Women and men from across America dusted off their pink pussyhats and snagged posterboards before heading out to women’s marches one year after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

In 2017, My parents and I attended the Women’s March in Washington D.C. with my parents, a historic event which was the largest single-day protest in American history. The 2018 marches brought in about half of last year’s numbers, but in some places such as Chicago, the participation increased, according to Fortune Magazine.

This year, protesters again gathered through the streets to fight for women’s rights, LGBT rights, a fair immigration policy and accessible healthcare. But, in some ways,  the goals for the 2018 women’s march shifted perspectives and focused on the new challenges in the coming year. With midterm elections coming up in the fall in both houses of Congress, protesters attempted to garner support for Democratic potentials, especially female Democrats to hold office.

The women’s march I attended in Cambridge encompassed a slightly different atmosphere than the D.C. march I attended the year before. There was still unyielding determination, but perhaps a also a sense of exhaustion from too many women’s arms from holding up protest signs for too many years. Last year was a storm of ferocious defiance; this year a resolute continuation of the new revolution of women’s empowerment.

I always feel a sigh of relief instead of dread when entering a crowd of protesters, even though they are strangers. I’m not scared of these people because I know they’re with me, not against me. I know they support me, so much so they left their warm homes and families to march in the cold streets to fight for our basic rights.

Over the past year, Americans saw the fall of powerful men who used their positions of power to act as abusers as the #MeToo movement engulfed the nation, and the rise of female leadership in the government, including Andrea Jenkins, the first openly transgender black woman to hold public office, and the “Silence Breakers” as TIME’s “Person of the Year.”

We have built a new army of feminist revolutionaries and continued a legacy of women not succumbing to inequality, as is evident from this year’s women’s marches. As CNN claimed in December, 2018 will be the year of women and let me tell you, women today are on the right side of history.