Deborah Orr: It's not breasts that are the problem

Of course one ought to be grateful, like a good girl. But replacing topless women with women in bras only illustrates that the Sun doesn't understand what's wrong with its general approach to women and why so many people object to it. It's not breasts that are the problem with Page 3. It's the attitudes to women that are promoted by presenting young women as sex objects in a current affairs publication. Yes, I know – it's just a bit of fun. Women in the Sun are still just a bit of fun. Charming.

Stella Creasy: A small victory, but a seismic one, nonetheless

It would never happen, they said. As British as the Union Jack, James Bond and moaning about the weather. This is free speech. You can't police sexuality. Women love it too. There are bigger feminist fights. Just a white middle class obsession. Turn the page if you're offended.

At every turn the campaign to get breasts off the breakfast table has faced opposition and derision. Yet the patience and persistence of Lucy Ann Holmes, Yas Necati and the team behind No More Page 3 has paid off. Grudgingly it seems the Sun has been dragged into the 21st century and dropped this supposedly untouchable national institution.

The NMP3 petition started in 2012 now has over 200,000 signatures but the social influence of their work has been even bigger. This campaign has never just been about the red tops, much as they have felt affronted by its ask. It was always about showcasing something absent from our newsfeeds – the voice of those whose lives were shaped by the prevalence of nipples across our news. In calling not just for the feature to be dropped, but also for their experiences to be heard, NMP3 revealed how this is far from harmless fun. The feelings of discomfort sitting next to someone looking at Page 3. The comments and cat calls. The embarrassment at having to explain to a child why in among the words there were naked ladies.

This has never about being "offended" by Page 3, but being affected by it. By highlighting how so many felt about women's bodies being objectified, this campaign has prompted national debate on the kind of message we send to 51% of the population about their role in our society. Telling someone to turn the page misses the point about the culture that this depiction of what is valued about women feeds. That even when we don't look we are impacted by its presence.

Those who think consigning Page 3 to the past where it belongs, or showing models in lingerie rather than nude, means the matter is resolved miss the scale of the challenge. As the Everyday Sexism project highlights, sexual harassment and discrimination against women of all ages and all backgrounds is such a part of life many have become almost resigned to it. But in its success NMP3 shows it is not for us to learn to accommodate these behaviours, but for society to change. And change it can.

Some will say this is but a minor victory in tackling inequality and ending the discrimination and violence women face. A world where one in three will be beaten or raped, where equal pay is still a myth and women make up but 20% of leadership positions across society. A small victory maybe, but a seismic one nevertheless. The calls for change it heralds will not stop but grow stronger every day as those who want a better world see progress is possible. Onwards and upwards we keep going towards making Britain a more equal, prosperous and safe place for all its citizens – whatever their gender or morning paper.

Julie Bindel: The fight against female subjugation must continue

There is no doubting the power of feminist activism today. In terms of the Sun's decision, I envisage little smirks and condescending comments from male cynics who believe us feminists focus on irrelevancies. But the fight against female subjugation needs to operate on every level.

Murdoch will want us to believe he has not actually caved in to feminist demands; the move from bare breast to bikini has been presented as a change of style, not content. And that would be right. No self-respecting feminist would argue that showing nipples equals sexism and cladding them in thin cotton to be leered at is just fine.

But good for the no More Page 3 Campaign, which has highlighted the drip, drip effect of the Sun's style of anti-woman imagery. Now what about the Sunday Sport, Star and other publications that feature very similar pictures? Let's now have a go at those.

Clare Short: This is a victory for dignity

clare short MP Photograph: Guardian

In one way it is a small step that the Sun appears to be dropping its endless pictures of bare-breasted young women. It seems they are to be replaced with women in bikinis or underwear. But the question is highly symbolic and emotive.

When I dared to say in 1986 that I thought the pictures should be dropped, the Sun started a campaign of vilification against me that lasted for years. Thousands of women wrote passionate letters to me about how they hated it. Some were angry that they were prevented from breastfeeding in public yet pictures of breasts were flaunted. Some were even receiving psychiatric treatment because their hatred of pornography was thought to be so odd. Most said they hated the images, which led to sneers and smutty jokes on buses and in workplaces.

I was delighted when a new generation of young women took up the cudgels. And now at last the Sun is backing off. It only took 30 years. But in those years of argument, more and more women became confident in their right to object. And even Murdoch seems to have become ashamed. Pornography proliferates across our society and distorts young men's view of their sexuality, so this is only part of the battle. But it is an important public victory for dignity.

Laura Bates: A sign of shifting attitudes

The Sun's decision to drop topless pictures is a sign of shifting attitudes. For NoMorePage3 campaigners, it was always about context – placed prominently in the newspaper, the images sent the message that the news about women was their breasts, and that they were passive decorations there to titillate man. The shift to images of women in underwear doesn't send a drastically different message, and it's disappointing the Sun couldn't have chosen to start celebrating women's many and diverse achievements, but it nonetheless represents the fall of an emblem that was representative of wider sexist norms. Of course this isn't the end of the road, with many more feminist battles ahead, but it's a testament to the power of collective action and a tipping point in the battle against the argument that everyday sexism is "just a bit of harmless fun".

