When I was a teenager, I knew little about the suffragettes. I’d heard of Emmeline Pankhurst, and had a vague idea of women in silly hats hitting things with toffee hammers and going on hunger strikes, but that was about it. So when I started researching early feminism for a novel I was writing, I was astonished. The suffragettes were bloody amazing. They flew in dirigibles and got themselves posted to Downing Street. They wrote suffrage speeches, newspapers, novels and plays. They organised a woman’s peace congress in 1915, with representatives from all warring nations, and met world leaders including Woodrow Wilson to try to negotiate peace. The British government was so worried about their activity that it cancelled all North Sea shipping until the congress was over. Did you know about that? I didn’t.

It may be the case that today’s teenagers don’t know about it either: two years ago, the government announced that it was axing feminism from the politics A-level. While it reversed the decision a few months later after a public outcry, it is a worrying sign of how little women’s history is valued today.

Telling young people about the suffrage movement is a cause close to my heart. My young adult novel Things a Bright Girl Can Do was recently released (I like to think of it as Little Women, just with more with hunger strikes, trenches and lesbian snogging), and to get a sense of what young people thought about feminism, I asked around among my friends’ teenage children. It made for depressing reading.

Feminism is a polarising subject for this generation. “You have one group that believes ‘feminism is cancer’, and that supporters are ‘feminazis’,” one 17-year-old told me.

Another said: “Many people my age wouldn’t [call themselves feminists] because of how the word has been tainted.” Most of them agreed that feminist was a dirty word. Beyond my informal survey, a 2015 YouGov poll found that 19% of respondents thought the term was an insult – higher than the 15% who thought it was a compliment. Blimey.

Emmeline Pankhurst addressing a meeting in Trafalgar Square, London, in 1908. Photograph: PA

Next year marks the centenary of Representation of the People Act 1918, which gave limited voting rights to women. But early feminists were fighting for much more than political power. A key argument was that once women had the vote, they would use it to improve society for women and their dependents. We’ll have old-age pensions! they promised. State orphanages! Equal pay for men and women! Women will be able to get university degrees! Divorced women will be able to see their children! Frankly, they sound deranged. But in the last 100 years, every single one of those demands has been realised.

It’s hard to appreciate quite how far women have come in such a short time. The first suffragettes were considered naughty schoolgirls, essentially. They were not even acknowledged as activists. It’s dizzying. I wish modern teenagers were taught this. I wish they understood quite how much they owe those women and their supporters.

It’s not all bad: some of the teenagers I talked to were passionately interested in equality and weren’t ashamed to call themselves feminists. “I really don’t understand why grownups think we don’t care,” one 16-year-old told me. “If you actually looked, you’d be blown away by how important feminism and equal rights for all sectors of society are for teenagers.” Others agreed, with several even saying that they felt uncomfortable with the label because the movement didn’t do enough for black women, immigrants, or transgender women.

In fact, according to the Fawcett Society’s State of the Nation 2016 report, young people are more likely to call themselves feminists than their elders. Although 67% of all adults surveyed were sympathetic to feminism, only 7% would describe themselves as a feminist. For those aged 18-24, this rose to 19% of women surveyed and 11% of men.

Young women today have opportunities that my teenage characters could only dream of. But the fight is not over. Women are still 10 times more likely to be stay-at-home parents than men, they’re still perceived as less competent than their male colleagues, and only 6% of all reported rapes in Britain are prosecuted. And today’s young people face other, seemingly impossible, battles: the collapse of the world’s ecosystems, our over-reliance on fossil fuels and the recent rise in racial tension, to name a few.

In the face of all that, I want teenagers to know that, 100 years ago, others fought seemingly hopeless battles and succeeded against the odds. I want them to know that societal change is not just possible, but essential. I want them to know how impossible that fight must have seemed – but how the suffragettes fought it anyway, and won.

• Things a Bright Girl Can Do is published by Andersen Press at £12.99