BLACK CHICK A LITTLE ROCKED: HOW TO RAISE A FEMINIST

Saturday, December 8, 2018

HOW TO RAISE A FEMINIST

A repost

Feeling Rebloggy

A few years ago, Chimamanda Adichie received a message from a childhood friend asking for advice: She wanted to know how to raise her newborn daughter to be a feminist.

For Adichie — a best-selling author who has also made a name for herself as a leading feminist voice — the question was a bit daunting, but she wrote a long letter back to her friend.

Clockwise to the Center: Beverly Bond, Chimamanda Adichie, Michelle Obama, Amandla Stenberg and Mommy, Beyonce and daughter Shonda and daughter, Viola and daughter, Barack and daughters, Kerry Washington carrying unborn child.

Now, that letter has been published as a book. It's called Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and it talks about everything from how to choose toys to teaching self-reliance to challenging traditional gender roles.

Adichie says writing the letter was useful for her, too. "Yes, I wrote it for my friend, but I think to a large extent it was also my way of mapping out my own thinking. Because I have talked a lot about these things and I care very much about them and I get very passionate ... but I realized I didn't actually have a concrete map of the particular, specific things that I think will help if we do them differently.

SOURCE: NPR

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[In the book are] fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can “allow” women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

SOURCE: Penguin / Random House