Author : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Narrators : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Genre : Non-fiction
Publisher : Random House Audio
Listening Length : 45 minute
Rating : 5/5
Narrator Rating : 3/5
“We should all be feminists” is adapted from Adichie’s TEDx talk on the same subject. I enjoyed this just as much as “A Feminist Manifesto in 15 suggestions”. She explores gender inequality and gender roles with deep insight:
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
She talks about what she has lived, what she has seen and heard; you identify with her. Her personal experiences are yours because you have, in a different place and time, experienced the very same thing, and what she is telling you now, you have though about a hundred times in your head. It is like the voice in your head talking out loud; absolutely amazing! And although her words seem like plain speaking and common sense she manages to imbue them with the personal – her words speak right to you, they ARE about you!
Among other topics I loved that she talked about culture and gender expectations, especially because a lot of inequalities are kept in place in the name of preserving “our culture”! She rightly says that:
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
The book is lovely and I highly recommend it. Here are a few other quotes from it:
“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”
“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
“What struck me—with her and with many other female American friends I have—is how invested they are in being “liked.” How they have been raised to believe that their being likable is very important and that this “likable” trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly. We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.”
“Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men—cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world—who are given the fancy title of “chef”—are men.”
