we should all be feminists - chimamanda ngozi adichie
We Should All Be Feminists by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a book-length essay, adapted from a Tedx talk of the same name given by Adichie in 2012. The text is a succinct introduction to many key ideas of modern feminism.
Adichie uses personal anecdotes to explore the ideologies, and to challenge the misconceptions, of 21st century feminism. The work opens with Adichie recalling the first time she was called a feminist. She describes her surprise at how it was used as an insult, “as if [she] were a supporter of terrorism”. Adichie grapples with common critiques of modern feminism (feminists are always angry. Feminists hate men. Feminists need to smile more…) and asserts that, actually, we should all be angry about the gendered injustices in today’s world.
Adichie’s identity (not just her identity as a woman, but her identity as a Black woman) is of course inextricable from the content of her writing in We Should All Be Feminists. Many of her personal anecdotes highlight her everyday experiences of casual misogyny in Nigeria – the specifics of which are somewhat different to how casual misogyny presents in Australia, but nonetheless illuminate her point. This point being - if one’s culture does not include the respectful treatment of women, that culture must change. She writes, “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”.
While there are culture-specific examples of gender roles, patriarchy and misogyny embedded within We Should All Be Feminists, Adichie also discusses elements of misogyny that are rife throughout many (if not all) patriarchal systems. She examines the ways in which rigid gender norms are harmful for everyone, exploring how these expectations teach women to “shrink themselves” in order to be likeable and align to constructs of femininity. Adichie also likens masculinity to a “hard, small cage” that is too rigid to allow boys and men to express their full humanity, arguing that there are no winners in a patriarchal system.
Adichie discusses the ways in which gendered expectations put pressure on men as well as women, and as a result men living in patriarchal societies can be conditioned to be threatened by the success of women, particularly when this occurs outside of gender norms – for example, in professional spheres. Adichie discusses this in We Should All Be Feminists, describing when a female friend took over a managerial role at work from a male predecessor and was criticised for implementing the same firm expectations that he had.
Evidence for this kind of phenomenon is not merely anecdotal, nor something that only happens in Adichie’s home country. Research from The University of Toronto indicates that women who present as assertive and as possessing leadership qualities are more likely to be sexually harassed at work than women who present as modest and warm. Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article earlier this year titled “when women earn more than their male partners, domestic violence risk goes up 35 per cent”. This is based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics from the last decade. However, the article highlights that when the reverse occurs – when men begin out-earning their female partners – there is no increased risk of harm or violence for them. Chief executive of the Annie North Women’s refuge in Victoria, Julie Oberin, comments in the article, “Australia is particularly misogynist and has very clear toxic masculinity and that’s an issue this research highlights…the role of the male breadwinner is so central to masculinity in this country that when it is challenged you end up in this situation”.
Hope for fairer societies is embedded within We Should All Be Feminists. Adichie states that while she is angry about injustice and the oppression of women, she is also hopeful as she “[believes] deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better”.
We Should All Be Feminists is not a complete guide to all of the issues of feminism – this would be impossible to contain in one work – but it is a useful and succinct work that highlights why identifying as a feminist is still necessary in the 21st century.
