"We need feminism because girls are shot in the head for going to school. We need feminism because women are burned alive for refusing to submit to grotesque male desires. We need feminism because women are under-represented in every sphere of life except being wives and mothers. We need feminism because one in five women in the UK experiences sexual violence and is usually blamed and shamed for it. We need feminism because we are taxed for our bodily functions. We need feminism because women’s bodies remain politicised, scrutinised, fetishised. There are countless more reasons why we need feminism,  infinitely more reasons; and this in itself is another reason that we need feminism."

That's just a tidbit of the introduction – written by Amy Annette, Martha Mosse and Alice Stride – for new book I Call Myself a Feminist. A title that asks 25 of the most intelligent, brightest and funny women today to contribute an essay that's equally as intelligent, bright and funny as they are. From Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism, The Mushpit magazine's Bertie Brandes to Reni Eddo-Lodge and 17-year-old writer June Eric-Udorie discuss and break down the anti-men bs, religion v women conflict and body hair rhetoric that shrouds feminism. It's been embraced, abandoned, reclaimed, degraded, elevated and devalued more times than most would care to count, but it's young women, particularly those under 30 – a handful of who are included in this book – who seem to be pushing it into the place place we’ve ever seen it. Although no explanation is needed for why we need feminism or why we identify as one, Eric-Udorie does a pretty good job of it in this exclusive extract, published below.

I didn’t always call myself a feminist. I swore the word would never cross my lips. Feminism came with too much baggage. I never heard anything positive about feminists, and I vividly remember my mother warning me in hushed tones that feminists were jealous women, upset that they had failed to get husbands. I was told that feminists wanted to kill all men, that they burned their bras and were lesbians. When I asked my teacher about what I now know is sexism, I was reminded that ‘good girls who were brought up properly by a Christian mother’ did not ask such questions. I vowed to never be a feminist and I rejected the label. I stopped asking too many questions and I stopped talking ‘too much’, and family and friends congratulated me because men didn’t like women who talked too much.

But the older I got, the more I found myself fighting the urge to speak, to question, to shout and to take up space. I sat on my hands and bit my tongue, but it didn’t last long. I was angry about the sexism I saw on a daily basis. I wanted to speak up about it, to ask why my mother said whistling was for boys, to question why the boys were always the ones assumed to be good at maths, and to talk at the top of my tiny lungs when my mother told me to keep quiet because ‘good girls were supposed to be seen not heard’. I had to question the problem with gender around me, so at eleven, I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to call myself a feminist.’

Growing up in Nigeria, I was surrounded by institutionalised sexism and misogyny. Women experiencing domestic violence in their marriage were told they were ‘lucky’ to have husbands. At dinner parties, people joked that my mother only ‘gave’ my father three daughters and encouraged her to try her luck to see if she might have a son. I heard horror stories of women who had been raped and who killed themselves. I watched in disbelief as the little girls living in my neighbourhood were married aged nine or ten to men old enough to be their fathers, and in some cases their grandfathers.

The eleven-year-old me was desperate to do something and calling myself a feminist seemed like the first step, but equally a dangerous step. But I did it. I called myself a feminist. I didn’t become one, because I already believed in and was eager for gender equality. Calling myself a feminist was standing up to say that women are people and they deserve liberation. Calling myself a feminist was breaking away from the silence, was not being complicit, and was the first step I took to acknowledging that I would join the fight for women’s liberation. I soon realised that oppression, misogyny and violence against women were vicious plagues. I saw sexism everywhere and in everything. It was too much for the eleven-year-old me and I became exhausted and frustrated that the issue was so omnipresent and yet so neglected.

I also saw how prevalent it was in one of my favourite places, the Church.

