On January 20th 2017 approximately 5 million people worldwide gathered in solidarity to protest the inauguration of the 45th US president, Donald Trump. One year later, the president is still in office and the state of things has not developed in the direction that the 2017 protestors’ slogans, seemed to have hoped for.
Yet despite the lack of changes, the Women’s March in 2018 is still of as much relevance to us as it was last year. While 2017 supplied the spark needed to bring women together throughout the world, the 2018 march comes just at the right time to motivate people to keep the ball rolling. The New Yorker described this year’s march, compared to the anger-driven movement of 2017, as “a goal-setting exercise“ — from a political perspective, the marchers, armed with the slogan of “Power to the Polls“, are hoping for more Democratic victories in the upcoming midterm elections and an increase in general voter participation.
However, women publicly making a stance is not only relevant to the approaching elections. In light of the recent Hollywood sexual harassment scandal and the ensuing #MeToo movement, it seems that the call for women’s voices to be heard is more prominent than ever. In this sense, the Women’s March is the perfect reminder that, although we may live in the 21st century, women’s strife for equal rights is not a struggle of the past and that women are ready to fight back.