Teresa Shook

Teresa Shook is a retired attorney living in Hana, on Maui, who is credited with creating the Facebook event that seeded the Women’s March held in Washington, D.C. on 21 January 2017. She held no role in the organization that went on to run the march.

The Facebook Event

Shook moved to Maui in 2000 from Santa Cruz, California, and had retired from practising law. She was 60 years old in January 2017.

On the night of the 2016 presidential election she posted a call to march on Facebook. The two contemporaneous accounts of that post do not agree on its wording: ABC News, interviewing her for Good Morning America on 17 January 2017, quotes her as writing “I think we should march”, while CBS News reports her post as “What if women marched on Washington around Inauguration Day en masse?” Both place it in the late hours of election night, and CBS reports that a Facebook event page was created from it a few hours later. A Colorado state coordinator told CBS that “the call to action was posted on November 9th.”

“What sparked the need for this movement was the rhetoric of the campaign was so demeaning to women,” Shook told ABC News. “I decided to post something after election night because I was thinking about my granddaughters, and I didn’t want them to grow up in a world full of hate speech and bigotry.” By the following morning, she said, “I had over 10,000 people coming to the event. I was flabbergasted.” Women’s March Inc., in a statement of its own two years later, credited her with “creating a Facebook event named the Million Women’s March” — the name under which it says the event was first posted.

Shook’s was not the only such event. CBS’s account of the following days describes participants in several states creating their own Facebook events and state pages, which a national team then consolidated: forty states had pledged to organize marches by 10 November 2016. By 17 January 2017 the official Women’s March on Washington event page carried more than 200,000 people saying they would attend, alongside more than 270 sister marches in all 50 states and 33 countries.

Shook herself declined sole credit at the time. “Someone called me the fire starter for starting this movement,” she told ABC News, “but this movement would not have happened without thousands of people helping to fan the flames.”

She did not become an officer or organizer of Women’s March Inc., the nonprofit formed to run the event, whose four national co-chairs were Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour. She spoke at the march on the National Mall, and spent much of 2017 travelling to give talks and accept awards. “Really, this is my work now,” she told the Associated Press in January 2018. The march, she said, “changed my life, but it’s changed my life for the good. I’m honored to be a part. We made history.”

Maui County Council Recognition

On 11 February 2017 the Maui County Council announced that Councilmember Kelly King had introduced a ceremonial resolution honouring Shook, and she was recognized in the Council Chamber on 17 February 2017. The council’s release calls her “The Firestarter”, describes her as “a retired attorney, grandmother and breast cancer survivor”, and credits her with starting the Women’s March via social media. It counts roughly 600 sister marches worldwide and about 5,000 Maui residents marching along Kaahumanu Avenue in Kahului. “It didn’t matter she lived in a remote area such as Hana,” King said; “she was able to touch the far ends of the earth and bring people together.”

These are the council’s characterizations, offered in a ceremonial resolution, rather than independent findings about who organized what.

The 2018 Break with the Co-Chairs

On 19 November 2018 Shook posted a statement on her Facebook page calling on the four national co-chairs to resign. She wrote that they “have steered the Movement away from its true course. I have waited, hoping they would right the ship,” and that “in opposition to our Unity Principles, they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs.” She added: “I call for the current Co-Chairs to step down and to let others lead who can restore faith in the Movement and its original intent.”

Women’s March Inc. replied the same day on its own Facebook page. It credited Shook with creating the original Facebook event, said she had “weighed in, irresponsibly,” and characterized her statement as “armchair critiques from those who want to take credit for our labor.” The two accounts of who deserves credit for the march are set out here as the parties’ own claims; this page does not adjudicate between them.

Ten months later, on 16 September 2019, the Women’s March announced that Mallory, Bland and Sarsour would transition off its board — three of the four, not all four. Carmen Perez-Jordan was named among seventeen incoming board members and remained with the organization. The organization told CNN it “has not cut ties with the three departing board members; their terms have ended.” No source consulted here connects that change to Shook’s statement.

Scope

Shook is on this site for a single documented act: posting the call, and creating the Facebook event, out of which the 21 January 2017 marches grew — an event CNN describes as having been “heralded as the largest single-day protest in American history”. She is otherwise a private individual, a retired lawyer in a rural part of Maui, and this page is deliberately limited to that act, the recognition it drew, and her one subsequent public intervention in the organization’s affairs.

What Is Not Established Here

This page was rewritten from a two-sentence stub. The following were removed or left unasserted because no source fetched in this pass supports them.

A single calendar date for the original post. Contemporaneous reporting places it in the late hours of election night, 8 November 2016, with the resulting call to action circulating on 9 November; no capture of the Facebook post or event page was obtainable, so the page reports the accounts rather than fixing a date.

A single verbatim text for the post. ABC News and CBS News, both quoting it within ten weeks of the event, give materially different wording. Both are reproduced above rather than one being chosen.

The stub’s claim that the post “drew thousands of responses within hours”. What is documented is Shook’s own statement that more than 10,000 people had signed up by the following morning. Higher RSVP figures circulate; the only event-page figure verified here is the 200,000-plus attending the official Women’s March on Washington page as of 17 January 2017, which is a different page from her original post.

The title “founder” stated in the project’s voice. Hawaii News Now, the Associated Press and CNN all use it; Women’s March Inc. explicitly contests the framing, and Shook herself said in January 2017 that the movement “would not have happened without thousands of people helping to fan the flames.” This page therefore states what she is documented to have done — posting the call and creating the Facebook event — and attributes the honorific to the sources that use it.

A birth year. ABC News reported her age as 60 on 17 January 2017, which implies 1956 or 1957 but does not fix either, so no birthYear is recorded.

Her involvement, if any, in naming or renaming the march. The only evidence retrieved is Women’s March Inc.’s own reference to “a Facebook event named the Million Women’s March”; the subsequent change of name, and any objection to it from organizers of the 1997 Million Woman March in Philadelphia, is not documented by anything fetched here.

A birthplace, law school, bar admission or dates of legal practice. No bar record or name-authority entry for her was located, and the news sources say only that she is a retired attorney. CNN additionally calls her “a lawyer and educator”; no source consulted describes any teaching post, so that description is not carried over.

Follower counts and platform entries. Her Facebook presence is the subject of this page but is not readable, so no primaryPlatforms list or follower figure is given.