Caroline Criado-Perez photographed at her home in north London: she thinks the attacks were provoked by 'a combination of misogyny and fear'. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the ObserverCaroline Criado-Perez never expected it to be that big a deal. It was just that when the Bank of England announced in April that the social reformer Elizabeth Fry was to be dropped from the £5 note in favour of Winston Churchill, she realised our banknotes would have an all-white, all-male line-up and "it pissed me off".
She didn't have a big game plan, she says, talking in the kitchen of her north London flat with a small, excitable dog on her lap. "I just thought: This is bollocks."
Criado-Perez, an Oxford English literature graduate who is studying for a master's in gender theory at the London School of Economics, set up a petition and threatened to sue the bank under the 2010 Equality Act. Within days, it had attracted 35,000 signatures.
Her campaign worked. When Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of England in July, he swiftly announced that Jane Austen would be the new face of the tenner. Carney, she says, was "very smooth".
And that might well have been that. But overnight, the 29-year-old found herself a target for a violent outpouring of misogynist bile on Twitter. She received a stream of rape and murder threats. It lasted for days.
"The immediate impact was that I couldn't eat or sleep," she says. "I lost half a stone in two days. I was just on an emotional edge all the time. I cried a lot. I screamed a lot. I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions."
She thinks the attacks were provoked by "a combination of misogyny and fear" from men "who have been brought up to think the world is theirs to inherit… They see a dissonance when they see a woman who is making herself heard."
The police were "a bit flummoxed". Eventually they took her seriously enough to investigate, but she remains "frustrated" that they don't seem to be looking into online rape threats received by other women.
"Our society always tells the victim how to behave, not the perpetrator," she says. "It's easy for me to change my behaviour. It's much harder to make them stop attacking me."
Yet, in spite of what she has been through, she insists that it has been a good year for feminism. Projects such as everydaysexism.com (a website that allows women to share details of sexist incidents) are "making sexism visible [and] opening people's eyes to the fact that we're not equal yet", she says.
These days, she is "a lot better, more able to cope". Her boyfriend, Matthew, has proposed. She is thinking of writing a book. And then there's that Jane Austen £10 note. What, I wonder, is her favourite Austen novel? "Persuasion," she says. It's hard to think of a more suitable reply.
