LONDON - It was a genteel campaign to ensure that British bank notes would continue to carry images of women, and it could have ended with the announcement last month that Jane Austen would replace Charles Darwin on the 10 pound note.

Instead, a countercampaign of online harassment, including threats of rape and death, against several high-profile women turned so nasty that Twitter tightened its global policy on reporting abuse.

Now a band of feminists has initiated a debate about power, rape and the limits of free speech in the age of social media.

Caroline Criado-Perez, a blogger and co-founder of the Web site The Women's Room, began her campaign months ago when she realized that soon there might be no women - except Queen Elizabeth II, of course - left on British bank notes. The issue seemed urgent: in April, the Bank of England had announced that the only woman currently featured among five historical figures, the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, would be replaced by Winston Churchill, indisputably male.

Surely, she argued, there were enough women of note in British history to find at least one more?

Ms. Criado-Perez collected almost $20,000 to mount a legal challenge should the nine-member committee that sets interest rates ignore the 2010 Equality Act obliging public institutions to keep in mind gender equality in all matters that it decides.

In July, a Canadian named Mark J. Carney became the first non-Briton to run the bank in its 319-year history, and he seized the opportunity to make a gesture.

Mr. Carney said that the bank had always intended to include another woman among the historical figures on the notes, and he announced that Austen would appear on future 10 pound notes.

But that same day on Twitter a trickle of abuse grew into a shower of threats against Ms. Criado-Perez at a rate of almost one per minute. Many others, from members of the public to members of Parliament, have also been the targets of such attacks. Three female journalists received bomb threats.

Twitter, after receiving an online petition with at least 124,000 signatures, announced on August 3 that it was introducing a new one-click button to report abuse on every post.

But few could have foreseen that Austen, a writer perhaps best known for her musings on 19th-century romance, might inadvertently become a feminist symbol.

"She has a wide popular and a varied political appeal," said Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University and an Austen specialist. "She's embraced by conservatives and progressives both."

The New York Times

(China Daily 08/11/2013 page10)