Quotes from Helen Lewis

Feminism has to fight 'the tyranny of niceness'. It is, and has always been, one of the most potent forces holding women back.

There is no perfect way to make a demand on power. There is no way to do feminism which will protect you from being attacked. You have to be honest with yourself: am I really being unreasonable? Or is the problem with the rest of the world? If it is the latter, then don't be derailed.

If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.

Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.

It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.

I we open up sport to women, it sends a message that wanting leisure time is not being selfish or unreasonable.

Women need time and space to play - particularly when we work so hard

Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.

We need to change our idea of what 'work' is. Work is not what creates value for an employer. It's what creates a society. It's what takes up your time.

There's definitely a feminist version of false consciousness. If you're trapped as a housewife, you begin to take pride in how shiny your taps are, castigate other women whose taps are not sufficiently shiny, and refuse to contemplate a world in which shiny taps are not the best measure of your worth as a human being. You do not question why, if shiny taps are so important, you're not being paid to clean them

The women's movement doesn't hate men. It hates patriarchy – a system created and supported by all of us, where men and women are legally, financially and socially unequal.

I want to warn twentysomething women that the old bargain has not changed all that much. You can only have it all if you do it all.

the story of gendered time is not one of beastly oppressive men and poor downtrodden women. It's a story of cultural scripts which we all follow without thinking.

A factory manager once tried to intimidate her. 'You can't win with that sari on,' he said. 'Why don't you change into a miniskirt?'fn5 Desai's reply took inspiration from Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India: 'I'll tell you something, manager. Mrs Gandhi wears a sari and she runs a country of 600 million people. You can't even run a little factory.

Harman rejected the idea that women should see each other as competition. The US feminist Katha Pollitt called this 'Smurfette syndrome': just as there is only one female Smurf, we imagine there is only one slot for women at the top table. If she has it, then I can't: so I have to bring her down.

We creep closer to equality, before something drags us back. Misogyny mutates. Sexism and feminism are like bacteria and antibiotics; the latter forces the former to evolve. As soon as one argument against women's rights becomes useless, another takes its place.

If there is to be a Fifth Wave [of feminism], what should our focus be? Here is my own messy, imperfect, difficult answer: structures, structures, structures. Social progress is fast, captivating, enthralling. It is ferociously beautiful to see the world change at the speed of speaking out. But those advances won't survive unless we do the hard work of economic and legal reform to support them