Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once again takes readers on an interesting journey by providing 15 suggestions on how to raise a feminist daughter, after receiving a letter from a childhood friend asking for advice. Initially posted on her official Facebook page, “Dear Ijeawele, Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions” was later adapted into a book. Adichie’s friend wanted her take on how to raise her daughter as a feminist, and the response is what has become a good read for many around the world: Dear Ijeawele.
“I remember being told as a child to ‘bend down properly while sweeping, like a girl’. Which meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish i had been told simply, ‘bend down and sweep properly because you’ll clean the floor better. And I wish my brothers had been told the same thing,” writes Adichie, in her third suggestion.
Referencing social media debates about which gender is responsible for cooking she responds with, “The knowledge of cooking does not come preinstalled in a vagina.” Clarifying that cooking is learned and is also a life skill that both men and women should have.
One of the things she highlights in her eighth suggestion is for her friend to teach her daughter to reject likeability. It opens with: “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.”
Adichie later stresses, “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.”
The fifteenth suggestion, the final, encourages Adichie’s friend to teach Chizalum about difference. And she advises:
“Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world.”
This epistolary manifesto is packed with powerful statements about feminism, some of which might be debatable, but still great conversation starters about what it means to be a woman in today’s world.