Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

The essence of the gender roles debate is the question of to what extent gender roles are natural and to what extent they are learned. If you’re a feminist, like Adichie, the answer to this question will be that everything—or almost everything—about gender is learned.

This view implies a certain understanding of human nature and society. According to this school of thought, men and women are not born with certain skills and knowledge innately: “Knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina” (16). Rather, humans are born flexible. That is, they are born with the capacity to learn, and they pick up knowledge and skills through practice. What’s more, men and women are born equal with an equal capacity to learn.

So, there is no skill, no activity, and no form of behavior that is inherently male or female. Rather, it’s society that codes specific skills and activities male or female and then imposes these on girls and boys by educating them differently. For instance, in Nigerian culture, cooking is gendered female, and this gendered coding is reproduced by mothers when they teach their daughters how to cook but not their sons.

This way of framing gender, as a pure invention of society that imposes arbitrary limits on the freedom and authenticity of the individual, is a very modern idea.