Most of my feminist outlook on life comes from my childhood. My father genuinely believed his daughters could and should do anything they want. And my mother still does exactly that. Even when she really, really shouldn’t – because what she wants is to run her household in a, shall we say, dictatorial way. Growing up in this environment, you absorb the idea of equality down to your very bones.

But there were three formative books, too. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which gave voice to the frustrations of Fifties women limited to domestic life and wondering why it wasn’t enough, when they had always been told it was. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, which unpicked how a woman’s worth is bound up in how attractive she is judged to be. And Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist Issue, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Although “celebrating” is perhaps not quite the right word. Orbach’s book was – is – an anti-diet book, about women’s problematic relationship with food and fatness. It suggested how we can work against a world that tells women that desire and indulgence are bad and the fleshly evidence of such is even worse. She thought, she said in a recent piece, that by analysing and writing about the problem it would be solved. Four decades on we need take only the briefest of glances up from our summer salads to know that it hasn’t quite worked out like that.

Lucy Mangan: “Why fat is still a feminist issue”