We Should All Be Feminists Main Ideas

Injustice

In “We Should All Be Feminists”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines a major problem that she believes could be addressed if we all became feminists. That problem is the injustice that comes from gender discrimination.

Women and girls experience injustice in everyday situations and from their earliest years. They are not placed in positions of leadership when they are clearly qualified, as young Adichie experiences when a less qualified boy is given the role of class monitor and she—both qualified and ambitious—is denied it. They are treated as if they must be reliant on a man for money, as Adichie experiences when she tips a parking attendant who assumes the money comes from her male friend Louis. They give up or hide their success, intelligence, and ambition, like the many women Adichie knows who sell their homes, give up their jobs and dreams, and pretend to enjoy homemaking in order to conform to society’s ideas of what women should be like. 

Though not as drastic as the harms to women, men also experience the “grave injustice” of how society understands gender. Young boys are taught that they must be strong and invulnerable and that they are more masculine if they have money. They are taught to be afraid of weakness and vulnerability, and this creates in them a fragile sense of self-worth. Thus, both men and women experience injustice related to gender expectations, and the way forward is to change those expectations and correct the injustice. According to Adichie, creating this change is what feminism is about.

Feminism

In her essay “We Should All Be Feminists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie traces her own introduction to the term feminism and the process of discovering if and how the term applies to her. She notes that her first introduction to the term indicated that to be a feminist was considered a very bad thing. Later encounters with people who had ideas about feminism supported the conclusion that most people saw feminism as something negative: angry, hateful, and definitely to be avoided. However, when she looked the word up in a dictionary, she learned that it simply meant someone who believed in the equality of men and women.

Her experiences as a woman taught her that there was merit to the idea that men and women are of equal worth and should be considered equally valuable and important to society. She was an ambitious and intelligent girl but was treated as less important than her male classmates, regardless of their capabilities and ambitions. As a successful author and teacher, she still faced second-class treatment in social situations. These personal experiences of injustice were only the tip of the iceberg, however; many women she knew had more dramatic stories of injustice and discrimination due to their gender.

Moreover, as she delved further into the consequences of gender inequality, she saw that it harmed boys and men in addition to women. As a result of these considerations, Adichie determines she is, in fact, a feminist. She does believe we should work toward changing cultural expectations of gender so that both men and women can live more authentically, without the hindrance of restrictive gender roles. Ultimately, she concludes that anyone who sees existing gender expectations as problematic and wants to change them is a feminist.

Childhood

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay “We Should All Be Feminists” makes the case that gender inequality and societal gender expectations are harmful—to men as well as to women. She presents a vision of a different future in which the present cultural norms surrounding gender are changed for the better. This change, she suggests, needs to start with how we raise children.

To support this idea, she describes childhood experiences of gender discrimination and inequality, both from her own life and from others’ experiences. She explains how she was passed over for the role of class monitor in school even though the teacher promised the role to the person with the highest test score and she was the person with the highest test score. The job went to a boy instead—one who had no interest in the position. She also tells how a family she knows will make their daughter cook a snack of noodles for their son, rather than teaching him to make his own noodles.

If gender expectations are ingrained in people from childhood, Adichie argues, those expectations are seen as normative. However, there is a hopeful message here: If gender norms are taught in childhood, they can be taught differently. If something is learned, it can be unlearned. What we teach children is within our control. And so she asks her audience to consider what it would be like if we just taught boys to cook for themselves or if we gave girls roles of leadership in school. What if we encouraged children to follow their interests and capabilities, instead of teaching boys to seek power and money and girls to seek marriage? By changing the messages people receive in childhood, we can change the future for the better.