There are few things that buoy the spirit more than a good protest. As a student, I marched for and against everything – refugees (for), voluntary student unionism (against), John Howard (definitely against), Reclaim The Night (for, always and forever).
For a middle class girl with a conservative father and a wardrobe full of student union issued t-shirts, it felt rebellious to be "on the streets" in a torrid storm of political activism. At night, my friends and I would paint the banners that we planned to wave above our heads the next day, heads made soft and foggy from the cheap wine passed around in a box. Change wrought by our own hands seemed inevitable. This was what we had come to university for – to be invincible street rats, thumbing our noses at the establishment and challenging the status quo.
Celebrities lead anti-Trump rally
Scarlett Johansson, Madonna and Ashley Judd deliver powerful speeches at the Women's March a day after President Donald Trump's inauguration.
I suppose it's a consequence of age that each generation looks back and considers themselves to have been part of the "last hurrah" of something special. My university peers and I failed to stop voluntary student unionism, and its introduction decimated the resources previously available to run events, activities, social gatherings and yes, foster political activism. After graduating, it seemed like the change we felt responsible for engineering had soared briefly before crashing spectacularly.
I'm not a pessimistic person, but it was hard not to feel despondent when the rallies we'd cut our teeth on as students started dwindling in numbers. You'd always show up because you wanted to believe a spark remained in the dying embers, but sometimes you couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed.
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I'm remembering this now because such apathy seems almost impossible to believe in the wake of the global women's marches that took place over the weekend. Launched as a response to Donald Trump's presidential election win based in Washington DC, the movement quickly grew and spread not just across America but around the world. From Washington to New York, Berlin to Paris, London to Sydney. My own town of Melbourne saw a swell of more than 5000 people – but that was a drop in the ocean compared to crowds of half a million marching in DC, Chicago and New York.
Images of the marches from around the world show a phenomenal amount of people – indeed, if you're feeling disheartened at the election of a man who considers women his property and constitutional adherence something that only applies to other people, you'll get a much needed boost from seeing just how many people just took to the streets in protest compared to the paltry tumbleweed of attendees who turned out to watch his inauguration.
None of which is to say the marches (or marchers) were perfect. A friend in Melbourne lamented afterwards how disappointing it is that these crowd numbers are rarely achieved when we march to oppose cuts to welfare (in which the predominant victims are also women), family violence (ditto) or the incarceration of refugees in offshore jails.
Seattle based writer Ijeoma Oluo has been writing superb and piercing words about the whiteness of the congregations, and how hurtful it is to her as the black mother of black sons to not see the same solidarity shown when it's black lives on the line. In her writing, she nails a complexity about the protests that those of us attending are duty bound to listen to – it's not that she tells people not to march, but wonders why all this political energy seems to disappear when race takes centre stage.
These words are not irrelevant for those of us in Australia. The bodies and culture of our own Indigenous population have been enslaved and colonised; their oppression is ongoing. Being a member of the privileged colonising class, I can only imagine how infuriating and heartbreaking it must be to watch your fellow citizens lend solidarity to people who live half and world away while your own oppression continues to go unnoticed, or ignored.
Those are lessons we must absorb and learn if this global action is to take hold. Because despite these gaping holes, the marches themselves did succeed in at least beginning the process of women shouting back. And being in that collective throng felt amazing.
Trump's win has not only delivered a bunch of fascists (and, in the case of Steve Bannon, an actual white supremacist) into the White House, it's also ramped up the rhetoric of obnoxious, mocking misogyny that festers in the online space. Faceless boys and men making rape jokes and telling women to "get back in the kitchen" because their tiny, childish brains have been made giddy at the reinforcement of all that entitlement they feel is their birthright. Those same boys and men now yelling, "fake news!" whenever something's reported that they don't like. The laughable assertion that feminism is over and Trump killed it.
Almost 4 million women around the world have taken a stand in opposition to these ideals. And though it may have been started in response to the figurehead, it really feels more like a shoutback to the daily grind of bullshit that women are expected to tolerate just because "that's the way things are"; an epic "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" moment.
If this isn't yet a global movement of resistance (coupled with a refined understanding of political struggle), it has at least started a global movement of recognition and empowerment for women who may not have felt they needed those things before, or felt they needed permission to take. It's not good enough that the majority of the world's women have been ignored (and not just by men, but by the women privileged by white supremacy) or that feminism has a legacy of being exclusionary when it comes to a number of non-negotiable issues. I hope movements like this work quickly to change that legacy rather than perpetuate it.
For now, I welcome the sense of community that was felt not just in Melbourne that day, but between me and women in places large and small all over the world. Marching was like going to feminist church. To march was to feel a sense of joy and camaraderie. It reshaped for me what it means to say "safety in numbers". Women so rarely get the opportunity to just "be", except when we're together. How liberating that safety is, and how different from the safety we're more often instructed to seek.
One thing is clear after the weekend: Apathy is over. Women are rising and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
In Longville, Minnesota, retired librarian Michelle Barton registered to host a march thinking she'd be the only person in her tiny town of 200 to attend. She was joined by 66 people.
Friends of mine marched in Boston, Washington, London, Los Angeles and Berlin, sharing photographs of the placards that had made them laugh or take a sharp, involuntary breath at the truth of it all. One sign quoted Thelma & Louise: "You get what you settle for." Another in Boston read, "Women Are The Wall And Trump Will Pay."
And here, in Melbourne, I walked beside a little girl in a blue dress covered with birds who held aloft a hand-painted sign that simply stated: "I Am The Oncoming Storm."
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