In
a new must-read piece posted on her official Facebook page, acclaimed
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie unveiled a feminist manifesto
that every parent needs to raise a child, be it a boy or a girl. The
piece written in form of a letter to a friend who welcomed a baby girl,
is entitled:
"DEAR IJEAWELE, OR A FEMINIST MANIFESTO IN FIFTEEN SUGGESTIONS
What joy. And what lovely names: Chizalum Adaora. She is so beautiful.
Only a day old and she already looks curious about the world. Your note
made me cry. You know how I get foolishly emotional sometimes. Please
know that I take your charge – how to raise her feminist – very
seriously. And I understand what you mean by not always knowing what the
feminist response to situations should be. For me, feminism is always
contextual. I don’t have a set-in-stone rule; the closest I have to a
formula are my two ‘Feminist Tools’ and I want to share them with you as
a starting point.
The first is your premise, the solid
unbending belief that you start off with. What is your premise? Your
feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only.’
Not ‘as long as.’ I matter equally. Full stop.
The second tool is a question: can you reverse X and get the same results?
For example: many people believe that a woman’s feminist response to a
husband’s infidelity should be to leave. But I think staying can also be
a feminist choice, depending on the context. If Chudi sleeps with
another woman and you forgive him, would the same be true if you slept
with another man? If the answer is yes then your choosing to forgive him
can be a feminist choice because it is not shaped by a gender
inequality. Sadly, the reality in most marriages is that the answer to
that question would often be no, and the reason would be gender-based –
that absurd idea of ‘men will be men.’
I have some suggestions
for how to raise Chizalum. But remember that you might do all the things
I suggest, and she will still turn out to be different from what you
hoped, because sometimes life just does its thing. What matters is that
you try. And always trust your instincts, above all else, because you
will be guided by your love for your child.
Here are my suggestions:
1. First Suggestion: Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift,
but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your
child will benefit from that. The pioneering American journalist Marlene
Sanders once said to a younger journalist, “Never apologize for
working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to
give your child.”
You don’t even have to love your job; you can
merely love what your job does for you – the confidence and
self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning. Reject the idea of
motherhood and work as mutually exclusive. Our mothers worked full time
while we were growing up, and we turned out well – at least you did, the
jury is still out on me.
It doesn’t surprise me that your
sister-in-law says you should be a ‘traditional’ mother and stay home,
that Chudi can afford not to have a ‘double income’ family.
People will selectively use ‘tradition’ to justify anything. Tell her that a double-income family is actually the true Igbo tradition because in pre-colonial times, mothers farmed and traded. And then please ignore her; there are more important things to think about.
People will selectively use ‘tradition’ to justify anything. Tell her that a double-income family is actually the true Igbo tradition because in pre-colonial times, mothers farmed and traded. And then please ignore her; there are more important things to think about.
In these
coming weeks of early motherhood, be kind to yourself. Ask for help.
Expect to be helped. There is no such thing as a Superwoman. Parenting
is about practice – and love. (I do wish though that ‘parent’ had not
been turned into a verb, which I think is the root of the middle-class
phenomenon of ‘parenting’ as one endless, anxious journey of guilt).
Give yourself room to fail. A new mother does not necessarily know how
to calm a crying baby. Don’t assume that you should know everything.
Look things up on the Internet, read books, ask older parents, or just
do trial and error. Let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take
time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think
of it as ‘doing it all.’ Our culture lauds the idea of women who are
able to ‘do it all’ but does not question the premise of that praise. I
have no interest in the debate about women ‘doing it all’ because it is a
debate that assumes that care-giving and domestic work are exclusively
female domains, an idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and
care-giving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not
whether a woman can ‘do it all’ but how best to support parents in their
dual duties at work and at home.
2. Second Suggestion: Do it
together. Remember in primary school we learnt that a verb was a ‘doing’
word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother. Chudi should do
everything that biology allows – which is everything but breastfeeding.
Sometimes mothers, so conditioned to be all and do all, are complicit in
diminishing the role of fathers. You might think that Chudi will not
bathe her exactly as you’d like, that he might not wipe her bum as
perfectly as you do. But so what? What is the worst that can happen? She
won’t die at the hands of her father. So look away, arrest your
perfectionism, still your socially-conditioned sense of duty. Share
childcare equally. ‘Equally’ of course depends on you both. It does not
have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping but
you’ll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You’ll know by
your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment
does not exist.
And please reject the language of help. Chudi
is not ‘helping’ you by caring for his child. He is doing what he
should. When we say fathers are ‘helping,’ we are suggesting that
childcare is a mother’s territory, into which fathers valiantly venture.
It is not. Can you imagine how many more people today would be happier,
more stable, better contributors to the world, if only their fathers
had been actively present in their childhood? And never say that Chudi
is ‘babysitting’ – people who babysit are people for whom the baby is
not a primary responsibility.
Chudi does not deserve any special
gratitude or praise, nor do you – you both made the choice to bring a
child into the world, and the responsibility for that child belongs
equally to you both. It would be different if you were a single mother,
whether by circumstance or choice, because ‘doing it together’ would
then not be an option. But you should not be a ‘single mother’ unless
you are truly a single mother.
