The author of Do It Like a Woman explains how she spent her early years trying to avoid a female identity, then woke up to the inspiration of feminism

Women are a bit rubbish, aren’t we? A bit boring. A bit trivial. Just look around you. Women make up only 24% of the subjects of global news stories, and on any given day, the lead stories in the UK have an 84% chance of being about men. Women feature in only 16% of political news stories, despite making up 29% of parliament (not a figure to be proud of in any case). Women are either entirely or mostly absent from the school curriculum, and so uninteresting that they make up less than 30% of speaking roles in feature films.

Obviously, the reason for this is that women are just rather unimpressive overall. That was certainly what I believed as a teenager and in my early 20s. I grew up believing I had to transcend my accident of birth. I was born with a vagina but I identified as a person, and I was desperate to prove myself despite my unfortunate genitals.

My solution was to make it very clear that I was not your average woman. I was more like a man. But my body betrayed me. When I met new people they could see my femaleness instantly. They treated me accordingly.

I worked harder to hide it. I eschewed feminine markers. I wouldn’t wear heels or make-up. I refused to show emotions. I made crude sexist jokes and pretended I wasn’t on a diet (although I also understood that the very worst thing I could be as a woman was overweight).

I worked so hard to show people I wasn’t your average woman – but it never occurred to me to question if I’d got “your average woman” right. I believed what I saw. And what I saw was men doing things. Impressive things, successful things, world-changing things. And I saw women shopping, gossiping and cleaning. I wanted no part of it.

Until I realised that I’d been sold a lie. Until I started finding out about the way women have been erased from history. Until I realised how women have had their achievements overlooked and their successes diminished.

And then I started to get angry.

Angry at having these role models stolen from me. Angry at the time I’d wasted trying to make people see me as human. Angry that I’d believed this anti-woman propaganda.

Feminism can sometimes feel like an impossible fight. There is so much to change, and all of it hopelessly intertwined

Do It Like a Woman was my attempt to “do something about it”. I wanted to write the book that I wished someone had given to me when I was growing up. The book that said: you don’t have to be a man. The book that said women are not the trivial, petty, over-emotional creatures you’ve been led to believe. They are as varied and inspiring and brave and intelligent as men. They are as politically aware and they are as capable.

The experience was an amazing one. I got to immerse myself for months in the worlds of women like Felicity Aston, who pushes her body to the absolute limits of physical endurance. Women like Rebecca Gomperts, who braved warships to deliver safe abortions to women who needed them. Women like Ruchira Gupta, who gave up her secure and successful career as a journalist to work with trafficked women in India. It is impossible to spend time in the company of such women and not come away inspired.

And that is important because inspiration can be short on the ground for your average feminist. Not only because women are misrepresented and underrepresented, but because feminism can sometimes feel like an impossible fight. There is so much to change, and all of it hopelessly intertwined. Where on earth do you start? Beyond the obvious and horrifying rape statistics, we haven’t even achieved something as basic as women’s voices being listened to with the same respect as men: study after study after study finds men interrupting women at a higher rate than they interrupt men, and women barely interrupting men at all.

So for me, writing Do It Like a Woman was a feminist act on two counts. First, it brought to light women who should be household names. But I also wanted it to give us a sense of hope that change is possible, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Because while it’s important to focus on what we still need to do, sometimes we do need to be reminded of how far we’ve come. And of how much difference one determined woman can make.

Extract

Gulmakai, who ‘was 22 but looked 45’, stood up and started ‘what looked like freestyle rapping in Pashto’. She brought her performance to a close with a final grotesque landai: ‘Making love to an old man / is like fucking a shrivelled cornstalk blackened by mould.’ The room burst into raucous laughter. It somehow seems less funny when Gulmakai delivers her punchline, ‘I know this is true. My father married me to an old man when I was 15.’ She tries to go on, but is silenced by the workshop leader – a man.

Gulmakai’s delivery is contemporary and her scornful laughter is overt, but her experience and her rage are all too familiar, and echo the traditional landai:

You sold me to an old man, father.

May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

More about Do It Like a Woman

Bravery is a recurring theme. Many of Criado-Perez’s subjects have stood up to husbands, brothers, fathers, cultures, faiths. Many have had to flee families, homes and countries. But there is also courage in being an active, campaigning feminist. Criado-Perez has been attacked by those apparently on her side – feminists who disagree with her criticism of certain religious or cultural practices, or who believe she is insufficiently aware of her own privilege as a white woman. She has waded into debates around intersectionality (the idea that systems of oppression overlap), once suggesting that it was being used “as a cloak to abuse other women”. Like any woman who is vocal on these subjects in the public sphere, from the academic Mary Beard to the MP Stella Creasy, Criado-Perez has been obsessively threatened. She doesn’t dwell on the experience, instead using her platform to shed light on the lives of others. There is bravery in that, too. – Sophie Elmhirst

Read the full review.

Buy the book

Do It Like a Woman is published by Granta Books at £8.99 and is available at the Guardian bookshop at £7.19.