Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Introduction
 
When a couple of years ago a friend of mine from childhood, who d grown into a brilliant, strong, kind woman, asked me to tell her how to raise her baby girl a feminist, my first thought was that I did not know. It felt like too huge a task. But I had spoken publicly about feminism and perhaps that made her feel I was an expert on the subject. I had over the years also helped care for many babies of loved ones; I had worked as a babysitter and helped raise my nephews and nieces. I had done a lot of watching and listening, and I had done even more thinking.
 
In response to my friend s request, I decided to write her a letter, which I hoped would be honest and practical, while also serving as a map of sorts for my own feminist thinking. This book is a version of that letter, with some details changed.
 
Now that I, too, am the mother of a delightful baby girl, I realize how easy it is to dispense advice about raising a child when you are not facing the enormously complex reality of it yourself.
 
Still, I think it is morally urgent to have honest conversations about raising children differently, about trying to create a fairer world for women and men.
 
My friend sent me a reply saying she would try to follow my suggestions.
 
And in rereading these as a mother, I, too, am determined to try.
 
****
 
Dear Ijeawele,
 
What joy. And what lovely names: Chizalum Adaora. She is so beautiful. Only a week old and she already looks curious about the world. What a magnificent thing you have done, bringing a human being into the world. Congratulations feels too slight.
 
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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Financial Times, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women s Prize for Fiction Winner of Winners award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, both national bestsellers. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Dear Ijeawele is a volume as fierce and illuminating as bringing up a confident daughter, both with love at their core. O, The Oprah Magazine

I love this book so much, for many reasons. Chimamanda is one of my favorite authors. Amber Tamblyn, GQ

Adichie epitomizes and epistolizes our potential in Dear Ijeawele."  Sloane Crosely, Vanity Fair 

Personal and urgent. . . . Adichie is passionate about equality. Her new book offers 15 ways that we can encourage girls to be strong, to plant seeds of feminism. But more than that, Adichie hopes the book will help move us toward a world that is more gender equal. Doing so means knocking down ingrained assumptions about how men and women think and behave. The Washington Post

Adichie s suggestions are logical and stated clearly, full of her dry wit, and range from the obvious ( Do it together ) to the bold ( Reject likeability ). . . . As much as this is a book written to mothers of daughters, fathers of daughters would benefit from reading it, too; parents in general would do well to try to raise children who won't have to grow up and read it at all. . . . Powerful and life-affirming, offering wisdom for everyone. The Village Voice
 
Adichie has partly written Dear Ijeawele to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers. Her advice is not only to provide children with alternatives to empower boys and girls to understand there is no single way to be but also to understand that the only universal in this world is difference.  Adichie is a brilliant novelist and a serious thinker, and she is also someone who makes no apology for her own trivial interests. Her understanding of feminism is intertwined with her understanding that we all want to be more than one thing. The Guardian