I grew up in a very religious family and it never crossed my mind that Christianity, and religion in general, could contribute to the oppression of women and the denial of our fundamental human rights. It was and remains the only place I find it difficult to call out sexism and misogyny. I sat angrily when the pastor preached that men should pick the names for their children because women are ‘irrational and emotional’. I was angry but I said nothing when he banned short skirts and joked that ‘an usher might come and complete your dressing’. It was hard for me to fight the urge to speak in church and I didn’t always manage to keep quiet. A discussion on abortion began and I found myself saying that I believed in abortion on demand. I knew that it was the ‘wrong’ thing to do in a room full of people who were pro-life, but I felt proud that I had

done so. Having been pro-life myself, to publicly acknowledge that I was no longer pro-life but now pro-choice felt like a big step forward. I was pulled to the side, told in hushed tones that I had to stop thinking I was a ‘white person’ and remember where I came from. I was reminded that this ‘feminism’ that had corrupted me was not part of my culture, it was incompatible with my religion and it was un-African.

“I vowed to never be a feminist and I rejected the label. I stopped asking too many questions and I stopped talking ‘too much’, and family and friends congratulated me because men didn’t like women who talked too much” – June Eric-Udorie

Being a feminist is hard. Being somewhat religious and being a feminist has felt, at times, unbearable. I have fought with my mother on innumerable occasions, about everything from the notion that women must be ‘sub- missive’ to men, to why a woman should have full bodily autonomy. I have felt conflicted many times: do I have to drop Christianity to be a ‘true’ feminist? It is not a question I have an answer to, and I suspect I never will. What makes feminism special, I think, is that there are no definite answers to tough questions; we must come up with the answers ourselves in this radical movement for change.

I watch too many girls turn their noses up at feminism. I watch too many girls lose their confidence when they hit puberty. I watch too many girls limit themselves because they don’t want to be called ‘ambitious’ or ‘bossy’. I am a teenage girl – I have been there too. I have worried, end- lessly, about other people’s perceptions of me. I wanted to be liked – who didn’t?

I am a feminist because I want to be rebellious. Girls and women are always expected to be the silent watchers in society and always to be well behaved. I think that’s non- sense and I wish all women would see that too. I wish more girls and women would give likability the middle finger. I wish more girls could see their potential to shake the world. I wish more girls and women could see the double standards and the perpetual state of wrongness, and no longer care what other people think.

I wish more girls and women could learn that the most revolutionary act they can make is to be their brilliant selves.

As a teenager, feminism appealed to me because I knew I deserved to be free and I was willing to fight and rebel to achieve that. At nearly seventeen, I feel like my rebellion has only just started. I am always disobedient; the stereo- types and rules that are forced onto girls are things I actively try to break away from even if I know it will get me into trouble. Because as we have learned from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’.

It may sound clichéd, but feminism saved me. I didn’t have a choice; it was either become a feminist or go crazy. It gave me the ability to do many things that were inconceivable to me a few years ago. I no longer feel intimidated by men and I will never put myself down to impress a man. I found freedom from the societal expectations of what it meant to be a ‘woman’ because I was surrounded by women who defied every notion within that. I found a space where I learned that I was not alone, and I found solidarity and love.

Most of all, feminism gave me the permission to be. Women and girls are so often not given the permission to be. We are told what it means to be us. We are instructed, given a set of rules that we must follow, and when we don’t the consequences are insurmountable. We are put into small boxes and squashed, because allowing a woman to be herself is a threat to those who want to continue to have the power in society. We are constantly worried that if we cannot fulfil the impossible expectations placed on us, we have failed. And to that, I say: bullshit. I want every girl to have the permission to be human. Feminism gave me that, the per- mission to be me: to be loud, to cry, to speak, to dance like nobody is watching, to protest, to support, to sing at the top of my voice, to love and to question.

The journalist and author Mona Eltahawy asked the girls of the Middle East and North Africa to ‘be immodest, rebel, disobey and know you deserve to be free’. This has become my mantra. I want all girls and women to be immodest, disobedient rebels because the only way to win the battle for our liberation is if we collectively break away from the profound shitness of the expectations of ‘womanhood’ in our world.

I call myself a feminist. I am a feminist. And nothing is ever going to change that.

I Call Myself A Feminist – published by Virago – is available 5 November, 2015