Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

The essence of the gender roles debate is the question of to what extent gender roles are natural and to what extent they are learned. If you’re a feminist, like Adichie, the answer to this question will be that everything—or almost everything—about gender is learned.

This view implies a certain understanding of human nature and society. According to this school of thought, men and women are not born with certain skills and knowledge innately: “Knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina” (16). Rather, humans are born flexible. That is, they are born with the capacity to learn, and they pick up knowledge and skills through practice. What’s more, men and women are born equal with an equal capacity to learn.

So, there is no skill, no activity, and no form of behavior that is inherently male or female. Rather, it’s society that codes specific skills and activities male or female and then imposes these on girls and boys by educating them differently. For instance, in Nigerian culture, cooking is gendered female, and this gendered coding is reproduced by mothers when they teach their daughters how to cook but not their sons.

This way of framing gender, as a pure invention of society that imposes arbitrary limits on the freedom and authenticity of the individual, is a very modern idea. In this sense, feminism can be seen as one flavor of that struggle between the individual and society that is one of the defining themes of modernity.

There is also another question here about whether Adichie believes gender to be entirely a social construct or if she retains some limited place for biology in producing gender. When, in suggestion 2, she says that the father should “do everything that biology allows—which is everything but breastfeeding” (12) she does seem to imply that some aspects of gender, namely bare bodily functions such as pregnancy and breastfeeding, are determined by biology. This is a move that would place her squarely in the second-wave feminist camp.

In suggestion 9, Adichie briefly moves away from issues related directly to gender in order to address issues of race. At first glance, the reader may interpret this as simply moving away from feminism to discuss a separate issue. However, this suggestion speaks to the importance of intersectionality for feminists. While racism and sexism have different origins and manifest in different ways, they both nevertheless come together in the experience of a child. For that reason, they can’t be treated entirely separately. You’re unlikely to raise a young girl to become a confident, proud, and self-assured woman if she feels shame towards other aspects of her identity. You can’t attend to one problem without attending to the other, too.