A Brief Book Review of We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
At 50 pages in length, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2014) is a brief read. Yet I would argue it is brimming with more compelling narration, humor, theses, characters, entreaties, and inspiration than other “classic” books I have read that are longer. (Sorry, Kate Chopin.) It’s brief enough where you could read it on train rides to and from work as I did today. If you’re looking for something to read bite-sized and stimulating, this is a great choice, irrespective of your gender.
If you haven’t read We Should All Be Feminists yet, you’re probably familiar with it. In her spectacular song “Flawless” from her self-titled album Beyoncé (2013), Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter sampled Adichie’s lecture at a TEDx conference on Africa from 2012 that forms the basis of this manuscript. That connection is also one of the small unexpected pleasures of reading We Should All Be Feminists, particularly in the second half, when the lines that Beyoncé’s production team sampled appear. After that moment I challenge you to read We Should All Be Feminists without Hit-Boy’s beat in your head and saying to yourself “god damn, God Damn, GOD DAMN“. Go ahead; try. I’ll wait.... Exactly. Told you. But we digress.
This book is more than just the parts sampled for “Flawless”. It’s a reflection on gender roles in two of the most populated countries in the world, the United States and Nigeria, and the causes of, and potential solutions to, inequality based on birth outcomes. The core thesis of the book, beyond what is true and obviously made explicit in the title, is that while there are biological differences between men and women, socialization and restrictive and fictitious (yet normalized and powerful) cultural attitudes exaggerate those differences. This creates stereotypes that actively harm individuals and society as a whole. We, men and women, do this by narrowly defining what it means to be a man and masculine and what it means to be a woman and feminine. As such, boys and girls grow up connecting masculinity with things such as money and aggressiveness, femininity with things such as deference and domesticity, and believe that rather than being themselves (which can and often does line up with these traits), they must match these stereotypes to be whole. Sadly, women have historically borne the brunt of these horrible collective fictions in ways violent, limiting, and demeaning. That’s not okay.
In making these points, Adichie asks a lot of challenging questions of both men and women to provoke us into ending our complicity in the propagation of sexist social structures. Above all, she asks us to dream of what that world would look like with gender equality and to have the courage to act on making it a reality. Laws and policies matter, but they reflect power structures, which arise from beliefs. Collectively believing in the world Adichie aspires to and acting on those aspirations would be a great start. As a feminist, I’m for it.