She received no more answer than that because at that moment a woman in a woolly hat and long coat started speaking on the stage, a microphone projecting her voice across the large space so it echoed off the parliament building’s facade. Soon the square had taken on the charged atmosphere of a festival as people cheered at her speech, brandishing their placards and shouting rally chants in French and German.

Equality for women! Our bodies belong to us! Liberation means revolution!

Sylvia took her camera out of her bag and began snapping, slipping amongst the crowd until she’d soon lost Evelyne, Daniel and the others altogether.

Half an hour later, the opening speeches over, the demonstrators began to march out of the square and through the streets of Bern. Chanting and singing as they walked, the trail of people moved up the middle of a cobbled street named Marktgasse, past a stone fountain topped with a curious figure in red and gold. In the distance, Sylvia could see the pointed form of a clock tower; she assumed this was the medieval Zytglogge, displaying an astronomical clock she’d read dated from the sixteenth century. She was suddenly struck by the incongruity of a march for women’s rights taking place amid streets built so long ago. How were they expected to bring change to the modern world when they had so much history to shrug off?

Stashing her camera in her bag, she began to talk to demonstrators – in English and French mostly, plus a mix of very basic German and sign language – about their motives, their hopes, the experiences that had brought them here. She spoke to university students demanding a different future to their mothers, women in their sixties reinvigorated by finally getting the vote, and single women demanding the right to live their lives as they wanted, not as expectation prescribed. There was Sarah, the young wife marching in defiance of her new husband, who had demanded she resign from the job she loved; Mathilde, who’d had an illegal abortion two years ago and nearly died; and Hanna, a striking 25-year-old who was placed in a reform school at the age of sixteen for having the temerity to fall in love with the wrong sort of boy.

‘When I got out of that hell hole,’ she told Sylvia, ‘I vowed never to let anyone dictate my life again.’

She wrote down their words and photographed their passionate faces, seeing the determination and cautious hope in their eyes, the fire that had ignited from being told they must behave in a certain way simply because they were women.

‘Take my picture,’ Hanna said, grabbing Sylvia’s arm. ‘Put it in your newspaper and tell the world what we are fighting for.’