World acclaimed and multiple award winning writer, Chimamanda Adichie, has said that she wants women to be treated the same way as men. She said the o
World acclaimed and multiple award winning writer, Chimamanda Adichie, has said that she wants women to be treated the same way as men. She said the overall goal of her feminist activities was to make feminism unnecessary in the long run, with everyone being judged on merit.
In a detailed interview with The Guardian of London, the novelist said she wanted people’s marriages to change for the better and for women to walk into job interviews and be treated the same way as somebody who has a penis.
Noting that she has always been an agony aunt of sorts, she said she had been the unpaid therapist for her family and friends, but that having the feminist label attached has changed things, and not just among her intimates.
“I was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn’t experienced before as a writer and public figure,” she said.
This is partly why she has written a new book, ‘Dear Ijeawele’, ‘Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions’, ostensibly to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers, a category within which she would include certain other progressives, and to lay down in plain, elegant English her beliefs about child-raising.
“Dear Ijeawele’ is, in some ways, a very basic set of appeals; to be careful with language (never say ‘because you are a girl’), avoid gendered toys, encourage reading, don’t treat marriage as an achievement, reject likability,” she said in the interview.
“Her job is not to make herself likable, her job is to be her full self,” she writes in reference to women, elucidating a choice which Adichie has come to elevate almost above any other.
Recounting her encounter with a young male admirer during an official outing in Nigeria some time ago, she said the man had said, “I used to love you. I’ve read all your books. But since you started this whole feminism thing, and since you started to talk about this gay thing, I’m just not sure about you any more. How do you intend to keep the love of people like me?”
She said she told man, “Keep your love, because, sadly, while I love to be loved, I will not accept your love if it comes with these conditions.”