My friend Nwabu once told me
that, because his wife left when his kids were young, he became ‘Mr.
Mom,’ by which he meant that he did the daily care-giving. But he was
not being a ‘Mr. Mom,’ he was simply being a dad.
3. Third
Suggestion: Teach her that ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense. Do not
ever tell her that she should do or not do something “because you are a
girl.”
‘Because you are a girl’ is never a reason for anything. Ever.
I remember being told as a child to ‘bend down properly while sweeping,
like a girl.’ Which meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish I
had been told simply ‘bend down and sweep properly because you’ll clean
the floor better.’ And I wish my brothers had been told the same thing.
There have been recent Nigerian social media debates about
women and cooking, about how wives have to cook for husbands. It is
funny, in the way that sad things are funny, that in 2016 we are still
talking about cooking as some kind of ‘marriageability test’ for women.
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.
Cooking is learned. Cooking – domestic work in general – is a life skill
that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that
can elude both men and women.
We also need to question the idea
of marriage as a prize to women, because that is the basis of these
absurd debates. If we stop conditioning women to see marriage as a
prize, then we would have fewer debates about a wife needing to cook in
order to earn that prize.
It is interesting to me how early the
world starts to invent gender roles. Yesterday I went to a children’s
shop to buy Chizalum an outfit. In the girls’ section were pale
phenomena in washed-out shades of pink. I disliked them. The boys’
section had outfits in vibrant shades of blue. Because I think blue
will be adorable against her brown skin – and photograph better – I
bought one. At the check out counter, the cashier said mine was the
perfect present for the new boy. I said it was for a baby girl. She
looked horrified. “Blue for a girl?”
I cannot help but wonder
about the clever marketing person who invented this pink-blue binary.
There was also a ‘gender neutral’ section, with its array of bloodless
grays. ‘Gender neutral’ is silly because it is premised on the idea of
male being blue and female being pink and ‘gender neutral’ being its own
category. Why not just have baby clothes organized by age and displayed
in all colors? The bodies of male and female infants are similar, after
all.
I looked at the toy section, also arranged by gender. Toys
for boys are mostly active, and involve some sort of ‘doing’ – trains,
cars – and toys for girls are mostly ‘passive’ and are overwhelmingly
dolls. I was struck by how early our culture starts to form the ideas of
what a boy should be and what a girl should be.
Did I ever tell
you about going to a US mall with a seven-year-old Nigerian girl and her
mother? She saw a toy helicopter, one of those things that fly by
wireless remote control, and she was fascinated and asked for one. “No,”
her mother said. “You have your dolls.” And she responded, “Mummy, is
it only doll I will play with?”
I have never forgotten that. Her mother meant well, obviously. She was well-versed in the ideas of gender roles – that girls play with dolls and boys with cars. I wonder now, wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been given a chance to explore that helicopter.
I have never forgotten that. Her mother meant well, obviously. She was well-versed in the ideas of gender roles – that girls play with dolls and boys with cars. I wonder now, wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been given a chance to explore that helicopter.
If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender roles on
young children we give them space to reach their full potential. Please
see Chizalum as an individual. Not as a girl who should be a certain
way. See her weaknesses and her strengths in an individual way. Do not
measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale
of being the best version of herself.
A young woman once told me
that she had for years behaved ‘like a boy’ – she liked football and was
bored by dresses – until her mother forced her to stop her ‘boyish’
interests and she is now grateful to her mother for helping her start
behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of
herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I wondered about what
her spirit had lost, because what she called ‘behaving like a boy’ was
simply that she was behaving like herself.
Another acquaintance
once told me that when she took her one-year-old son to a baby play
group, where babies had been brought by their mothers, she noticed that
the mothers of baby girls were very restraining, constantly telling the
girls ‘don’t touch’ or ‘stop and be nice,’ and she noticed that the baby
boys were encouraged to explore more and were not restrained as much
and were almost never told to ‘be nice.’ Her theory is that parents
unconsciously start very early to teach girls how to be, that baby girls
are given more rules and less room and baby boys more room and fewer
rules.
Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us that we will
often follow them even when they chafe against our true desires, our
needs, our wellbeing. They are very difficult to unlearn, and so it is
important to try and make sure that Chizalum rejects them from the
beginning. Instead of gender roles, teach her self-reliance. Tell her
that it is important to be able to do for herself and fend for herself.
Teach her to try and fix physical things when they break. We are quick
to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her try. Buy her toys like
blocks and trains – and dolls, too, if you want to.
4. Fourth
Suggestion: Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the
idea of conditional female equality. Reject this entirely. It is a
hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being
pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full
equality of women, or you do not.
Here are some examples of Feminism Lite:
A woman should be ambitious, but not too much. A woman can be successful but she should also do her domestic duties and cook for her husband. A woman should have her own but she should not forget her true role as home keeper. Of course a woman should have a job but the man is still head of the family.
A woman should be ambitious, but not too much. A woman can be successful but she should also do her domestic duties and cook for her husband. A woman should have her own but she should not forget her true role as home keeper. Of course a woman should have a job but the man is still head of the family.
