Helen Lewis

Lewis's first book Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, a history of the imperfect and unfinished story of the battles for women's rights, was published by Jonathan Cape on 27 February 2020. In the book Lewis argues that feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights, but that too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. Difficult Women was featured in New Statesman 'Books To Read in 2020' and the Observer 'Non-fiction Books to Look Out for in 2020'

In November 2019 and in April 2020, Lewis was a panelist on BBC's Have I Got News for You.

Lewis was educated at the independent St Mary's School, Worcester and went on to read English at St Peter's College, Oxford. After graduating, she gained a post-graduate diploma in newspaper journalism from London's City University. Subsequently, she was accepted on the Daily Mail's programme for trainee sub-editors, working in the job for a few years, and later joining the team responsible for commissioning features for the newspaper. She was appointed the Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University for 2018/2019, and is now on the steering committee for the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.

In July 2017 Lewis wrote about her concerns that gender self-identification would make rape shelters unsafe for women and would lead to an increase in sexual assaults in women's changing rooms, writing: "In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women's changing room?" Lewis has defended herself, saying "I've had two tedious years of being abused online as a transphobe and a 'TERF' or 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist'—despite my belief that trans women are women, and trans men are men—because I have expressed concerns about self-ID and its impact on single-sex spaces".

Lewis was appointed as deputy editor of the New Statesman in May 2012, after becoming assistant editor in 2010. In 2012, Lewis coined the light-hearted Lewis's Law : "the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism". She has written about the harassment of women online and trolling. She is now a staff writer at The Atlantic.

For five years from August 2006, Lewis ran a networking event, open to all young journalists, called Schmooze and Booze, for which she organised events held in a central London pub every other month. Lewis commented in 2007 that older colleagues, who had worked with each other for quite a long time, all seemed to know each other, while her contemporaries did not.

Helen Lewis (born 30 September 1983) is a British journalist and the former deputy editor of the New Statesman. She has also written for The Guardian and The Sunday Times.