© Julia Hetta

ONE hundred years since women were first granted the right to vote, a new kind of suffragist is rising. In the February issue of Vogue, Eva Wiseman meets seven influential females fighting to empower women in the battle for equality that rages on.

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Politicians Stella Creasy and Sophie Walker join artist Gillian Wearing, gal-dem founder Liv Little, trans awareness campaigner and journalist Paris Lees, blogger Dina Torkia and writer Reni Eddo-Lodge for a unique portrait by Julia Hetta and a Vogue video in which they explain what equality means to them, the changes that would improve the lives of women and what the next hundred years will hold.

“There’s definitely a Mean Girls-style Burn Book in politics – patriarchy isn’t gendered – but the way we talk about other women is important," Labour MP Creasy tells Wiseman in the interview accompanying the portrait. "Women should be believed, because coming forward about harassment is hard. I see the pressure to close down the debates, to say systems are in place, but if so, they’re not working. I’m the anti-Sheryl Sandberg. For me, it’s not about leaning in, it’s about building an army. Progress can happen. My mistake was thinking that it would be easy… Women are set up to fail. We can never be thin, curvy, clever, kind enough. But I’m impatient to change the world.”

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On her soon-to-be unveiled statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square - the first woman to stand on a pedestal there made by the first woman to create one - Wearing said: “Fawcett was all about dialogue. And it worked – she spent six decades getting women the vote. But it took a lot of work! The Guerrilla Girls campaigned, and people kept counting, compiling statistics over 10 years. Now Maria Balshaw is running the Tate, things should change further. The hard thing today is overcoming the psychology – this prejudice goes deep. We need to change people’s inner stereotypes of women. And, that’s harder than fighting for the vote.”

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Read the full interview in the February issue of Vogue which hits newsstands on January 5.