Feminism Lite uses inane analogies
like ‘he is the head and you are the neck.’ Or ‘he is driving but you
are in the front seat.’ More troubling is the idea, in Feminism Lite,
that men are naturally superior but should be expected to ‘treat women
well.’ No. No. No. There must be more than male benevolence as the basis
for a woman’s wellbeing.
Feminism Lite uses the language of
‘allowing.’ Theresa May is the British Prime Minister and here is how a
progressive British newspaper described her husband: ‘Philip May is
known in politics as a man who has taken a back seat and allowed his
wife, Theresa, to shine.’
Allowed.
Now let us reverse it. Theresa May has allowed her husband to shine. Does it make sense? If Philip May were Prime Minister, perhaps we might hear that his wife has ‘supported’ him from the background, or that she is ‘behind’ him, but we would never hear that she had ‘allowed’ him to shine.
Allow is a troubling word. Allow is about power. Members of the society of Feminism Lite will often say, “Leave the woman alone to do what she wants as long as her husband allows.”
A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one sided – and it is nearly only used that way – should never be the language of an equal marriage.
Another egregious example of Feminism Lite: men who say ‘Of course a wife does not always have to do the domestic work, I did domestic work when my wife travelled.’
Allowed.
Now let us reverse it. Theresa May has allowed her husband to shine. Does it make sense? If Philip May were Prime Minister, perhaps we might hear that his wife has ‘supported’ him from the background, or that she is ‘behind’ him, but we would never hear that she had ‘allowed’ him to shine.
Allow is a troubling word. Allow is about power. Members of the society of Feminism Lite will often say, “Leave the woman alone to do what she wants as long as her husband allows.”
A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one sided – and it is nearly only used that way – should never be the language of an equal marriage.
Another egregious example of Feminism Lite: men who say ‘Of course a wife does not always have to do the domestic work, I did domestic work when my wife travelled.’
Do
you remember how we laughed and laughed at an atrociously-written piece
about me some years ago? The writer – a man small in more ways than one –
had accused me of being ‘angry,’ as though ‘being angry’ was something
for which to be ashamed. Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I
am angry about sexism. But I am angrier about sexism than I am about
racism. Because I live among many people who easily acknowledge race
injustice but not gender injustice.
I cannot tell you how often
people I care about – men and women – have expected me to make a case
for sexism, to ‘prove’ it, as it were, while never having the same
expectation for racism (Obviously in the wider world, too many people
are still expected to ‘prove’ racism, but not in my close circle). I
cannot tell you how often people I care about have dismissed or
diminished sexist situations.
Like Ikenga who once said ‘even
though the general idea is that my father is in charge at our home, it’s
my mother who is really in charge behind the scenes.’ He thought he was
refuting sexism, but he was making my case. Why ‘behind the scenes?’ If
a woman has power then why do we need to disguise that she has power?
But here is a sad truth – our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male, that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women – is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. And Feminism Lite enables this.
But here is a sad truth – our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male, that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women – is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. And Feminism Lite enables this.
5. Fifth Suggestion: Teach Chizalum to read. Teach her to love books.
The best way is by casual example. If she sees you reading, she will
understand that reading is valuable. If she were not to go to school,
and merely just read books, she would arguably become more knowledgeable
than a conventionally educated child. Books will help her understand
and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in
whatever she wants to become – a chef, a scientist, a singer all benefit
from the skills that reading brings. I do not mean school books. I mean
books that have nothing to do with school, autobiographies and novels
and histories. If all else fails, pay her to read. Reward her. I know of
this incredible Nigerian woman who was raising her child in the US; her
child did not take to reading so she decided to pay her 5 cents per
page. An expensive endeavor, she later joked, but a worthy investment.
6. Sixth Suggestion: Teach her to question language. Language is the
repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. But to teach
her that, you will have to question your own language. A friend of mine
says she will never call her daughter ‘Princess.’ People mean well when
they say this, but ‘princess’ is loaded with assumptions, of her
delicacy, of the prince who will come to save her, etc. This friend
prefers ‘angel’ and ‘star.’
So decide for yourself the things
you will not say to your child. Because what you say to your child
matters. It teaches her what she should value. You know that Igbo joke,
used to tease girls who are being childish – “What are you doing? Don’t
you know you are old enough to find a husband?” I used to say that
often. But now I choose not to. I say ‘you are old enough to find a
job.’ Because I do not believe that marriage is something we should
teach young girls to aspire to.
I no longer say ‘she had a child
FOR him.’ I say ‘she had a child WITH him.’ And I bristle when I hear a
man say ‘she is carrying my child.’ ‘Our child’ just sounds better, more
accurate too.
Try not to use words like ‘misogyny’ and
‘patriarchy’ too often with Chizalum. We Feminists can sometimes be too
jargony, and jargon can sometimes feel too abstract. Don’t just label
something misogynistic, tell her why it is, and tell her what would make
it not be.
Use examples. Teach her that if you criticize X in
women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with
X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert inter alia:
anger, loudness, stubbornness, coldness, ruthlessness.
