"What comes first – the determination that something is feminine, or that it's bad?"

This question was at the heart of the discussion between Caroline Criado-Perez and Katrine Marçal, chaired by Anna Whitelock, that kicked off the Cambridge Literary Festival for this spring yesterday. Both women are "writers, journalists, and broadcasters," and they are renowned for their work in feminist activism, both publishing books this spring that highlight the little-acknowledged role of women throughout history. These occupied a large portion of the conversation, each author complimenting the other on them, and it was clear to see that these authors share a lot of mutual ground. This was despite the fact that, on the face of it, they seem to tackle very different subjects: Criado-Perez's Do It Like A Woman is a series of pen-portraits treating the subject of various influential women throughout history, and Marçal's Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? applies feminist theory to economics, interrogating the concept of the self-interested 'economic man' and its implications.

The importance of representations of femininity is something that both writers are concerned with. Criado-Perez, when asked about her motivations for writing her book, spoke about her interest in positive female role models and the influence they have on women, contrasted against negative presentations of women which have the effect of 'stereotype fret'. She is perhaps best known for her campaign to have more women put on banknotes by the Bank of England – a successful one, which will mean that Jane Austen will be put on £10 notes from 2017 onwards, although when asked about this Criado-Perez commented that she felt her biggest victory from the campaign was the bank acknowledging that they had been discriminatory in their selection process and changing it to be fairer. She won the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award for this; however, some responses were hardly as positive. The largely female audience listened in horror as she listed some of the incredibly graphic and violent messages she received: threats of rape, assault, and murder, some including personal details such as past addresses and all vitriolic in their misogyny. A court case against three people found to have sent her threatening messages was pursued, with all three facing jail sentences; Criado-Perez's tenacity in following these through is a manifestation of her belief that misogyny is the desire to erase women in part by silencing them, a case she puts forward convincingly using the evidence that many of these threats involved the men making them 'shutting her up'. 

Marçal spoke of similar experiences as chief editorialist for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, pointing out the disparity between the abuse that male journalists receive and the vitriol aimed at female journalists. She compared this with the criticism levied at classical feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, who she described as her personal role models; both writers acknowledged the double standard between responses to public speaking depending on the gender of the speakers, seeming to answer the question asked by Criado-Perez in this instance – women speaking in public are faced with hatred precisely because they are women, with the quality of their ideas having little bearing on the matter. Criado-Perez was careful to point out that this is applicable not just to women talking about issues of women's rights, but to women talking at all in male environments, bringing up the example of Kathy Sierra, a technology blogger who was bullied off the internet by men infuriated that she was talking about topics that they saw as theirs. 

This lack of separation between feminist speech and female speech is one that Marçal demonstrates as well in her attitude towards her field; she is quick to stress that rather than a 'feminist issue', 'this is about fixing the economic mess we're in'. This is caused by the exploitation of labour that has traditionally been female such as housework and childcare and the way shifting gender roles are transforming the shape of the economic world due to changing attitudes to this labour and increased opportunities for women to pursue other types of work. She suggests that relationships between men and women have 'changed more in the past 60 years than in the past 60,000'. 

Both women emphasised the fact that this change is a continuing process and that further moves are required, both through the re-evaluation of female labour in the field of economics and through an increase in the amount of positive female representation in the media. This is an initiative Criado-Perez is already pursuing through her creation of her website Women's Room, which aims to increase the amount of female experts in the media. This appreciation for positive female role models clearly derives in no small part from her relationship with her mother, who attended the talk, caring for her daughter's dog Poppy throughout. She spoke fondly about the ways in which her mother has inspired her, highlighting her aid work overseas – she has recently returned from working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. 

But both women also believe that through interrogating the gender binary with the empathy that Criado-Perez's mother clearly instilled in her child, there may come a day that neither femininity nor masculinity are viewed as 'good' or 'bad', and that they need not be opposing values, either. As Marçal said: "I'm an optimist – I think it's all up for change."