Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions Read online

  Another egregious example of Feminism Lite: men who say “of course a wife does not always have to do the domestic work; I did domestic work when my wife traveled.”

  Do you remember how we laughed and laughed at an atrociously written piece about me some years ago? The writer had accused me of being “angry,” as though “being angry” were something to be ashamed of. Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I am angry about sexism. But I recently came to the realization that I am angrier about sexism than I am about racism.

  Because in my anger about sexism, I often feel lonely. Because I love, and live among, many people who easily acknowledge race injustice but not gender injustice.

  I cannot tell you how often people I care about—men and women—have expected me to make a case for sexism, to “prove” it, as it were, while never having the same expectation for racism. (Obviously, in the wider world, too many people are still expected to “prove” racism, but not in my close circle.) I cannot tell you how often people I care about have dismissed or diminished sexist situations.

  Like our friend Ikenga, always quick to deny that anything is caused by misogyny, never interested in listening or engaging, always eager to explain how it is in fact women who are privileged. He once said, “Even though the general idea is that my father is in charge at our home, it’s my mother who is really in charge behind the scenes.” He thought he was refuting sexism, but he was making my case. Why “behind the scenes”? If a woman has power then why do we need to disguise that she has power?

  But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. And Feminism Lite enables this.

  FIFTH SUGGESTION

  Teach Chizalum to read. Teach her to love books. The best way is by casual example. If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable. If she were not to go to school, and merely just read books, she would arguably become more knowledgeable than a conventionally educated child. Books will help her understand and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in whatever she wants to become—a chef, a scientist, a singer, all benefit from the skills that reading brings. I do not mean schoolbooks. I mean books that have nothing to do with school, autobiographies and novels and histories. If all else fails, pay her to read. Reward her. I know this remarkable Nigerian woman, Angela, a single mother who was raising her child in the United States; her child did not take to reading so she decided to pay her five cents per page. An expensive endeavor, she later joked, but a worthy investment.

  SIXTH SUGGESTION

  Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. But to teach her that, you will have to question your own language. A friend of mine says she will never call her daughter “princess.” People mean well when they say this, but “princess” is loaded with assumptions, of a girl’s delicacy, of the prince who will come to save her, etc. This friend prefers “angel” and “star.”

  So decide for yourself the things you will not say to your child. Because what you say to your child matters. It teaches her what she should value. You know that Igbo joke, used to tease girls who are being childish—“What are you doing? Don’t you know you are old enough to find a husband?” I used to say that often. But now I choose not to. I say “You are old enough to find a job.” Because I do not believe that marriage is something we should teach young girls to aspire to.

  Try not to use words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” too often with Chizalum. We feminists can sometimes be too jargony, and jargon can sometimes feel too abstract. Don’t just label something misogynistic; tell her why it is, and tell her what would make it not be.

  Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.”

  Teach her to ask questions like What are the things that women cannot do because they are women? Do these things have cultural prestige? If so, why are only men allowed to do the things that have cultural prestige?

  It is helpful, I think, to use everyday examples.

  Remember that television commercial we watched in Lagos, where a man cooks and his wife claps for him? True progress is when she doesn’t clap for him but just reacts to the food itself—she can either praise the food or not praise the food, just as he can praise hers or not praise hers, but what is sexist is that she is praising the fact that he has undertaken the act of cooking, praise that implies that cooking is an inherently female act.

  Remember the mechanic in Lagos who was described as a “lady mechanic” in a newspaper profile? Teach Chizalum that the woman is a mechanic, not a “lady mechanic.”

  Point out to her how wrong it is that a man who hits your car in Lagos traffic gets out and tells you to go and bring your husband because he “can’t deal with a woman.”

  Instead of merely telling her, show her with examples that misogyny can be overt and misogyny can be subtle and that both are abhorrent.

  Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always say something like “if it were my daughter or wife or sister.” Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy. Teach her, too, to question the idea of women as a special species. I once heard an American politician, in his bid to show his support for women, speak of how women should be “revered” and “championed”—a sentiment that is all too common.

  Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings. There is a patronizing undertone to the idea of women needing to be “championed” and “revered” because they are women. It makes me think of chivalry, and the premise of chivalry is female weakness.

  SEVENTH SUGGESTION

  Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement.

  We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain an uneven exchange? One consequence of this imbalance is the very shabby and very familiar phenomenon of two women publicly fighting over a man, while the man remains silent.

  When Hillary Clinton was running for president of the United States, the first descriptor on her Twitter account was “Wife.” The first descriptor on the Twitter account of Bill Clinton, her husband, is “Founder,” not “Husband.” (Because of this, I have an unreasonable affection for the very few men who use “husband” as their first descriptor.) In a strange way, it doesn’t feel unusual that she would define herself as a wife like this, while he doesn’t define himself as a husband. It feels normal, because it is so common; our world still largely values a woman’s marital and maternal roles more than anything else.

  After she married Bill Clinton in 1975, Hillary Clinton kept her name, Hillary Rodham. Eventually she began to add his name, Clinton, to hers, and then after a while sh
e dropped “Rodham” because of political pressure—because her husband would lose voters who were offended that his wife had kept her name.

  Reading of this made me think not only of how American voters apparently place retrograde marital expectations on women, but also of my own experience with my name.

  You remember how a journalist unilaterally decided to give me a new name—Mrs. Husband’s Surname—on learning that I was married, and how I asked him to stop because that was not my name. I will never forget the smoldering hostility from some Nigerian women in response to this. It is interesting that there was more hostility, in general, from women than from men, many of whom insisted on calling me what was not my name, as though to silence my voice.

  I wondered about that, and thought that perhaps for many of them, my choice represented a challenge to their idea of what is the norm.

  Even some friends made statements like “You are successful and so it is okay to keep your name.” Which made me wonder: Why does a woman have to be successful at work in order to justify keeping her name?

  The truth is that I have not kept my name because I am successful. Had I not had the good fortune to be published and widely read, I would still have kept my name. I have kept my name because it is my name. I have kept my name because I like my name.

  There are people who say “Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father’s name.” Indeed. But the point is simply this: Whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I traveled my life’s milestones, the name I have answered to since that first day I went to kindergarten on a hazy morning and my teacher said, “Answer ‘present’ if you hear your name. Number one: Adichie!”

  More important, every woman should have the choice of keeping her name—but the reality is that there is an overwhelming societal pressure to conform. There are obviously women who want to take their husband’s names, but there are women who do not want to conform but for whom the required energy—mental, emotional, even physical—is just too much. How many men do you think would be willing to change their names on getting married?

  “Mrs.” is a title I dislike because Nigerian society gives it too much value. I have observed too many cases of men and women who proudly speak of the title of Mrs. as though those who are not Mrs. have somehow failed at something. Mrs. can be a choice, but to infuse it with as much value as our culture does is disturbing. The value we give to Mrs. means that marriage changes the social status of a woman but not that of a man. (Is that perhaps why many women complain of married men still “acting” as though they were single? Perhaps if our society asked married men to change their names and take on a new title, different from Mr., their behavior might change as well? Ha!) But more seriously, if you, a twenty-eight-year-old master’s degree holder, go overnight from Ijeawele Eze to Mrs. Ijeawele Udegbunam, surely it requires not just the mental energy of changing passports and licenses but also a psychic change, a new “becoming”? This new “becoming” would not matter so much if men, too, had to undergo it.

  I prefer Ms. because it is similar to Mr. A man is Mr. whether married or not, a woman is Ms. whether married or not. So please teach Chizalum that in a truly just society, women should not be expected to make marriage-based changes that men are not expected to make. Here’s a nifty solution: Each couple that marries should take on an entirely new surname, chosen however they want as long as both agree to it, so that a day after the wedding, both husband and wife can hold hands and joyfully journey off to the municipal offices to change their passports, driver’s licenses, signatures, initials, bank accounts, etc.

