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Essay / Book “We should all be feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From a young age; Hunter-Gatherer bands (with hunters being the male and fruit gatherers, etc. being the female), to this day gender roles are predefined and associated with each gender by society. “Gender roles are culturally defined sets of behaviors such as masculinity and femininity.” From birth, an individual is subject to these gender specifications: girls in pink and boys in blue. These differences are injected into the children's brains and this process continues and repeats itself. In this binary division of genders, man is predominant from the start. While women have always been at the mercy of men. Being a victim, provoked by this dissimilarity, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie felt the need to do something and wrote a short book “We Should All Be Feminists” adapted from a speech she gave at a TEDx conference in 2012. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works combat "the danger of a single story", how stereotypes limit people's thinking and create social problems such as gender discrimination. Despite the disapproval of feminism, Adichie makes it clear that feminism can work for everyone, because accepting feminism and the responsibilities that come with it can mean movement toward a more just world for humans. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay The book is a call to action for people around the world to end stereotypical gender discrimination that has always led to the oppression of women. It talks about Adichie's life experiences that she had because she was a woman and that she would never have had if she wasn't. She had never heard of the word "feminist", its meaning and the reason for its existence. The case where she got the highest grades in the class and still wasn't ranked as class monitor because she wasn't a boy: "Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the supervisor must be a boy. She had forgotten to mention that earlier; she thought it was obvious,” was a turning point in her life, “I have never forgotten that incident. She further recounts in her book that if a woman in Africa tips someone or pays their hotel bills, it is the man's money she is spending and she cannot win for herself. When she tipped the person who helped her park the car, she thanked Louis (who is a man) instead, and when she was ignored by the waiter, showed how men are still considered superior to women. She goes on to say that the world has evolved: “But our ideas about gender haven't evolved much. » Previously, the physically stronger person was more likely to lead, but today, physical strength has been replaced by the need to be creative, skilled, intelligent and innovative, and these attributes are no longer reserved for men. From not knowing the term feminist to becoming a "Happy Feminist" then "Happy African Feminist" then "Happy African Feminist who doesn't hate men" then "Happy African Feminist who doesn't hate men and who likes to wear shiny lips and high heels” for herself and not for men” and finally becoming simply “feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes”. It's her life journey and how she embraced the word without fear of the negative baggage attached to it,.