"We are all social beings": We Should All Be Feminists

I have been rooting for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ever since I found out about her about five years ago. It was through her TEDTalk, "The Danger of a Single Story," shared during a a professional development about what's been an ongoing conversation in my school district about school culture / cultural proficiency. That TED Talk is probably my favorite so far, if only because it applies more readily to the subject that I teach: English language arts. As such, it is a Talk that I share with every new group of students that I've taught.

Though in 2008 she was the recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Adichie wasn't as well-known as I thought she deserved to be. So, it was with joy that I read the many positive reviews of Americanah (2013) posted for CBR. I was like, "Yay! She's on her way!" Deservedly so, as evidenced by We Should All Be Feminists (2014), a transcription of her 2012 TEDxEuston Talk.

What Adichie calls for in her message is a paradigm shift in how we think about and present the concept of feminism, for we all suffer from the societal pressures imposed on us regarding gender:

Gender matters everywhere in the world...[We] should begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world...And this is how we start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.

As my birthday looms heavily, I find myself anxious in a way I have never been before, mainly because I'm becoming affected by societal pressures to define myself in two main ways: Wife. Mother.

Entering the last year of my mid-thirties, I am neither yet a wife nor a mother, and I now feel like I am running out of time--even though I had not given myself a deadline or ever really desired to define myself by those two roles. While it is easy to say, "Why care what society thinks?! Live your life!" Chimamanda Adichie eloquently offers this perspective: "[R]eality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization."

What this all means to me is that even though I can intellectualize and logically argue with family members, especially, that I don't need a husband or a child to define my worth as a woman, the fact is I'm now grappling with the implications of what living such a "lifestyle" might mean to my perceived purpose and value in a world that requires that I fulfill these two roles, particularly that of mother.

Though I am a nurturer, mother--in the biological sense--is not a role I particularly ever remember wanting to fulfill. This is why I am especially surprised that in the past few months I've wrestled with whether a decision to not have at least one biological child is to my long-term benefit. As one well-meaning older cousin advised me a few months ago, "It's no good and is selfish to not have at least one. You'll be alone and lonely in old age." I was particularly aggravated by her advice because I thought it was so limiting and "old school." Additionally, I didn't like that motherhood as a single parent was presented as an acceptable option. Choosing to become a single parent has never appealed to me.

While I listened in exasperation to her unwanted advice (though from a place of love), I realized that my cousin's comments came from cultural socialization, one that has been crippling to the female sex:

Our society teaches a an unmarried woman of a certain age to see this status as a deep personal failure. ...We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. ...We police girls. ...We teach girls shame.

To say that Adichie's essay is filled with nuggets of wisdom would be an understatement based on the highlights in my book alone. There's so much to linger on, but the points highlighted above resonate most profoundly at the moment.

In all, We Should All Be Feminists is powerful and empowering, so much so that when I finished reading it, I wanted to buy everyone I know a copy. While there doesn't seem to be anything new to the ideas Adichie expresses about feminism, her delivery of this loaded topic is very accessible and persuasive--especially to people of color or those from cultures that reject the concept of feminism. 

This is a CBR8 crossposted review.