And Adichie argues that to address this failure, we cannot start looking at what people are taught in middle school sex ed courses. We have failed at creating a world where men and women are equal. The proof is in the pudding, in the violence against women, in Brock Turner, Casey Affleck, Nate Parker, Donald Trump. Adichie’s work encourages you to look around and inward to see where gender binaries-pink vs. Some may wonder (yes, even after Trump) why setting the world as we know it on fire is a desirable action. The survival techniques we were taught-even by mothers who identified as feminists, womanists and believers of equal rights for all-we are likely to pass on to our own children, even when we think we know better than to perpetuate ideas that support and enforce the patriarchy.ĭear Ijeawele is powerful because it’s short and sweet-the perfect disguise for a collection of ideas that attempt to set the world on fire.

But it’s also a love letter to our younger selves (Adichie’s included), because most of us were conditioned to think of girlhood and womanhood as something to be survived.

Dear Ijeawele is indeed a letter to a friend preparing to take on the difficult task of raising a girl in a world where gender is, as Adichie describes it, “a straitjacket” of damaging rules and restrictions for women. “Now that I, too, am the mother of a delightful baby girl,” Adichie writes in the introduction, “I realize how easy it is to dispense advice about raising a child when you are not facing the enormously complex reality of it yourself.”Īnd so the piece became a message to her friend Ijeawele, to Ijeawele’s daughter Chizalum, to the world, to herself and to her own child. By the time she had completed it, she was a new mother as well. So Adichie, a self-proclaimed feminist and bestselling author, began working on the project that would eventually become this manifesto. How do you raise a feminist when you aren’t a master of feminism-or motherhood-yourself? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest book, Dear Ijeawele, Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, perfectly frames this difficult task.Īdichie confesses that she was motivated by a challenge from her good friend Ijeawele, who asked for concrete ways to raise her (at the time, unborn) daughter as a feminist.

Chimamanda dear ijeawele