Ali – Last weekend Zurich finally got around to holding a women’s march. They are a good three months behind the rest of the world but the Swiss Germans feel that these things require careful planning to make sure they don’t have a women’s march that goes off half-cocked….errrr….so to speak…..
Anyway, the forecast called for rather rainy craptacular weather for the event, and many of our ex-pat friends were less than motivated. Fearing that there would be all of 3 women showing up, I thought I should make an appearance (because 4 protestors is obviously the critical threshold for making a political statement). I was also determined to drag Maya along, as I felt a solemn duty to baptize her in the pool of feminist activism. Her last and only protest march was the Human Rights March in Vienna, Austria when she was around 4 years old and at the time she felt very strongly that access to icecream was a basic human right. Luckily I managed to borrow another kid – Maya’s friend Lil – so I could pass the whole thing off as a play date. Bonus: because it was labeled a play date, Joe tagged along as well, as he could pass his flaming feminism off as parental responsibility.
So the four of us headed towards the staging area at Heveltiaplatz, apparently a standard place for Zürich residents to demonstrate. We were a wee bit late and I was a bit concerned we would miss the 4 women in Pussy hats who composed the sum total of the march. However , we walked straight into a massive wall of estrogen. 
We were swallowed by the wave and floated along in a sea of pink hats and umbrellas. Maya and Lil seemed a bit shy about jumping on board at first but then started breathing in the hormones and sped through three Tanner stages of pre-puberty as they settled in. My bag of ‘protest cookies’ also helped. 
The March headed across the Bahnhoff Strasse stopping a number of trams, in a shockingly unSwiss way, and then headed over the Limmat. At that point we got a small glimpse of how big the march was as it stretched along the river. We finally left the march at the Rathaus to head in for hot chocolate. 
The news reported later that there were 17,000 attendees, which was impressive for a rainy day in a country with a lot of reserved, unemotional people. Funny to think that Switzerland didn’t even give women the vote until 1971. Perhaps that is why the march was so well attended: a clear statement that women aren’t giving up any hard won rights and freedoms. 