Teach her
to ask questions like: What are the things that women cannot do because
they are women? Do these things have cultural prestige? If so why are
only men allowed to do the things that have cultural prestige?
Use examples from the news. Two Nigerian senators quarrel publicly. The
woman calls the man a bastard, and the man tells the woman that he will
rape her. The man is sexist because he has not insulted her as an
individual, but as a generic female and this is dehumanizing. He should
have called her a bastard too. Or an asshole. Or so many other things
that are not about her being a generic woman.
Remember that
television commercial we watched in Lagos, where a man cooks and his
wife claps for him? True progress is when she doesn’t clap for him but
just reacts to the food itself - she can either praise the food or not
praise the food, just as he can praise hers or not praise hers, but what
is sexist is that she is praising the fact that he has undertaken the
act of cooking, praise that implies that cooking is an inherently female
act.
Remember the mechanic in Lagos who was described as a ‘lady
mechanic?’ Teach Chizalum that the woman is a mechanic not a ‘lady
mechanic.’
Point out to her how wrong it is that a man who hits
your car, gets out and tells you to go and bring your husband because he
can't "deal with a woman".
Instead of merely telling her, show
her with examples that misogyny can be overt and misogyny can be subtle
and that both are abhorrent.
Teach her to question men who can
have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than
as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always
say something like ‘if it were my daughter or wife or sister.’ Yet such
men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime ‘as a brother or son’
in order to feel empathy. Teach her, too, to question the idea of women
as a special species. The American House Speaker Paul Ryan who was
recently reacting to the Republican presidential nominee’s boast about
assaulting women, said, “Women are to be championed and revered, not
objectified.”
Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings. There is a patronizing undertone to the idea of women needing to be ‘championed and revered’ because they are women. It makes me think of chivalry, and the premise of chivalry is female weakness.
Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings. There is a patronizing undertone to the idea of women needing to be ‘championed and revered’ because they are women. It makes me think of chivalry, and the premise of chivalry is female weakness.
7.
Seventh Suggestion: Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways
to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement nor is it what
she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy but it is not
an achievement.
We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we
do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a
terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women
obsessed with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not
obsessed with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is
automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than
the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice
more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain
an uneven exchange? (One consequence of this imbalance is the very
shabby and very familiar phenomenon of two women publicly fighting over a
man, while the man remains silent.)
Hillary Clinton will be the
next president of the United States. On her Twitter account, the first
descriptor is ‘Wife.’ The first descriptor on her husband Bill Clinton’s
Twitter account is not ‘Husband.’ (Because of this, I have an
unreasonable respect for the very few men who use ‘husband’ as their
first descriptor)
My sense is that this is not a reflection on Hillary Clinton personally but on the world in which we live, a world that still largely values a woman’s marital and maternal roles more than anything else.
My sense is that this is not a reflection on Hillary Clinton personally but on the world in which we live, a world that still largely values a woman’s marital and maternal roles more than anything else.
After she married Bill Clinton in 1975, Hillary
Clinton kept her name, Hillary Rodham. Eventually she began to add his
name ‘Clinton’ to hers and then after a while she dropped ‘Rodham’
because of political pressure – because her husband would lose voters
who were offended that his wife had kept her name. American voters
apparently place retrograde marital expectations on women.
Do you
remember all the noise that was made after a newspaper journalist
decided to give me a new name and call ‘Mrs. Husband’s Surname’ and I
promptly told him never to do that again?
I remember how some
members of the Society of Ill-Willed Nigerian Commenters insisted on
calling me Mrs. Husband’s Name even after I had made clear that it was
not my name. Many more women than men did this, by the way. And there
was a smoldering hostility from women in particular. I wondered about
that, and thought that perhaps for many of them, my choice represented a
challenge to their largely-unquestioned idea of what is the norm. Even
some friends made statements like ‘you are successful and so it is okay
to keep your name.’
Which made me wonder – why does a woman have to be successful at work in order to justify keeping her name?
Which made me wonder – why does a woman have to be successful at work in order to justify keeping her name?
The truth is that I have not kept my name because I am successful. Had I
not had the good fortune to be published and widely-read, I would still
have kept my name. I have kept my name because it is my name. I have
kept my name because I like my name.
There are people who say –
well your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father’s
name. Indeed. But the point is simply this: whether it came from my
father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was
born, the name with which I travelled my life’s milestones, the name I
have answered to since that first day I went to kindergarten on a hazy
morning and my teacher said ‘answer ‘present’ if you hear your name.
Number one: Adichie!’
I like it and will not change it. More
importantly, every woman should have that choice. How many men do you
think would be willing to change their name on getting married?
As for titles, I dislike the title of ‘Mrs.’ because I think Nigerian
society gives it too much value – I have observed too many cases of men
and women who loudly and proudly speak of the title of Mrs. as though
those who are not Mrs have somehow failed at something. Mrs can be a
choice, but to infuse it with so much value as our culture does is
disturbing. The value we give to Mrs. means that marriage changes the
social status of a woman but not of a man. (Is that perhaps why many
women complain of married men still ‘acting’ as though they were single?
Perhaps if our society asked married men to change their names and take
on a new title, different from MR, their behavior might change as well?
