We Should All Be Feminists

Adichie discusses traditional gender roles as a source of sexism and posits that these roles are almost as harmful to men as to women. While girls are taught to be compliant and submissive, she writes, boys are taught to be stoic and “hard”: “We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys” (26). Because boys are taught that vulnerability entails weakness, Adichie writes, they learn to despise vulnerability in themselves; their hardness and toughness is therefore brittle and easily punctured.

Girls are meanwhile taught to please boys, in the hopes of eventually getting married. This entails “shrink[ing] themselves” so as not to appear threatening to men: “[W]e raise [girls] to cater to the fragile egos of males” (27). Adichie describes female friends of hers who have succumbed to this social pressure. She writes about a single female friend who sold her house so that she would seem more appealing to prospective husbands, and about another single female friend who wore a wedding ring to a work conference to command more respect: “The sadness in this is that a wedding ring will indeed automatically make her seem worthy of respect […] and this is in a modern workplace” (29).

Adichie writes that she herself has felt the pressure of traditional gender roles, even as a self-described feminist. She relates her first day at a graduate school teaching job, when she decided to wear a nondescript suit rather than her usual colorful feminine attire: “I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously” (37). She has “since chosen to no longer be apologetic for [her] femininity” (38) and frames her feminine style of dress as a rejection of traditional patriarchal values.