eBook - ePub
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of ‘Americanah’ and ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, based on her 2013 TEDx Talk of the same name.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is We Should All Be Feminists an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Essays in Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
We Should All Be Feminists
Okoloma was one of my greatest childhood friends. He lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother: if I liked a boy, I would ask Okolomaâs opinion. Okoloma was funny and intelligent and wore cowboy boots that were pointy at the tips. In December 2005, in a plane crash in southern Nigeria, Okoloma died. It is still hard for me to put into words how I felt. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist.
I was about fourteen. We were in his house, arguing, both of us bristling with half-baked knowledge from the books we had read. I donât remember what this particular argument was about. But I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, âYou know, youâre a feminist.â
It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone â the same tone with which a person would say, âYouâre a supporter of terrorism.â
I did not know exactly what this word feminist meant. And I did not want Okoloma to know that I didnât know. So I brushed it aside and continued to argue. The first thing I planned to do when I got home was look up the word in the dictionary.
Now fast-forward to some years later.
In 2003, I wrote a novel called Purple Hibiscus, about a man who, among other things, beats his wife, and whose story doesnât end too well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. (Nigerians, as you might know, are very quick to give unsolicited advice.)
He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me â he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke â was that I should never call myself a feminist, since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
Then an academic, a Nigerian woman, told me that feminism was not our culture, that feminism was un-African, and I was only calling myself a feminist because I had been influenced by Western books. (Which amused me, because much of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist: I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I try to read those books called âclassic feminist textsâ, I get bored, and I struggle to finish them.)
Anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would now call myself a Happy African Feminist. Then a dear friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant that I hated men. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men.
Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: you hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you donât wear make-up, you donât shave, youâre always angry, you donât have a sense of humour, you donât use deodorant.
Now hereâs a story from my childhood.
When I was in primary school in Nsukka, a university town in south-eastern Nigeria, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Class monitor was a big deal. If you were class monitor, you would write down the names of noise-makers each day, which was heady enough power on its own, but my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walked around and patrolled the class for noise-makers. Of course, you were not allowed to actually use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be class m...