In 2017, a single hashtag ricocheted around the world, unseated staid powers and rewrote the status quo. Only, did it? EvaWiseman investigates.
One January morning in 2017, I took my two-year-old daughter to the Women’s March. For her birthday that year she had received exclusively children’s books about “strong women”; she’d used them as tables for tea parties, and she didn’t march that day, so much as plod. It was London, the day after Trump’s inauguration, and across the world an estimated 4.5 million of us stomped through streets with banners, babies, those awful pink hats and a sense of urgency. Something was gestating.
Men said they couldn’t say anything anymore, often in newspaper columns or on prime-time TV., I thought of 2017, with its weird and fizzing hope. What had changed since then? The old rules on sex and power had been dismantled, but when would we see the new structures that formed in their place?watched #MeToo unfold with a kind of bruised relief – she’d been silent about harassment since she was 16.