Caroline Criado Perez is an author and feminist campaigner. Tracy King is a writer and campaigner. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez exposes the erasure of women in a world that’s been designed BY men FOR men — and men alone. In this world, women sit shivering in offices set to male temperatures, they hold phones that are too big for their hands, they struggle to reach the rail on the tube set to a male height. But discomfort is just one part of the puzzle. This data gap is also putting women’s lives at risk. Invisible Women delves into the consequences of not collecting data speci ..read more

Jess Phillips is the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley and the author of Truth to Power and Everywoman. When she’s not standing up in the House of Commons, calling out the prime minister for playing “bully-boy games” during Brexit votes, she’s shedding light on the reality of being a woman in politics. That reality is pretty terrifying. She receives death and rape threats every day of her life. And one night received 600 rape threats in one night. She has panic alarms installed in her home and office.  On 16 June 2016, Phillips’s friend, the MP Jo Cox, was assass ..read more

Vicky Spratt and Diane Munday are campaigning to decriminalise abortion in England, Scotland, and Wales. Diane Munday campaigned to legalise abortion in Britain in the 1960s. Her activism has not only changed women’s lives in this country — but saved them. Munday had a termination in 1961, when it was illegal. Her husband’s salary meant she was able to afford the procedure. But a friend of hers who had a backstreet abortion died. She went on to fight for the legalisation of abortion in Britain. Over 50 years after the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, Munday is fighting for le ..read more

Sofie Hagen is a Danish comedian who co-created the Guilty Feminist podcast with Deborah Frances White. Hagen is non-binary and uses pronouns she/they/he. Hagen is a fat acceptance campaigner and plus size fashion designer, who speaks candidly about our culture’s ingrained anti-fat bias and the subtle and overt ways society continues to marginalise and discriminate against fat people.  In this episode of History Becomes Her, Hagen discusses her admiration for civil rights activist Rosa Parks. Hagen also shares how she got started in the fat acceptance movement and how people can unlearn ..read more

Akilah Hughes is a writer, comedian, YouTuber, and podcaster. Hughes is the co-host of Crooked Media's What A Day podcast and one of the few black women hosting a daily news podcast. Podcasting has a representation problem. There are more podcasts than ever before, but women and people of colour are still sorely underrepresented as hosts, especially when it comes to daily news. This week's episode is hosted by Jess Joho, a staff writer at Mashable based in Los Angeles. In this episode, Hughes discusses representation in podcasting, her book Obviously: Stories from My Timeline, and how she pra ..read more

Ruth Hunt is one of Britain’s leading LGBTQ campaigners. She has played a central role in campaigning for same sex marriage in England and Wales and access to fertility treatment for lesbians. After becoming chief executive of LGBTQ rights charity Stonewall in 2014, Hunt spearheaded the organisation's commitment to campaigning for trans equality. She is credited with transforming Stonewall from an LGB charity to a fully trans-inclusive LGBTQ charity during her tenure. Stonewall was founded in the UK as a response to Section 28 — a law passed in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher that stopped councils ..read more

Zing Tsjeng is a journalist and the author of the Forgotten Women book series. These four books provide fascinating biographies of the leaders, scientists, artists, and writers who are notably absent from our history books. As Tsjeng notes in her books, women account for around half of the world’s population, but they only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history. For those of us who grew up learning a lot about Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Columbus, and Abraham Lincoln, you might have wondered what women were getting up to during this time. They were very busy, it turns out. In ..read more

Lisa Taddeo spent eight years writing Three Women — a bestselling book that has been hailed “the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire” ever written. Taddeo drove across America six times to spend thousands of hours with the three women whose stories shed light on the way women’s sexuality is marginalised. She even moved to the towns they lived in to gain a deeper understanding of their lives. The result is a fascinating deep-dive into the sex lives of three women and the harsh — sometimes devastating — way they are judged by society and the people they know for their sex lives ..read more

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of suicide and grief. Poorna Bell is an author and journalist who is actively challenging our ingrained beliefs about mental health, loss, and strength. Bell is also a powerlifter and writes about the stereotypes and cultural barriers faced by South Asian women when it comes to sport. In this episode of History Becomes Her, Bell talks about how lifting weights helped her find inner strength after the death of her husband in 2015. Bell also discusses how she moved forward with her grief, how she came to terms with societal stigmas and stereotyp ..read more

Gina Martin is an activist, campaigner, author, and law-changer. In the summer of 2017, Martin was at a music festival when she was upskirted by a man in the crowd. The term upskirting refers to the violating act of taking photos or videos under a person's clothes without consent in an effort to capture a person's crotch area, underwear, and genitals. When Martin reported what happened to the police, she was told there wasn't much they could do. What she later learned was that upskirting was not a criminal offence in England and Wales. Martin launched a campaign called #StopSkirtingT ..read more