Ha!) But more seriously, if you, a 28-year-old Masters degree holder,
go overnight from Ijeawele Ude to Mrs. Ijeawele Onyekailodibe, surely it
requires not just the mental energy of changing passports and licenses
but also a psychic change, a new ‘becoming?’ This new ‘becoming’ would
not matter so much if men, too, had to undergo it.
Still on
titles, I like Ms because it is similar to Mr. A man is Mr whether
married or not, a woman is Ms whether married or not. So please teach
Chizalum that in a truly just society, women should not be expected to
make marriage-based changes that men are not expected to make. Here’s a
nifty solution – each couple that marries should take on an entirely new
surname, chosen however they want to as long as both agree to it, so
that a day after the wedding, both husband and wife can hold hands and
joyfully journey off to the municipal offices to change their passports,
drivers licenses, signatures, initials, bank accounts, etc.
8.
Eighth Suggestion: Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to
make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is
honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people. Remember I told
you how infuriating it was to me that Chioma would often tell me that
‘people’ would not ‘like’ something I wanted to say or do. It upset me
because I felt, from her, the unspoken pressure to change myself to fit
some mold that would please an amorphous entity called ‘people.’ It was
upsetting because we want those close to us to encourage us to be our
most authentic selves.
Please do not ever put this pressure on
your daughter. We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false.
And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual
predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused
because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to
be ‘nice’ to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the ‘feelings’
of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of
likeability. At a recent rape trial, the woman raped by a man said that
she did not want to ‘cause conflict.’ We have a world full of women who
are unable fully to exhale because they have for so long been
conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.
So instead of teaching Chizalum to be likeable, teach her to be honest. And kind.
And brave. Encourage her to speak her mind, to say what she really thinks, to speak truthfully. And then praise her when she does. Praise her especially when she takes a stand that is difficult or unpopular because it happens to be her honest position. Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that her kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she too deserves the kindness of others. Teach her to stand for what is hers. If another child takes her toy without her permission, ask her to take it back. Tell her that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say, to shout.
And brave. Encourage her to speak her mind, to say what she really thinks, to speak truthfully. And then praise her when she does. Praise her especially when she takes a stand that is difficult or unpopular because it happens to be her honest position. Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that her kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she too deserves the kindness of others. Teach her to stand for what is hers. If another child takes her toy without her permission, ask her to take it back. Tell her that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say, to shout.
Show her that she does not need to be
liked by everyone. Tell her that if someone does not like her, there
will be someone who will. Teach her that she is not merely an object to
be liked or disliked, she is also a subject who can like or dislike. In
her teenage years, if she comes home crying about some boys who don’t
like her, let her know she can also choose not to like those boys.
Here’s this bit from the New York Times, about a security agent who was
there on the night that gunshots were fired at the White House.
<Saturday
afternoon as supervisors explained that the gunshots
were from people in two cars shooting at each other. Johnson had told
several senior officers Friday night that she thought the house had been
hit. But on Saturday she did not challenge her superiors, “for fear of
being criticized,” she later told investigators.>>
<
This
fear of being criticized is a consequence of likeability. A man is much
less likely to give that as a reason, simply because men are much less
likely to be raised with likeability as a central life motif.
9.
Ninth Suggestion: Give Chizalum a sense of identity. It matters. Be
deliberate about it. Let her grow up to think of herself as, among other
things, a proud Igbo Woman. And you must be selective – teach her to
embrace the parts of Igbo culture that are beautiful and teach her to
reject the parts that are not. You can say to her, in different contexts
and different ways - “Igbo culture is lovely because it values
community and consensus and hard work, and the language and proverbs are
beautiful and full of great wisdom. But Igbo culture also teaches that a
woman cannot do certain things just because she’s a woman and that is
wrong. Igbo culture also focuses a little too much on materialism and
while money is important – because money means self-reliance – you must
not give value to people based on who has money and who does not.”
Be deliberate also about showing her the enduring beauty and resilience
of Africans and of black people. Why? Because of the power dynamics in
the world, she will grow up seeing images of white beauty, white
ability, and white achievement, no matter where she is in the world. It
will be in the TV shows she watches, in the popular culture she
consumes, in the books she reads. She will also probably grow up seeing
many negative images of blackness and of Africans.
Teach her to
take pride in the history of Africans, and in the Black diaspora. Find
black heroes, men and women, in history. They exist. You will have to
counter some of the things she will learn in school – the Nigerian
curriculum isn’t quite infused with the idea of teaching children to
have a sense of pride. Western nations do it well, because they do it
subtly, and they might even disagree about having it called ‘teaching
pride’ but that is what it is. So her teachers will be fantastic at
teaching her mathematics and science and art and music, but you will
have to do the pride-teaching yourself.
Teach her about privilege
and inequality and the importance of giving dignity to everyone who
does not mean her harm – teach her that the househelp is human just like
her, teach her always to greet the driver and all domestic staff who
are older than she is. Link these expectations to her identity – for
example, say to her “In our family, when you are a child, you greet
those older than you no matter what job they do.”
Give her an
Igbo nickname. When I was growing up, my Aunty Gladys called me Ada
Obodo Dike. I always loved that. Apparently my village Ezi-Abba is known
as the Land of Warriors and to be called Daughter of the Land of
Warriors was deliciously heady.
Teach her to speak Igbo. Not as a
project. Too many Igbo-speaking parents today approach this as though
it were a project – they reward the children for speaking the rare
sentence, enroll them in patchily-organized once-a-week Igbo school and
never actually make normal conversation with them in Igbo. Children are
intelligent, they can easily sniff out what you value and what you
don’t. Once-a-week ventures into some class while not expecting them to
actually speak Igbo at home will make it very clear to them that you
have little value for Igbo. And it won’t work.
If Chizalum is
Igbo-speaking, it will help her better navigate our globalized world.
And studies have shown over and over that there are many benefits to
being bilingual.
10. Tenth Suggestion: Be deliberate about how you engage with her and her appearance.
Encourage her participation in sports. Teach her to be physically
active. Take walks with her. Swim. Run. Play tennis. Football. Table
tennis. All kinds of sports. Any kind of sports. I think this is
important not only because of the obvious health benefits but because it
can help with all the body-image insecurities that the world thrusts on
girls. Let Chizalum know that there is great value in being active.
Studies show that girls generally stop playing sports as puberty
arrives. Not surprising. Breasts and self-consciousness can get in the
way of sports. Try not to let that get in her way.
If she likes
makeup let her wear it. If she likes fashion let her dress up. But if
she doesn’t like either let her be. Don’t think that raising her
feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity
are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they
are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about
pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and
makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits
considered generally male – sports cars, certain professional sports. In
the same way, men’s grooming is never suspect in the way women’s
grooming is – a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is
dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence,
his ability or his seriousness.
Never ever link her appearance
with morality. Never tell her that a short skirt is ‘immoral.’ Make
dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of
morality. If you both clash over what she wants to wear, never say
things like ‘you look like a prostitute’ as I know your mother once told
you. Instead say ‘ that dress doesn’t flatter you like this other one.
Or doesn’t fit as well. Or doesn’t look as attractive. Or is simply
ugly. But never ‘immoral.’ Because clothes have absolutely nothing to do
with morality.
Try not to link hair with pain. I think of my
childhood and how often I cried while my dense long hair was being
plaited. I think of how a packet of Smarties chocolates was kept in
front of me, as a reward if I sat through having my hair done. And for
what? Imagine if we had not spent so many Saturdays of our childhood and
teenagehood doing our hair. What might we have learned? In what ways
might we have grown? What did boys do on Saturdays?
So with her
hair, I suggest that you redefine ‘neat.’ Part of the reason that hair
is about pain for so many girls is that adults are determined to conform
to a version of ‘neat’ that means Too Tight and Scalp-Destroying and
Headache-Infusing.
We need to stop. I’ve seen girls in school in Nigeria being terribly harassed for their hair not being ‘neat,’ merely because some of their God-given hair had curled up in glorious tight little balls at their temples. Make Chizalum’s hair loose. And make that your definition of neat. Go to her school and talk to the administration if you have to. It takes one person to make change happen. Also, her hair doesn’t have to ‘last’ – another reason we give for painful hairstyles. I suggest that you make loose plaits and big cornrows and don’t use a tiny-teethed comb that wasn’t made with our hair texture in mind.
We need to stop. I’ve seen girls in school in Nigeria being terribly harassed for their hair not being ‘neat,’ merely because some of their God-given hair had curled up in glorious tight little balls at their temples. Make Chizalum’s hair loose. And make that your definition of neat. Go to her school and talk to the administration if you have to. It takes one person to make change happen. Also, her hair doesn’t have to ‘last’ – another reason we give for painful hairstyles. I suggest that you make loose plaits and big cornrows and don’t use a tiny-teethed comb that wasn’t made with our hair texture in mind.
Chizalum will notice very early on –
because children are perceptive – what kind of beauty the mainstream
world values. She will see it in magazines and films and television. She
will see that whiteness is valued. She will notice that the hair
texture that is valued is straight or swingy, and is hair that falls
down rather than stands up. She will encounter these whether you like it
or not. So make sure that you create alternatives for her to see. Let
her know that slim white women are beautiful, and that non-slim,
non-white women are beautiful. Let her know that there are many
individuals and many cultures that do not find the narrow mainstream
definition of beauty attractive. You will know your child best, and so
you will know best how to affirm her own kind of beauty, how to protect
her from looking at her own reflection with dissatisfaction.
Surround her with a village of aunties, women who have qualities you’d
like her to admire. Talk about how much YOU admire them. Children copy
and learn from example. Talk about what you admire about them. I, for
example, particularly admire the African American feminist Florynce
Kennedy. Some African women that I would tell her about are Ama Ata
Aidoo, Dora Akunyili, Muthoni Likimani, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Taiwo Ajayi
Lycett. There are so many African women who are sources of feminist
inspiration. Because of what they have done and because of what they
have refused to do.
Like your grandmother, by the way, that
remarkable, strong, sharp-tongued babe. I remember once hearing Mrs.
Josephine Anenih speak, and being so inspired by her frank and strong
feminism, which I had not expected at all.
Surround Chizalum too
with a village of uncles. This will be harder, judging from the kind of
friends Chudi has. I still cannot get over that blustering man with the
over-carved beard who kept saying at Chudi’s last birthday party – “I
have paid her bride price! A woman whose bride price I have paid cannot
come and tell me nonsense!”
So please find the few good men that
you can, the few non-blustering men. Because the truth is that she will
encounter a lot of male bluster in her life. So it is good to have
alternatives from very early on.
I cannot overstate the power of
alternatives. She can counter ideas about static ‘gender roles’ if she
has been empowered by her familiarity with alternatives. If she knows an
uncle who cooks well – and does so with indifference – then she can
smile and brush off the foolishness of somebody who claims that ‘women
must cook.’
11. Eleventh Suggestion: Teach her to question our culture’s selective use of biology as ‘reasons’ for social norms.
I know a Yoruba woman, married to an Igbo man, who was pregnant with
her first child and was thinking of first names for the child. All the
names were Igbo.
Shouldn’t they have Yoruba first names since
they would have their father’s Igbo surname? I asked, and she said, ‘A
child first belongs to the father. It has to be that way.’
We
often use biology to explain the privileges that men have, the most
common reason being men’s physical superiority. It is true that men are
in general physically stronger than women. But our use of biology is
selective. ‘A child first belongs to the father’ is a common sentiment
in Nigeria. But if we truly depended on biology as root of social norms
then children would be identified as their mothers rather than their
fathers because when a child is born, the parent we are biologically –
and incontrovertibly – certain of is the mother. We assume the father is
who the mother says the father is. How many lineages all over the world
are not biological, I wonder?
For many Igbo women, the
conditioning is so complete that women think of children only as the
father’s. I know of women who have left bad marriages but not been
‘allowed’ to take their children or even to see their children because
the children belong to the man.
We also use evolutionary biology
to explain male promiscuity, but not to explain female promiscuity,
even though it really makes evolutionary sense for women to have many
sexual partners – because the larger the genetic pool, the greater will
be the chances of bearing offspring who will thrive.
So teach
Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she
should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because
social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm
that cannot be changed.
12. Twelfth Suggestion: Talk to her about sex and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward but it is necessary.
Remember that seminar we went to in class 3 where we were supposed to
be taught about ‘sexuality’ but instead we listened to vague
semi-threats about how ‘talking to boys’ would end up with us being
pregnant and disgraced. I remember that hall and that seminar as a place
filled with shame. Ugly shame. That particular brand of shame that has
to do with being female. May your daughter never encounter it.
With her, don’t pretend that sex is merely a controlled act of
reproduction. Or an ‘only in marriage’ act, because that is
disingenuous. (You and Chudi were having sex long before marriage and
she will probably know this by the time she is twelve) Tell her that sex
can be a beautiful thing and that it can have emotional consequences
and tell her to wait until she is an adult and tell her that once she is
an adult, she gets to decide what she wants sex to mean to her. But be
prepared because she might not wait until she’s 18. And if she doesn’t
wait, you have to make sure she is able to tell you that.
It’s
not enough to say you want to raise a daughter who can tell you
anything, you have to give her the language to talk to you. And I mean
this in a literal way. What should she call it? What word should she
use?
I remember people used ‘ike’ when I was a child to mean both
anus and vagina and anus was the easier meaning but it left everything
vague and I never quite knew how to say that I, for example, had an itch
in my vagina.
Most childhood development experts and
pediatricians say it is best to have children call sexual organs by
their proper names – vagina and penis. I agree, but that is a decision
you have to make. You should decide what name you want her to call it,
but what matters is that there must be a name and that it cannot be a
name that is weighed down with shame.
To make sure she doesn’t
inherit shame from you, you have to free yourself of your own inherited
shame. And I know how terribly difficult that is. In every culture in
the world, female sexuality is about shame. Even cultures – like many in
the west – that expect women to be sexy still do not expect them to be
sexual.
The shame we attach to female sexuality is about control.
Many cultures and religions control women’s bodies in one way or the
other. If the justification for controlling women’s bodies were about
women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the
reason was – women should not wear short skirts because they can get
cancer if they do. Instead the reason is not about women, it is about
men. Women must be ‘covered up’ to protect men. I find this deeply
dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the
appetites of men.
And speaking of shame. Never ever link
sexuality and shame. Or nakedness and shame. Do not ever make
‘virginity’ a focus. Every conversation about virginity becomes a
conversation about shame. Teach her to reject the linking of shame and
female biology. Why were we raised to speak in low tones about periods?
To be filled with shame if our menstrual blood happened to stain our
skirt? Periods are nothing to be ashamed off. Periods are normal and
natural and the human species would not be here if periods did not
exist. I remember a man who said a period was like shit. Well, sacred
shit, I told him, because you wouldn’t be here if periods didn’t happen.
13. Thirteenth Suggestion: Romance will happen so be on board.
I’m writing this assuming she is heterosexual – she might not be,
obviously. But I am assuming that because it is what I feel best
equipped to talk about.