  EIGHTH SUGGESTION

  Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people. Remember I told you how upsetting it was to me that our friend Chioma would often tell me that “people” would not “like” something I wanted to say or do? I always felt, from her, the unspoken pressure to change myself to fit some mold that would please an amorphous entity called “people.” It was upsetting because we want those close to us to encourage us to be our most authentic selves.

  Please do not ever put this pressure on your daughter. We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be “nice” to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the “feelings” of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.

  So instead of teaching Chizalum to be likeable, teach her to be honest. And kind.

  And brave. Encourage her to speak her mind, to say what she really thinks, to speak truthfully. And then praise her when she does. Praise her especially when she takes a stand that is difficult or unpopular because it happens to be her honest position. Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that her kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she, too, deserves the kindness of others. Teach her to stand up for what is hers. If another child takes her toy without her permission, ask her to take it back, because her consent is important. Tell her that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say it, to shout.

  Show her that she does not need to be liked by everyone. Tell her that if someone does not like her, there will be someone else who will. Teach her that she is not merely an object to be liked or disliked, she is also a subject who can like or dislike. In her teenage years, if she comes home crying about some boys who don’t like her, let her know she can choose not to like those boys—yes, it’s hard, I know, just remembering my crush on Nnamdi in secondary school.

  But still I wish somebody had told me this.

  NINTH SUGGESTION

  Give Chizalum a sense of identity. It matters. Be deliberate about it. Let her grow up to think of herself as, among other things, a proud Igbo woman. And you must be selective—teach her to embrace the parts of Igbo culture that are beautiful and teach her to reject the parts that are not. You can say to her, in different contexts and different ways, “Igbo culture is lovely because it values community and consensus and hard work, and the language and proverbs are beautiful and full of great wisdom. But Igbo culture also teaches that a woman cannot do certain things just because she’s a woman, and that is wrong. Igbo culture also focuses a little too much on materialism, and while money is important—because money means self-reliance—you must not value people based on who has money and who does not.”

  Be deliberate also about showing her the enduring beauty and resilience of Africans and of black people. Why? Because of the power dynamics in the world, she will grow up seeing images of white beauty, white ability, and white achievement, no matter where she is in the world. It will be in the TV shows she watches, in the popular culture she consumes, in the books she reads. She will also probably grow up seeing many negative images of blackness and of Africans.

  Teach her to take pride in the history of Africans, and in the black diaspora. Find black heroes, men and women, in history. They exist. You might have to counter some of the things she will learn in school—the Nigerian curriculum isn’t quite infused with the idea of teaching children to have a sense of pride in their history. So her teachers will be fantastic at teaching her mathematics and science and art and music, but you will have to do the pride-teaching yourself.

  Teach her about privilege and inequality and the importance of giving dignity to everyone who does not mean her harm—teach her that the household help is human just like her, teach her always to greet the driver. Link these expectations to her identity—for example, say to her “In our family, when you are a child, you g
reet those older than you no matter what job they do.”

  Give her an Igbo nickname. When I was growing up, my Aunty Gladys called me Ada Obodo Dike. I always loved that. Apparently my village, Ezi-Abba, is known as the Land of Warriors, and to be called Daughter of the Land of Warriors was deliciously heady.

  TENTH SUGGESTION

  Be deliberate about how you engage with her and her appearance.

  Encourage her participation in sports. Teach her to be physically active. Take walks with her. Swim. Run. Play tennis. Football. Table tennis. All kinds of sports. Any kind of sports. I think this is important not only because of the obvious health benefits but because it can help with all the body-image insecurities that the world thrusts on girls. Let Chizalum know that there is great value in being active. Studies show that girls generally stop playing sports as puberty arrives. Not surprising. Breasts and self-consciousness can get in the way of sports—I stopped playing football when my breasts first appeared because all I wanted to do was hide the existence of my breasts, and running and tackling didn’t help. Please try not to let that get in her way.

  If she likes makeup, let her wear it. If she likes fashion, let her dress up. But if she doesn’t like either, let her be. Don’t think that raising her feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male—sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men’s grooming is never suspect in the way women’s grooming is—a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous.