First Book Review of 2017 : We Should All Be Feminist by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Title: We Should All Be Feminist

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Publisher: Vintage (Kindle Edition)

Published: July 29th 2014

Page: 49p

ISBN: 9781101911761

“It is difficult to find a suitable man for you, because you’re too smart” a collogue of mine who happened to be a man said that. Then another day I read an article that critized a fact about being a smart women is a threat to a men. Though I am upset everytime I read or heard anything like that, I never called myself a feminist. Feminist or Feminism is common word for me, but only because it is widely used by some famous people. So was I truly understand the meaning of being a feminist? I was not or at least not until I read this essay. I have few of Adichie’s books on my shelf, but haven’t read it yet, so this was my first encounter with her because I’ve got very cheap ebook on amazon. It was very short and actually was a documented version of 30 minutes TEDx Talk that Adichie delivered two years earlier.

Born as Nigerian, Adichie described her experience being treated by another Nigerian. There was a story from her early childhood that englighted me about something else, it was when her teacher made a competition that whoever got the highest score on the test, could become a class monitor who write down the name of noise maker. She was ambitious to win and she won. Unfortunatelly, the teacher said that a class monitor had to be a boy, the teacher forgot to make it clear earlier because she assumed it was obvious. Sadly the choosen class monitor was a sweet, gentle kind of boy who had no interest of becoming a class monitor. Well from this particular story, I can tell that most of us (typical women like me) were fortunate to grow up in place without such boundary about anything we can or can not do. When I was in junior high school, I became class monitor most of the time. 

Culture are made by habit, habit by attitude, and attitude by mindset. So one of my friend, after reading this book said that okey we just learned about all this feminism concept, then what’s next? In my opinion, we can change no one but ourselves. But the changes that we make in ourselves can inspire others to change. So let us empower ourselves with the weapon of knowledge and hopefuly we can create better future by becoming an agent of change to our culture. I will recommend this book to anyone who want to at least understand the meaning of feminist.

And just I answered my collegue, I found the same statement from Adichie in this book:

“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”