Why we should all be feminisits by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is my first Adchie reading. It was such a great and fun read. A short and effective essay on Feminism and gender and why it is so important even today. If you download it on your kindle, it will take you about half an hour to read it!

Adchie was born in Nigeria in a family of six children. At 19 she leaves her home to the USA to study Communication at

Drewel University in Philadelphia. She is best known for her novels Purple Hibiscus published in 2003 and nominated for The Man Booker Prize in 2004, Americanah published in 2013 and Half a Yellow Sun published in 2006.

This essay is so perfectly written and presented in a simplistic manner without any touch of negative humour thrown in to engage a live audience. Adchie is part of the new wave of speakers making feminism more accessible. A self proclaimed "happy feminist who does not hate men, who likes lipstick, high heels for herself but not for men", she adds a much needed touch of humour to the topic and addresses the ridiculous stereotypes of a feminist.

She presents male/female differences clearly. Her example of cooking fit perfectly. Women are not born with a cooking gene and yet they are expected to do so. Still, men are top chefs, making most of the money. Evolution and culture? Male figures grow stronger and more aggressive. And culture is the result of behaviors and beliefs that describe a certain group. It's people who make culture and not the other way around.

We should all read this from highschool teenagers, University students, adults, men and women. It should become an obligatory study part of the curriculum. We should all be feminists.

We should all be feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Favorite fragments from the book: 
1. “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.” 

2.“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.” 

3.“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.” 

4.“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”