Helen Lewis (journalist)

Helen Lewis (born 30 September 1983) is a British journalist and a staff writer at "The Atlantic". She is a former deputy editor of the "New Statesman," and has also written for "The Guardian" and "The Sunday Times".
Life and career.
Lewis was educated at the independent St Mary's School, Worcester and then 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" 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.
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.
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 : "the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism". She has written about the harassment of women online and trolling. Since July 2019, she has been a staff writer at "The Atlantic".
In November 2019, April 2020, October 2020 and April 2021 Lewis was a panellist on BBC's "Have I Got News for You".
"Difficult Women".
Lewis's first book "Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights", a history of the battles for women's rights, was published by Jonathan Cape on 27 February 2020. In the book Lewis argues that feminism succeeded because of complicated women who clashed with each other while fighting for equal rights, but that too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in a modern search for inspirational heroines. "Difficult Women" was featured in the "New Statesman" under "Books to Read in 2020", and in the "Observer" list of "Non-fiction Books to Look Out for in 2020".
Views on gender self-identification.
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".
In November 2020, game developer Ubisoft removed two in-game podcasts from "" that featured Lewis.
Personal life.
Lewis married "Guardian" journalist Jonathan Haynes in 2015. She was previously married in 2010 and divorced her first husband in 2013, saying "I fell in love with someone else" during their marriage.