Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions(3)
I looked at the toy section, which was also arranged by gender. Toys for boys are mostly active, and involve some sort of doing—trains, cars—and toys for girls are mostly passive and are overwhelmingly dolls. I was struck by this. I had not quite realized how early society starts to invent ideas of what a boy should be and what a girl should be.
I wished the toys had been arranged by type, rather than by gender.
Did I ever tell you about going to a U.S. mall with a seven-year-old Nigerian girl and her mother? She saw a toy helicopter, one of those things that fly by wireless remote control, and she was fascinated and asked for one. “No,” her mother said. “You have your dolls.” And she responded, “Mummy, is it only dolls I will play with?”
I have never forgotten that. Her mother meant well, obviously. She was well versed in the ideas of gender roles—that girls play with dolls and boys with helicopters. I wonder now, wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been given a chance to explore that helicopter.
If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential. Please see Chizalum as an individual. Not as a girl who should be a certain way. See her weaknesses and her strengths in an individual way. Do not measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.
A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved “like a boy”—she liked football and was bored by dresses—until her mother forced her to stop her “boyish” interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called “behaving like a boy” was simply behaving like herself.
Another acquaintance, an American living in the Pacific Northwest, once told me that when she took her one-year-old son to a baby play group, where babies had been brought by their mothers, she noticed that the mothers of baby girls were very restraining, constantly telling the girls “don’t touch” or “stop and be nice,” and she noticed that the baby boys were encouraged to explore more and were not restrained as much and were almost never told to “be nice.” Her theory was that parents unconsciously start very early to teach girls how to be, that baby girls are given less room and more rules and baby boys more room and fewer rules.
Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us that we will often follow them even when they chafe against our true desires, our needs, our happiness. They are very difficult to unlearn, and so it is important to try to make sure that Chizalum rejects them from the beginning. Instead of letting her internalize the idea of gender roles, teach her self-reliance. Tell her that it is important to be able to do for herself and fend for herself. Teach her to try to fix physical things when they break. We are quick to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her try. She might not fully succeed, but let her try. Buy her toys like blocks and trains—and dolls, too, if you want to.
FOURTH SUGGESTION
Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equality. Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not.
Feminism Lite uses analogies like “he is the head and you are the neck.” Or “he is driving but you are in the front seat.” More troubling is the idea, in Feminism Lite, that men are naturally superior but should be expected to “treat women well.” No. No. No. There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman’s well-being.
Feminism Lite uses the language of “allowing.” Theresa May is the British prime minister and here is how a progressive British newspaper described her husband: “Philip May is known in politics as a man who has taken a back seat and allowed his wife, Theresa, to shine.”
Allowed.
Now let us reverse it. Theresa May has allowed her husband to shine. Does it make sense? If Philip May were prime minister, perhaps we might hear that his wife had “supported” him from the background, or that she was “behind” him, or that she’d “stood by his side,” but we would never hear that she had “allowed” him to shine.
“Allow” is a troubling word. “Allow” is about power. You will often hear members of the Nigerian chapter of the Society of Feminism Lite say, “Leave the woman alone to do what she wants as long as her husband allows.”
A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one-sidedly—and it is nearly only used that way—should never be the language of an equal marriage.
Another egregious example of Feminism Lite: men who say “of course a wife does not always have to do the domestic work; I did domestic work when my wife traveled.”
Do you remember how we laughed and laughed at an atrociously written piece about me some years ago? The writer had accused me of being “angry,” as though “being angry” were something to be ashamed of. 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.