Book Review
The first thing that strikes us about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech/essay is the frankness. What she wants to say and tell us is crystal clear. Her very relatable real-life examples speak for themselves. They point out the obvious comparisons we have been making consciously or unconsciously through our lives. She speaks about her experiences in Nigeria, but her examples are believable even in India. We need changes everywhere, while cooking or cleaning, working or resting, speaking or listening, asking for a raise, asking for quiet time, and at the same time, taking care of our kids, or while merely putting on makeup.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s feminism of letting the other be the way they want to and not fit into certain molds or check specific categories reflects throughout her essay. Adichie encourages us to dream of a world that is fair and has men and women who are happy because they are true and honest to and about themselves. And she insists that for this to happen, our attitude should shift from raising not just the daughters differently but to raising both the sons and daughters differently.
The easy and smooth language employed to narrate the author’s personal experiences makes it one of the fundamental reads for understanding feminism. With the ongoing discourse, misconceptions, and stereotypes about feminism and feminists, it becomes crucial to keep oneself updated with the concept's nuances.
I read this book as part of a challenge for Booklist Queen's Reading Challenge for February 2021. Prompt : A Book about a pressing social issue.
Top Quotes
“Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”
“At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men.”
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
“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.”
“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”
“But by far the worst thing we do to males—by making them feel they have to be hard—is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.
And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”
“I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.”
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man.”
“Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men.”
Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”
“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”
“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.”
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.”
“Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.”
“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”
“Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.”
“What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender?”
“Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don’t think like that. I don’t even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender. That many men say, like my friend Louis did, that things might have been bad in the past but everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant and the waiter greets just you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, “Why have you not greeted her?” Men need to speak out in all of these ostensibly small situations. Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation.”
“Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man?”
“We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an art form.”
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