a narrow focus
on sexual abuse. _Vox_ has reported
[[link removed]] that
#MeToo has propelled forward efforts to end the “tipped minimum
wage” — a below-minimum rate allowed for servers and others who
receive gratuities — as it compelled workers to put up with abusive
behavior from customers out of fear that interrupting it would result
in losing tips they needed to survive. As _Vox_ correspondent Anna
North wrote in 2019, “
[[link removed]]Seven
states
[[link removed]] have
done [away with the rate] already, and the movement has gained steam
with the rise of #MeToo.”

Ride-share companies such as Lyft and Uber have launched programs
[[link removed]] that
allow women customers to request rides from female and non-binary
drivers. Multiple efforts have attempted
[[link removed]] to provide
[[link removed]] free
walks home at night for women in certain areas. And the movement
has spurred renewed interest
[[link removed]] from
investors in funds and companies that focus on gender equality and
women’s leadership.

In addition to nurturing new initiatives, the alluvial deposits of
movement activity also sustain organizations that have labored
diligently on these issues for years — groups whose once-ignored
reports and recommendations now receive the attention they always
deserved, whose ability to raise money is dramatically enhanced, and
whose counsel is sought out by lawmakers and activists alike.

Indeed, long-term advocates are often the best positioned to comment
on the changes wrought by mass mobilization. “I have been a civil
rights lawyer and a women’s rights lawyer for the last 20
years,” said
[[link removed]] Sharyn
Tejani, director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund established in
the wake of #MeToo. “And if you had told me at any point in those 20
years that there would be money available to help people come forward,
to help people with their cases, I would have told you, ‘That’s
just never going to happen.’”

“That underneath-the-radar, behind-the-scenes organizing is
extremely important,” Jo Freeman, an influential writer and longtime
feminist activist told
[[link removed]] _NPR_.
Social movements, she says, rely on both short-term surges and
long-term spadework. “What you see are the surge parts,” Freeman
explained. But key to understanding how movements progress is
appreciating the long-term interplay of different types of efforts.
“You gotta plow the ground and plant the seeds before you can reap
the harvest,” she said.

AN ARMY OF OUTRAGED VOTERS

Another impact of #MeToo, and one that is surprising to see overlooked
by critics, is its role in helping to mobilize women as a voting bloc.
Social movements tend to have a cyclical character
[[link removed]],
with periods of highly visible mass mobilization periodically erupting
then subsiding, followed by periods of quieter work. Although #MeToo
was first launched
[[link removed]] in
2006 by activist Tarana Burke
[[link removed]],
most people talking about the mobilization are referring to the period
of peak activity between 2017 and 2018, when the hashtag became a
truly viral phenomenon. Of course, actions that might be branded as
#MeToo during that period took place in a wider context of ongoing
feminist organizing, and the peak moment was part of a series of
interrelated events that had marked electoral consequences.

Immediately after Donald Trump’s election, women outraged by the new
president’s sexism and his recorded bragging
[[link removed]] about
sexual assault organized one of the biggest one-day mobilizations in
U.S. history with the Women’s March
[[link removed]] in
January 2017, and this demographic became a key part of the continued
anti-Trump “resistance
[[link removed]].”
The rapid spread of #MeToo not long after was very much a related
development. And yet another wave of feminist organizing was ignited
in 2022 following the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s reversal
of Roe v. Wade.

The whole of this activism has had a significant effect on U.S. voting
patterns, starting in the 2018 round of national elections and
extending over several cycles, as Women’s March- and #MeToo-aligned
groups explicitly launched
[[link removed]] drives
to mobilize voters. In an article profiling how “Women powered
Democrats in the 2018 Midterms,” the _Washington Post_ described
[[link removed]] a
“women-led army” that was “repulsed by Trump and determined to
do something about it.” As the story explained, “Women who had
never been particularly active politically worked phone banks, wrote
postcards and sent text messages to voters.” The result was
historically high turnout, especially among women.

Brookings would later report
[[link removed]] that
“The 2018 midterm election was a particularly 
[[link removed]]strong
year for Democrats
[[link removed]],”
with the margin of women preferring Democrats over Republicans “far
exceeding that for the 2014 midterms.” As the _Washington
Post_ noted of the Women’s March and #MeToo organizers, “Many of
the congressional candidates they were supporting flipped
Republican-held seats, all part of a political tide strong enough to
flush the GOP from control of the House, dealing Trump a major
defeat.”

Pronounced polarization continued in 2020, when the gender gap between
male and female voters in key swing states such as Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania became
[[link removed]] a
yawning divide, and when sustained turnout among women — with
numbers far exceeding
[[link removed]] 2016
— helped ensure that Donald Trump was not reelected. And while the
latest round of mobilization has generally been seen as distinct from
#MeToo, women continued to exert power
[[link removed]] at
the polls in 2022, when a predicted “red wave” of Republican
victories failed to materialize, in no small part due to voters
[[link removed]] furious
[[link removed]] about
the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision the previous summer.