Make sure you are aware of the romance in her life. And the only way you can do that is to start very early to give her the language with which to talk to you. I don’t mean you should be her ‘friend,’ I mean you should be her mother to whom she can talk about everything.
Make sure you are aware of the romance in her life. And the only way you can do that is to start very early to give her the language with which to talk to you. I don’t mean you should be her ‘friend,’ I mean you should be her mother to whom she can talk about everything.
Teach her that to love is not only to give but
also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about
their lives – we teach girls that a large component of their ability to
love is their ability to self-sacrifice. We do not teach this to boys.
Teach her that to love she must give of herself emotionally but she must
also expect to be given.
I think love is the most important
thing in life. Whatever kind, however you define it but I think of it
generally as being greatly valued by another human being and giving
great value to another human being. But why do we raise only one half of
the world to value this? I was recently in a roomful of young woman and
was struck by how much of the conversation was about men – what
terrible things men had done to them, this man cheated, this man lied,
this man promised marriage and disappeared, this husband did this and
that.
And I realized, sadly, that the reverse is not true. A
roomful of men do not invariably end up talking about women – and if
they do, it is more likely to be in objectifying flippant terms rather
than as lamentations of life. Why?
It goes back, I think, to that
early conditioning. At a recent baby’s baptism ceremony, guests were
asked to write their wishes for the baby girl. One guest wrote: I wish
for you a good husband.’ Well-intentioned obviously but very troubling. A
three-month old baby girl already being told that a husband is
something to aspire to. Had the baby been a boy, it would not have
occurred to that guest to wish him ‘ a good wife.’
And speaking
of women lamenting about men who ‘promise’ marriage and then disappear.
Isn’t it odd that in most societies in the world today, women generally
cannot propose marriage? Marriage is such a major step in your life and
yet you cannot take charge of it, it depends on a man asking you. So
many women are in long term relationships and want to get married but
have to ‘wait’ for the man to propose – and often this waiting becomes a
performance, sometimes unconscious and sometimes not, of
marriage-worthiness. If we apply the first Feminism Tool here, then it
makes no sense that a woman who matters equally has to ‘wait’ for
somebody else to initiate what will be a major life change for her.
A Feminism Lite adherent once told me that the fact that our society
expects men to make proposals proved that women had the power, because
only if a woman says yes can marriage happen. The truth is this – the
real power resides in the person who asks. Before you can say yes or no,
you first must be asked. I truly wish for Chizalum a world in which
either person can propose, in which a relationship has become so
comfortable, so joy-filled, that whether or not to embark on marriage
becomes a conversation, itself filled with joy.
I want to say
something about money here. Teach her never ever to say such nonsense as
‘my money is my money and his money is our money.’ It is vile. And
dangerous – to have that attitude means that you must potentially accept
other harmful ideas as well. Teach her that it is NOT a man’s role to
provide. In a healthy relationship, it is the role of whoever can
provide to provide.
14. Fourteenth Suggestion: In teaching her
about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints.
Saintliness is not a pre-requisite for dignity. People who are unkind
and dishonest are still human, and still deserve dignity. Property
rights for rural Nigerian women, for example, is a major feminist issue,
and the women do not need to be good and angelic to be allowed their
property rights.
There is sometimes, in the discourse around
gender, the assumption that women are supposed to be morally ‘better’
than men. They are not. Women are as human as men are. Female goodness
is as normal as female evil.
And there are many women in the
world who do not like other women. Female misogyny exists and to evade
acknowledging it is to create unnecessary opportunities for
anti-feminists to try and discredit feminism. I mean the sort of
anti-feminists who will gleefully raise examples of women saying ‘I am
not a feminist’ as though a person born with a vagina making this
statement somehow automatically discredits feminism. That a woman claims
not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If
anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful
reach of patriarchy. It shows us, too, that not all women are feminists
and not all men are misogynists.
15. Fifteenth Suggestion: Teach
her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal.
Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is
not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical.
Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her
about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world.
She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the
world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are
valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know – we
cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have
spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace
with that.
Teach her never to universalize her own standards or
experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for
other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the
realization that difference is normal.
Tell her that some people
are gay, and some are not. A little child has two daddies or two mommies
because some people just do. Tell her that some people go to mosque and
others go to church and others go to different places of worship and
still others don’t worship at all, because that is just the way it is
for some people.
You like palm oil but some people don’t like palm oil – you say to her.
Why – she says to you.
I don’t know. It's just the way the world is – you say to her.
Why – she says to you.
I don’t know. It's just the way the world is – you say to her.
Please note that I am not suggesting that you raise her to be ‘non
judgmental’ which is a commonly used expression these days, and which
slightly worries me. The general sentiment behind the idea is a fine one
but ‘non-judgmental’ can easily devolve into meaning ‘don’t have an
opinion about anything.’ And so, instead of that, what I hope for
Chizalum is this: that she will be full of opinions, and that her
opinions will come from an informed, humane and broad-minded place.
May she be healthy and happy. May her life be whatever she wants it to be.
Do you have a headache after reading all this? Sorry. Next time don’t ask me how to raise your daughter feminist.
With love, oyi gi,Chimamanda
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