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 were 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 had been “the unpaid therapist for my 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.”
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