Because women constitute more than half of the nation’s population,
even small shifts in voting gender-based patterns can have momentous
implications. Given that, the fact that millions joined in collective
efforts to protest Trump and Brett Kavanaugh as abusers, share their
own stories of surviving harassment and assault, and participate in
electoral drives expressing revulsion to such figures is a
consequential development.

THE RESPONSE GOES GLOBAL

Finally, like the Occupy movement before it, #MeToo sparked outbreaks
of activity in many other countries — in this case ranging
from Ireland
[[link removed]] to Japan
[[link removed]] to Mexico
[[link removed]] to China
[[link removed](58).].
In Australia, #LetHerSpeak campaigners succeeded in modifying
[[link removed]] gag laws across
the country which previously barred sexual assault survivors from
identifying themselves in media. And in Africa, Kiki Mordi, the lead
reporter of a BBC investigation
[[link removed]] that exposed sexual
harassment in Nigerian and Ghanaian universities and was herself
forced to drop out of school in Nigeria after refusing advances from a
lecturer, saw her reporting spark widespread outrage. #Sex4Grades
became a viral hashtag across the continent and led to the firing of
multiple abusers. “The scale of the response,” Mordi remarks
[[link removed]],
“it was like magic.”

In every case, activist efforts faced resistance and backlash. And in
many of the previously named countries, legal progress has been far
slower than one would hope. Yet those who have been working on the
ground for decades around the issues raised by #MeToo testify to the
concrete changes they have witnessed: “I had a rape case yesterday
against a leading Bollywood producer,” well-known lawyer Karuna
Nundy explained [[link removed]] in 2018.
“My client is a very young woman; we told the court that she was
raped over a period of six months on pain of bodily harm… The way we
were heard by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the two
judges is very different from the way we would have been heard, say,
15 years ago.” She added, “There’s an interplay between public
consciousness, and the law and due process.”

Perhaps the greatest testament to the types of shifts that have
occurred comes from France. Initially, when #MeToo activism erupted in
the country in 2019, it was dismissed as an unwelcome American import.
Yet by 2021, the tide had reversed, with a raft of influential men in
media, sports, politics and culture facing legal action for sexual
abuse, and with French lawmakers promptly acting to establish
[[link removed]] 15
as the age of sexual consent after rejecting the same proposal just a
few years prior. “Things are moving so fast that sometimes my head
spins,” said Caroline De Haas, a feminist activist who in 2018
founded the group #NousToutes
[[link removed]], in an interview
[[link removed]] the _New
York Times_.

A #NousToutes demonstration in Paris on Nov. 25. (Twitter/Tiphaine
Blot)

As the paper noted_, _revelations around the prevalence of sexual
abuse “have undermined the myths of Frenchmen as great seducers and
of a refined romantic culture,” leading to a reappraisal of French
masculinity that is now being felt in countless relationships and
encounters. Commenting on prominent legal reversals, _Le
Monde_ remarked
[[link removed]] that
society’s “understanding of consent has unquestionably changed.”

The consequence of such shifts is attested to by Pierre Ménès — a
prominent sports journalist known for forcibly kissing women on
television and, in 2016, lifting the skirt of a female journalist in
front of a studio audience. “The world’s changed, it’s
#MeToo,” Ménès now
[[link removed]] complains
[[link removed]]. “You can’t do
anything anymore.”

Such grievances about lost privilege are quite significant. It is
common that the right — or in this case the patriarchy — is far
more vocal in recognizing the impact of social movements than
progressive activists themselves. Organizers are perpetually aware of
how the changes they secure usually fall far short of their most
transformative hopes, necessitating continued struggle. For this
reason, they are notoriously bad at pausing to claim their victories.

But because mass protests, in particular, are so often dismissed once
moments of peak activity die down, it is important to take the time to
monitor their later reverberations. These mobilizations are
significant not because they are the only driver of social progress,
but because they seed the wider ecosystem of social movement activity
— offering fresh opportunities to engage the public, bolstering
long-term organizing, and creating political opportunities that did
not exist before. We should therefore want more of them.

“Our goal has to be ending sexual violence,” Goss Graves, director
of the National Women’s Law Center director, told
[[link removed]] the _New
York Times_. “The real goal feels giant, and not achievable
overnight.” For those seeking to end patriarchy altogether, the goal
is even bigger. Rather than asking whether mobilizations to these ends
accomplished everything they wanted, the question should be: Did they
leave feminist movements in a better place than they were before? And
is our world better off for it? In the case of #MeToo, the answer is
undoubtedly yes.

_Research assistance provided by Raina Lipsitz and Celeste
Pepitone-Nahas._

_Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board
member at Dissent, and co-author of "This Is An Uprising: How
Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century" (Nation Books).
He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com
[[link removed]]._

_Paul Engler is the director of the Center for the Working Poor in Los
Angeles, and a co-founder of the Momentum Training
[[link removed]], and co-author, with Mark Engler,
of "This Is An Uprising [[link removed]]."_

* #MeToo movement
[[link removed]]
* Social Movements
[[link removed]]
* Social Change
[[link removed]]

*
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[[link removed]]
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