Creating a feminist world

One of my daughters is adventuresome, athletic, and unyielding in her independence. She’s also obsessed with princesses and refuses to wear anything except a “big” (i.e., puffy) dress. My other daughter is sensitive, emotional, and attached to me at the hip (often literally). She sleeps with a fire truck and builds snakes out of her Legos. In other words, children negotiate and fulfill gender stereotypes in complex ways.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about this reality in a lovely volume of letters that she originally wrote to her childhood friend Ijeawele, a new mother who wondered how to raise her daughter as a feminist while negotiating race, gender expectations, and cultural norms. “Teach her that the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense,” Adichie counsels her friend. “The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.” She then tells about observing a Nigerian mother in a U.S. shopping mall who refused to buy her daughter a toy helicopter because the daughter already had dolls to play with. “I wonder now, wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been given a chance to explore that helicopter.” Adichie concludes with this advice: “Teach her to try to fix physical things when they break. We are quick to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her try. She may not fully succeed, but let her try. Buy her toys like blocks and trains—and dolls, too, if you want to.”

The tone of the book is at once gentle and fierce. It is, as the subtitle claims, both a manifesto and a set of suggestions. But the juxtaposition isn’t jarring: it simply embodies what frank conversation between good friends looks like at its best. Challenge and generosity. Law and gospel. “Teach her to reject likeability,” Adichie suggests in one letter, and in another: “teach her to love books.”