We Should All Be Feminists

From a talk to a short book

We Should All Be Feminists began as a talk. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist known for Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, gave it at TEDxEuston in London in December 2012. The talk spread widely. Beyonce sampled part of it in her 2013 song "Flawless," and in 2014 it was published as a short essay. Sweden later gave a copy to every 16-year-old in the country.

The essay is short and personal. Adichie does not present theory or statistics. She tells stories from her life in Nigeria and the United States and uses them to make one argument: gender, as it works today, is a serious injustice, and everyone (women and men) should want to fix it.

She sets her terms early. Her definition of a feminist is simple: a man or a woman who sees that there is a problem with gender today and wants to do better. Her goal is to reclaim the word from the negative ideas attached to it.

The trouble with the word "feminist"

Adichie first heard the word as an insult. When she was 14, she argued with a childhood friend named Okoloma, and he told her she was a feminist. He did not mean it as a compliment. She did not know what the word meant, but she could tell from his tone that it was a bad thing. Okoloma later died in the Sosoliso plane crash in Nigeria in 2005.

Years later, while she was talking about her first novel, a journalist told her that the book was feminist. He advised her never to call herself a feminist, because feminists are unhappy women who cannot find husbands. So she decided to call herself a Happy Feminist.

Then a Nigerian academic told her that feminism was not part of African culture and that she had picked it up from Western books. So she became a Happy African Feminist. A friend told her that calling herself a feminist meant she hated men. So she became a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. Eventually the label grew to include "who likes to wear lip gloss and high heels for herself and not for men."

The joke has a serious point. The word "feminist" carries so much baggage that a woman who uses it must keep disowning stereotypes: that she is angry, that she is unattractive, that she hates men, that she rejects her culture, that she does not care about her appearance. Adichie refuses all of these. A person can be a feminist and enjoy makeup, love men and be proudly African.

Small moments, large patterns

Much of the essay is a series of everyday scenes that show how gender shapes life in ways people stop noticing.

The class monitor. In primary school in Nsukka, Adichie's teacher announced that the student with the highest score on a test would become class monitor. Adichie earned the highest score. The teacher then said the monitor had to be a boy; she had forgotten to mention that rule because she thought it was obvious. The boy with the second-highest score became monitor. He was gentle and had no interest in the job. Adichie wanted it badly. The rule rewarded a gender, not a person.

The parking attendant. In Lagos, Adichie went out with a male friend, Louis. When they parked, she tipped the attendant. The attendant thanked Louis. He assumed that any money must have come from the man.

Hotels and clubs. In Lagos, Adichie notes, a woman who walks into a hotel alone may be stopped by staff who assume she is a sex worker. Some clubs do not let a woman in without a man. A woman alone is treated as suspect.

The waiter. When she goes to a restaurant in Nigeria with a man, the waiter often greets the man and ignores her. She describes feeling invisible.

The writing workshop. When Adichie taught her first writing class, she worried about how to dress. She felt she had to look serious to be taken seriously as a young woman teacher, so she wore a man's suit she did not like, instead of her favorite lip gloss and girly skirt. She regrets that now. She argues that women should not have to hide their femininity to earn respect.

Each scene is small. Adichie's point is that these moments add up. When something happens over and over, it starts to look normal. When it looks normal, people stop questioning it. Louis, a thoughtful man, at first could not see the problem at all. He told her things might have been bad in the past, but that everything was fine now. The parking moment showed him otherwise.

How we raise girls

Adichie argues that the way societies raise girls teaches them to limit themselves.

• Girls learn to shrink. Girls are taught to make themselves smaller and to have ambition, but not too much. A girl may succeed, but not so much that she threatens a man.
• Girls learn to cater to male egos. Women are told to tone down their strength and opinions so that men do not feel threatened. Adichie asks why male egos should be so fragile, and why women should be responsible for protecting them.
• Girls learn that marriage is the goal. Girls hear early that marriage is their highest achievement. Men are not raised the same way. An unmarried woman of a certain age is seen as a failure. An unmarried man is not. Girls are raised to see each other as rivals for male attention.
• Girls learn shame. Girls are told to close their legs and cover themselves. They learn to feel guilty for being female and to silence what they want.
• Girls learn that domestic work is their job. Adichie notes that girls are expected to cook and clean, as if women were born knowing how. Cooking is a skill anyone can learn.

She describes a young woman at a Nigerian university who was gang-raped. Many young Nigerians responded with the question of why the woman had been in a room with four men. Adichie argues that this response shows how deeply people blame women for male violence. People have been taught to see women as inherently guilty.

How we raise boys

Adichie argues that gender norms also hurt boys and men. Societies teach boys to fear weakness, fear vulnerability and hide their true selves. She describes masculinity as a hard, small cage. Boys are taught that they must be tough, that they must always pay, and that their worth depends on their money and power.

These norms set up harmful dynamics between the sexes. When teenage boys and girls go out, the boy is expected to pay, even though both may have little money. Adichie argues that this links masculinity to money in a way that creates pressure for boys and dependency for girls. It also means that men with fragile egos feel threatened by women who are strong or successful.

Her proposal is to raise boys and girls differently: to raise children according to their abilities and interests, not their gender. Boys should be free to be vulnerable. Girls should be free to be ambitious. Both should learn to cook. Both should see marriage as a choice, not a requirement.

Why "feminist" and not "human rights"

Some people ask Adichie why she uses the word "feminist" at all. Why not just say she believes in human rights? She answers that this would be dishonest. Feminism is part of human rights, but the problem it names is specific. For centuries, people divided humans into two groups and excluded and oppressed one of them: women. Choosing a vague term like "human rights" would pretend that this specific problem does not exist.

She also addresses the idea that physical strength once justified male leadership. Long ago, survival may have depended on physical strength, so the strongest person led. Today, she argues, leadership depends on intelligence, creativity and knowledge, and no hormone produces those qualities. A man is not more fit to lead simply because he is a man.

Adichie also takes on the claim that feminism goes against culture. She points to her great-grandmother, who, from the family's stories, refused to marry a man she did not want, ran away and married the man she chose. In Adichie's view, she was a feminist even though she would not have known the word. Culture, Adichie argues, is not fixed. People create it and can change it. If the full humanity of women is not yet part of a culture, then people can and should make it part of that culture.

She ends with a call to action. Everyone, women and men, must do better. We must raise our daughters differently, and we must raise our sons differently.

What the critics say

Some feminist critics say the essay is too basic and focuses on middle-class concerns such as marriage, dating and dress rather than on economic and legal structures. Others note that its stories assume a man and woman binary, a debate that grew after Adichie's 2017 comments about trans women. Supporters answer that the essay's plain, personal style is the reason it reaches readers who would never open a book of feminist theory.

Who should read it

Read it if you want a short, plain introduction to why gender equality still matters, told through real stories. It works well for teenagers, for book clubs and for anyone who distrusts the word "feminist." It takes under an hour.