@EverydaySexism Is Now A Book.
It’s finally happened… the Everyday Sexism Project has gone from blog to book.
The story: Tired of being told that sexism didn’t exist, Laura Bates (25 years old at the time) created a website where people could share their stories of misogyny.
“I thought perhaps 50 or 60 women would add their stories and that it would be cathartic for them to share them,” said Bates in a Metro interview.
It turned out that quite a lot of women had something to say.
About 60,000.
Via blog and Twitter, The Everyday Sexism Project has been hugely influential in the last couple of years. It’s forced Facebook to change its policies on content relating to domestic violence. It’s been presented to the UK Prime Minister and to the United Nations.
The project has also been hugely cathartic for women who have wanted to have a voice, from the big things it’s so difficult to talk about all the way down to the seemingly casual little things women have been taught to shoulder in silence. Wolf-whistling in the street. Discrimination in the workplace. The time and date counter for when Charlotte Church came of age. It’s all become so normalised.
Buy Everyday Sexism on Amazon (and continue to have your say)
And now, the project has finally become a book. It is a good book. It is inspiring and cathartic. For some, it may be triggering. For many, it will be a case of “oh yeah, le sigh, that’s happened to me too.”
The title of the project says it all. It happens every day. Much of it is so common it doesn’t shock society enough, but it should.
As Caitlin Moran says in her quote on the front cover, the project has helped to “make most women feel oddly saner”.
We love this book. It means you can now hold in your hands the essence of the project that has both changed social policy (a very big deal) and helped people stand up and say that maybe the little things aren’t so little after all.
Buy Everyday Sexism on Amazon.