So maybe I am reading too much into this, or letting it inspire too much joy in my bruised and battered heart, but I find myself uplifted by recent events among various pockets of the sisterhood.

As this very magazine touched on a month or so ago, feminism seemed to me to have been getting a bit... small. A bit nit-picky. A bit like school – too much monitoring of what everyone else was doing, especially the cool girls, and chiding those who weren’t quite falling in line. And a lot of borderline-neurotic navel-gazing. But now, suddenly, we seem to be going a bit... collective. A bit... big picture-ish. There is, in fact, an ongoing outbreak of rather bracingly direct action.

Close to home, there was the recent Repeal the 8th march in Dublin, attended – despite downpours and bus strikes across the capital – by an estimated 25,000 people, dedicated to overturning Ireland’s strict abortion laws. As I write, Polish women are calling for a general strike in order to protest against a recent bill that struck down their own rights to abortion even in the case of rape and incest.

All power to the global sisterhood: Lucy Mangan on the women taking action around the world