Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the tenth day of the month is "Judgment." I have personally decided that I will pass judgment on a book on the tenth day of each month.
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Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie should be a mandatory read for everyone. It's short! 63 tiny pages! It's powerful! I wanted to underline every sentence! It's important!
Adichie's friend Ijeawele asks Adichie for advice on how to raise a feminist on the occasion of Ijeawele's daughter's birth. Adichie complies, uncomfortably at first, but by the end of the book she's giving direct advice about what's important.
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| The back of the book cover |
I didn't agree with everything Adichie wrote, but I do think it's important for all of us to think about how we talk to and around children. I think we should think about what our values are and how we pass those on. I think we should listen to people who have led lives differently from our own. I think this is a powerful manifesto and I'm going to start giving it to everyone I know who has a baby, tucked into their welcome baby present right along with a rattle and burp cloths.
5/5 stars
Lines of note:
Share child care equally. "Equally" of course depends on you both, and you will have to work it out, paying equal attention to each person's needs. It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you'll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You'll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. (page 12)
I think this is true of all types of work in a relationship from child-care to housework to paid work.
Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I am angry about sexism. But I recently came to the realization that I am angrier about sexism than I am about racism.
Because in my anger about sexism, I often feel lonely. Because I love, and live among, many people who easily acknowledge race injustice but not gender injustice. (page 22-23)
Ah, yes. Denial is real and has painful consequences.
...what you say to your child matters. It teaches her what she should value. (page 26)
So much pressure on parents and people who are around children, but they are listening to everything and every word matters.
Hat mentions:
None
Oh, gosh. Rick and I just had a discussion like this last night, thanks to Ohio's resounding defeat of Issue 1 and the forthcoming abortion amendment in November. This led to a chat about Choice, and how so much more of the burden of having a child is on the mother, from conception onward. That even a stay-at-home dad still starts at a deficit, and how society will automatically judge/make assumptions about the mother based upon the children.
ReplyDeleteMy son and his fiancee are having a baby in November. They already know it's a boy. I think the 15 things are important to know for both sexes, both for feminism and for humans in general. Jared, my son, is a huge champion for feminism (both of my sons are, actually). I know that he and his wife will raise their son to be one, too.
I agree that it's vitally important to remember how you speak around and to children. They remember everything, and they are always in search of role models. I know that even as a teacher, I was constantly astonished at the things my students remembered of what I spoke about or did, and this would be many, many years after they had me in class. And these were teenagers. I guess we should always be who we want to be remembered as.
Oh, I definitely think feminism should be something that is a focus regardless of the sex/gender of parent and child! How we talk about roles, bodies, difference, and equality impact all people!!
DeleteI do think it is a tremendous responsibility that we give to parents and other adults who regularly interact with children, including and maybe especially teachers. One careless word can have a huge impact and it takes a lot more positive interactions to undo that. It's such a HUGE responsiblity!
Alright, I want this book!!! I'll probably wish I had read it earlier, but it's never too late.
ReplyDeleteYes! Everyone should read it! It's never too late. (Also, it's so short that it will make you feel VERY productive.)
DeleteOh, I'll have to add this to my TBR! Since becoming a parent, I've really thought so much more about how I message things and what kind of unconscious messages I may not mean to say to my girl - even when she was tiny, I tried to put so much thought into how to share context and nuance to what she picked up in daycare or from when my mom was her main babysitter and whose language and worldview are very different than mine, just from generational differences... it's not easy, for sure!
ReplyDeleteOh, it's a delightful little read. Again, I don't necessarily agree with everything the author wrote (although I do most of it, I think), but it was a great way to be more aware of our roles and responsibilities around children.
DeletePlease dismiss this comment if you don't want it sitting here... I agree this was a great read and it made quite a splash too (wasn't it in a Beyonce video?). But! Adichie's doubling down on transphobic stuff is painful.
ReplyDeleteI have no memory of this book coming out. LOL. I appreciate that in this book she specifically called out that her advice was for a women in a heterosexual couple, as that was her experience.
DeleteAs for her transphobic stuff, I guess I just have her siloed away JK Rowling. They both have done very important work in other areas, but their stances on transpeople, particularly transwomen, are really going to let down their legacy one day. This book was very much "your baby has female genitalia, your baby will identify as a girl" vibe, which is not necessary true, of course, but I didn't notice any outright anti-trans statements, although I wasn't really looking, either. The cis-centeredness was there and erasure of the trans experience is in itself a big issue, so I would leave it to others to decide if this is a dealbreaker for them
Thanks for bring this up. It IS important and we should definitely talk about gender and sex in all of these conversations!
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DeleteI love this author, have not heard of this book. Thanks for the heads up!
ReplyDeleteI hope you get something out of it if you decide to read it.
DeleteThis sounds interesting. I saw Maya's comment and it did make me wonder... I tend to be pretty sensitive towards these things. I also wonder - how does this align (or not) with the "we should all be feminists" slogan (I don't know that one can call it a movement, really) that is out there? Is she saying that only people with typical female genitalia should be feminists? To me, the statements on the back of the book could just as easily read "Tell them...", etc. (I might not be making any sense. First governance meeting of the year and my brain went to mush...)
ReplyDeleteI mean, there are definitely things in this book I don't agree with, particularly her condemnation of what she calls "feminism lite." She admits freely that her advice is targeted for heterosexual couples since that's what she's familiar with, so I think she's aware of her shortcomings, at least in respect to sexuality. However, there is just an absence of talking at all about transgender issues, which is a problem in and of itself, but I think her argument is that ALL children should be raised feminists. It's just that this was originally a letter to her friend who had just had a baby with female genitalia. Does that make sense? Again, there's definitely some aspects of this book that can be critiqued, but I thought it was a great, readable introduction for newbies who might not have thought about some of these topics.
DeleteThat makes total sense, thanks. And it does sound like her message is really that we should all - regardless of gender identity, or sex assigned at birth - be feminists. Thanks.
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