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CCP tenner
Success on a tenner (l to r): Mary Macleod, governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez with the concept design for the new banknote featuring Jane Austen, 2013. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/PA
Success on a tenner (l to r): Mary Macleod, governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez with the concept design for the new banknote featuring Jane Austen, 2013. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/PA

Q&A with Caroline Criado-Perez: ‘What happened to me was a wake-up call for society’

This article is more than 8 years old
Interview by

Writer and feminist Caroline Criado-Perez on the £10 note campaign, Twitter abuse – and her light-bulb moment

In your book, you detail the online abuse you received in response to your bank note campaign [in 2013 it was announced that Elizabeth Fry would be dropped from £5 notes and replaced by Winston Churchill, leaving no women celebrated on bank notes. Criado-Perez’s campaign means that Jane Austen will now be on the next £10 note] from people with user names such as CarolineISDead and RapeHerNOW and the effect they had on you...
I remember sitting in my flat, watching all these threats roll in, and it was horrifying, utterly shocking and scary. I didn’t know who these people were and what they were capable of. It was relentless.

You even felt you had to leave your home at one point...
I needed to get away. I went to the seaside with my boyfriend.

Your Twitter profile now says: “Please send all hate mail to your mum.” Have you regretted putting yourself out there?
There are days when you wish things could be different, but ultimately I can’t not do feminism and I don’t want to live with inequality, so I can’t really regret it. I think what happened to me was a bit of a wake-up call for society at large, it was a pretty high price I had to pay but it wasn’t completely pointless because [abuse is] something that we now talk about and we’re trying to figure out.

Are you optimistic?
In the past couple of weeks, two high-profile women have been receiving horrible abuse: Sue Perkins and Jack Monroe. I don’t think there’s an easy fix to this. I think it’s deep-rooted and it’s going to require fundamental changes in society, like changing our education system, changing our media, so that women are fairly represented. Things have to change so that women are seen [to be] as fully human as men and then it won’t be so frightening when a woman – goodness! – [might] even take over Top Gear. That she would get death threats… it’s the idea that “No, no, no, this is a male preserve. You don’t come in here” – that’s what that was about. If women weren’t seen as this niche alien species that would never have happened.

Caroline Criado-Perez today. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/Observer

You came to feminism in your late 20s. What were you doing before?
I had a sort of wayward life, I didn’t know what I was doing. I did a year studying history at UCL. I hated it and ended up at Fabric [the club] most of the time raving. Then I dropped out to try and be an opera singer and while I was opera singing I was also working at a website agency and I was unhappy there and decided that I didn’t want to do singing. I always had in the back of my head that I wanted to write. I love reading and writing and eventually I ended up doing English at university and discovered feminism.

How?
There was a light-bulb moment when I picked up a book by Deborah Cameron for an essay about gendered language. There was this study that she spoke about that really resonated with me, really made me think for the first time, about gendered grammar. Using “he” as the default pronoun and using “man” to mean humankind, and how grammar purists claim that this doesn’t matter, but actually studies have shown that when women hear “he” and when women hear “man” they think of a man. I just couldn’t understand why that hadn’t occurred to me before. I thought, God, that’s so true!

How did The Women’s Room, your online database for female experts, come about?
Two days in a row, in 2012, the Today programme had all-male panels discussing women’s bodies. The first was a piece about teenage girls and their contraception; they had an all-male panel, one of whom was the headmaster of Wellington College, which I thought was quite an odd choice. The next day, they had a piece about women and breast cancer, and specifically women’s experiences of a particular kind of test for breast cancer, and they were reduced to asking this male breast cancer expert: “If you were a woman, would you take this test?” It was hilarious, so bad, we had to do something about it.

What women do you particularly admire?
Other than my mum? [laughs] I admire all the women in my book. Amazing, incredibly inspiring – it was an absolute pleasure to write. I got to immerse myself for a year in the stories of amazing women doing incredible things and that was really wonderful and is something I’d recommend for all feminists. If you’re feeling: “Oh god, it’s all too difficult”, just spend time reading about women because they do really recharge you. Collect women now!

What do you like to do when you’re not working?
Boxing and climbing.

Do It Like a Woman by Caroline Criado-Perez is published by Granta (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39

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