Bidisha: This is a triumph for a wider pornified culture

The boobs are dead, long live the boobs. The apparent cancellation of the Sun's Page 3 daily female fleshbot does not signal the end of endemic media sexism or the triumph of feminist values. Instead the decision signals the overall triumph of a wholly pornified, misogynist wider culture. The ethos and presentation of Page 3 is in decline not because men respect women more and radical feminists like me have won but because there are now infinite images of women, sexualised, dehumanised and objectified, accessible for free, online.

The fundamental message, that women are people and not objects, has not quite sunk in. While the specific brand of the Page 3 woman – a young, usually unknown model, in a studio, plus tits – may have gone, in the last couple of days the same page space has been devoted to model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and the actresses from Hollyoaks, all in their skimpies.

It's not as though the paper's suddenly running extracts from Intercourse or Pornography: Men Possessing Women by my hero Andrea Dworkin or a long, clothed interview with bell hooks or Roxane Gay. And while the Page 3 woman might be gone from the paper version (replaced by … other objectified women) she is still being served up for free like a piece of meat online to many more "readers".

Polly Toynbee: The Sun's retreat is a straw in the wind

Victory! Campaigners long vilified as humourless, sexless feminist nags and hags have won. (Well, a very small first step, not online.) This suggests a turn in the tide when Murdoch swallows his pride and admits reducing women to dumb bare bodies doesn't sell as well as it did. But the pornification of everything is everywhere still, insanely sexualised images of women still the norm: back in the day when we were sticking feminist messages on tube station ads that demeaned women, we thought the sheer archaic dirty-old-man backwardness of all that would bring advertisers to their senses – but it got worse. Young girls are made miserable by imagery telling them bodily perfection is the only way they will be judged. But how long change takes: we thought equal pay and sex discrimination was sorted once acts were passed in the seventies. The Sun's retreat is a straw in the wind – it will take much more to blow away the idea that women are bodies, while men are people.

Homa Khaleeli: Women aren't there just to provide a pretty picture

Have campaigning feminists really altered the Sun's trajectory? Only if it was all about the nipples. Now instead of a topless model, we have women in bikinis and lingerie, while the topless pictures have been banished … to the paper's website.

Murdoch's new vision for the page was clear in the tweet he sent out last year, that "beautiful young women" looking "more attractive in at least some fashionable clothes". The idea that women deserve to be in the paper for what they do, not just what they look like apparently never occurred to him.

If the battle over Page 3 was about changing the idea that a newspaper should be filled with fully clothed, successful men achieving things or debating issues, while the biggest photograph of a woman was often the half-naked, passive model, then really what's the difference? Until 2003 the models could be 16-year-old girls, and sometimes dressed in school uniforms. Then there was the "news in brief" speech bubble, telling us what they thought about the events of the day - the joke being a girl in her pants would have anything intelligent to say about current affairs, and anyway who cares when there are BOOBS?!! Right?! All this while the editors insisted it was a "family" newspaper and embarrassed themselves by talking mindlessly about "natural beauty".

When the paper finally focuses on businesswomen, sportswomen, female politicians and women's actions rather than just their looks then it will be time to start celebrating. It's time the paper realised that women aren't in the paper just to provide a pretty picture. Page 3 endured because some male readers liked it and female readers … well, who cares? Today, it's great that the "institution" has been replaced, but we still need to crack the foundations that kept it in place for 44 years.

Katharine Whitehorn: You can find everything on the internet

I don't see that stopping Page 3 will make a huge difference these days because of everything you can find on the internet. Compared to most of the other ways women get exploited, someone getting paid for taking their bra off just doesn't seem that important now. If you want to worry about something get worried about trafficking or FGM or something similar.

Katherine Sladden: It has inspired a generation of feminists

Katherine Sladden Photograph: Katherine Sladden

No other campaign has done as much to inspire a new generation of young feminists as No More Page 3.

It was two years ago when Lucy-Ann Holmes first wrote to the editor of the Sun asking him to please stop publishing topless women on Page 3. He didn't reply - so she went online and started a petition on Change.org. That sparked a campaigning community whose legacy will last long after Page 3 is forgotten.

The fact that the Sun's editor ignored Holmes in 2012 might have been the best thing that happened for women's rights campaigners. It meant Lucy had to turn her petition into a movement. No More Page 3 became the gateway issue for women finding the courage to speak out on issues they care about. Young women such as Yas Necati, who's still at sixth form college, and who organised her own No More Page 3 rally outside the Sun headquarters - it was her first taste of activism and she was hooked. Girl Guides started to say "I am a feminist" and launched an activism badge. And every university that has dropped Page 3 or supermarket that moved it from the shelves, has given another young person a taste of what it is like to campaign and win.

That feeling of winning is infectious. No More Page 3 inspired Caroline Criado-Prerez to start a petition to get a women on British banknotes. And that petition, in turn, inspired Ailsa Burkimsher Sadler to start a campaign to get mothers recognised on marriage certificates. In fact, since Holmes's campaign was started, women's rights issues have been among the most successful on Change.org.

No More Page 3 took on an institution and made a change – it is a remarkable victory. But to me the bigger victory here is a generation of woman growing up learning that they have the power to make change in the world. That's a pretty good thing – and I think even David Dinsmore, the Sun's editor, would have to agree.