"In any grass-roots campaign, building an ongoing base of support is as important as winning the ultimate goal"
About this Quote
The line reads like a field note from someone who’s watched movements flare up, make headlines, and then evaporate the moment the cameras move on. Patricia Ireland isn’t romanticizing “the people”; she’s arguing, in blunt organizer logic, that the real battleground in a grass-roots campaign is time. Winning the “ultimate goal” is a snapshot. A base is infrastructure.
Her phrasing quietly reorders what counts as success. “As important as” is the tell: it punctures the winner-take-all fantasy that a single legislative victory, court ruling, or election night can settle a fight. The subtext is almost preventative: if you chase the big win without building durable relationships, you’ll get a fragile policy that can be undone, a coalition that splinters, a membership list that goes cold. In other words, you’ll win and still lose.
Ireland’s context matters. As a prominent feminist leader in the late 20th century, she operated in a landscape where gains on reproductive rights, workplace equality, and anti-discrimination policy were routinely followed by backlash, defunding, court challenges, and cultural counter-mobilization. Her sentence anticipates that churn. It’s a warning against movement tourism and crisis-driven activism: showing up only when a vote is imminent, donating only when a panic email lands, treating politics as a series of emergencies rather than a long campaign.
The intent is pragmatic and slightly unsentimental: movements should think like institutions without becoming them. Build the base, because the base is what makes the next fight winnable, and what keeps today’s win from being temporary.
Her phrasing quietly reorders what counts as success. “As important as” is the tell: it punctures the winner-take-all fantasy that a single legislative victory, court ruling, or election night can settle a fight. The subtext is almost preventative: if you chase the big win without building durable relationships, you’ll get a fragile policy that can be undone, a coalition that splinters, a membership list that goes cold. In other words, you’ll win and still lose.
Ireland’s context matters. As a prominent feminist leader in the late 20th century, she operated in a landscape where gains on reproductive rights, workplace equality, and anti-discrimination policy were routinely followed by backlash, defunding, court challenges, and cultural counter-mobilization. Her sentence anticipates that churn. It’s a warning against movement tourism and crisis-driven activism: showing up only when a vote is imminent, donating only when a panic email lands, treating politics as a series of emergencies rather than a long campaign.
The intent is pragmatic and slightly unsentimental: movements should think like institutions without becoming them. Build the base, because the base is what makes the next fight winnable, and what keeps today’s win from being temporary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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