Many years ago on what was, I think, my first visit to the US, I landed in New York one evening. Jetlagged and disoriented, I took myself out for a walk to get a feel of the city and found myself in the middle of what must have been one of the first ‘Take Back the Night’ marches that women had begun to organise to claim the streets.

It was a heady, exhilarating experience, rendered somewhat sharper at the edges by my wakeful and edgy state of mind. I joined the march, was handed a placard, and I walked with the women — and some men — silently, making what I felt was a powerful and necessary statement.

I was no stranger to protest marches. We’d had, and would have, many of our own here in India, but there was something about landing in another country and finding yourself in the middle of people with whom you could establish an immediate connect, people who were fighting for issues you recognised as yours.

Some years after this, in Toronto for a publishing conference, a friend drew me into yet another demonstration, this time with loud slogans and speech, in subzero temperatures, and we marched across the city, our frosted breath mixing with the slogans we chanted, demanding women’s rights, their safety, their dignity. I can’t recall the immediate trigger for that march, but I remember the intense empathy, the deep solidarity I felt with women in Canada. Two other memories that have stayed with me are of a bunch of waitresses coming out of a café holding cups of hot soup for the demonstrators, and a woman from Fiji taking a minute off from the slogan-shouting and jumping up and down on the snow in excitement, for she’d never seen snow before!

Feminism is like that — one of the most international of movements, it has helped women connect on common issues across the globe, while recognising that there are also vast differences among us.

This is why the Women’s March in Washington DC last week, and the many other sister marches elsewhere, were so important, and so inspirational. It’s not just the numbers — half a million in DC and adding up to several more million across the world in as many as 673 sister marches — or even the participation of people from every class and region, or even the profusion of pink hats and scarves, that made the march so remarkable.

Instead, the women’s march marks an important moment in the history of feminism, not only in the US but elsewhere too. We’re here, it was saying, lest you thought we’d gone (just because some among us voted for you). We’re here and there and everywhere else. And we’re protesting your policies, your diatribes, your misogyny.

And more, it said, we’re not just going to go away after protesting. In the old days, protesters would show their strength, and then they’d go home happy with the we’ve-shown-them-we-can’t-be-dismissed sort of feeling. But today, women know a protest march is just the beginning, and a great deal of work is likely to follow.

And so, an agenda was chalked out. The internet was pressed into service and already, a big campaign is on to demand 10 things that can and should be done in 100 days. Here they are, the women are saying, now do them; we’re keeping up the pressure, Big Sister is watching!

Indeed the internet has been a key player in this grand mobilisation. Technology built the speed with which the organisers put things together in a bare two months, starting, according to Wikipedia, with a simple Facebook event, set up the day after Trump’s election, inviting people to march to Washington.

It’s also in the fitness of things that the March mobilised women — men came too, but their numbers were fewer — and had women speakers, but chose not to focus only on the sort of issues traditionally defined as ‘women’s issues’. Instead, it chose to draw attention to a range of issues, thereby marking one of the most important developments in feminism worldwide, which is to claim every issue as a women’s issue: The economy, national security, refugees, migration, jobs, democratic rights.

Said to be the largest protest march since the Vietnam years, the Women’s March became, and remains, an important statement of strength in a time of despair, calling on people to press for a world free of prejudice, and committed to human rights.

Whether or not the March will change anything, remains to be seen. But that it was able to mobilise, with a fraction of the resources, more people in just one city than the President’s Inauguration, is significant.

Big Sister is indeed watching, and she’s not going to let you get away easily.

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

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