Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

For Adichie, the problem of gender inequality begins at birth. Yet, it’s not because boys and girls are born unequal—they’re not—it’s because almost from the moment babies are born, they begin to be conditioned into different forms by the people around them.

This is the unspoken premise of the book: The root cause of gender inequality in society is the disparity in the way we raise girls and boys. Unequal conditioning as children leads to unequal outcomes as adults. That puts an incredible onus on parents to engender feminist change.

Many of the suggestions in this book are simply about being aware of the way that we train girls and boys differently so that we can redress the problem. For example, suggestion 7 is about how girls are taught to be preoccupied with marriage, whereas boys are not. Suggestion 8 discusses the way girls are taught to be restrained, mild-mannered, and obedient, while boys are taught to be honest and to express themselves. Suggestion 12 is about the ways in which we condition girls to find sex shameful, while boys are taught to take pride in their sexual conquests.

Again, the problem is not simply that girls and boys are raised to be different. The problem is that the unequal way we condition children often leads to negative—even devastating—outcomes for women in later life. The fact that women are conditioned to value marriage more than men means women are more likely to give up their personal ambitions to make a relationship work. The way we condition girls to be passive and obedient makes them more vulnerable to sexual assault. Furthermore, the way we condition girls to find sex shameful complicates and sours sexual pleasure for women.

For feminists, the way we raise girls matters. The fact that we treat them differently than boys is not an inevitable consequence of biology—it’s a choice, and one that results from our own conditioning by society. We have the choice to raise our children another way—as equals.

Throughout the book, Adichie offers numerous real-world examples to support her case that society enforces a basic inequality between men and women. When you boil them down, a lot of these examples follow the same formula; they aim to demonstrate a double standard. A double standard refers to a situation in which a standard of behavior is unfairly applied to one group of people but not to others. In the context of feminism, the argument is that, in various situations, our culture unfairly applies a higher standard to women than to men, and this has negative outcomes for women.

A classic example of a double standard is when a higher standard of grooming is expected of women as opposed to men. This double standard has consequences that unfairly affect women because it means women often spend a lot more time working on their appearance than men do—time that could be better spent elsewhere. In suggestion 10, Adichie recalls how she spent a great many Saturdays of her childhood having her hair plaited simply because girls were expected to conform to an overly high ideal of “neatness”: “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?” (44).

Another common example of a double standard is when women are judged for possessing personality traits that a man wouldn’t be judged for. For example, women are often judged for being angry, loud, or ambitious, while in men, these qualities are expected or even lauded as positive traits. What’s more, even when women and men behave exactly the same way, women are often perceived to possess negative characteristics that men aren’t. This is commonly the case with women who hold positions of power; powerful women are perceived to be cold, stubborn, or ruthless, even while their male equivalents are not. This is a double standard because we hold powerful women to a higher standard than we do powerful men. Adichie addresses this concept in her discussion of powerful women:

We ask of powerful women, is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men (24-25).

Adichie highlights many more examples of double standards for men and women that are prevalent in Nigerian and western culture. She argues that if we are truly committed to female equality, we must be self-critical of our own attitudes to women. We must be ever vigilant that we never hold women to expectations that we wouldn’t also hold men to. When we judge women for something, we should ask ourselves: would I judge a man for the same thing?