Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions(4)

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.

I cannot tell you how often people I care about—men and women—have expected me to make a case for sexism, to “prove” it, as it were, while never having the same expectation for racism. (Obviously, in the wider world, too many people are still expected to “prove” racism, but not in my close circle.) I cannot tell you how often people I care about have dismissed or diminished sexist situations.

Like our friend Ikenga, always quick to deny that anything is caused by misogyny, never interested in listening or engaging, always eager to explain how it is in fact women who are privileged. He once said, “Even though the general idea is that my father is in charge at our home, it’s my mother who is really in charge behind the scenes.” He thought he was refuting sexism, but he was making my case. Why “behind the scenes”? If a woman has power then why do we need to disguise that she has power?

But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. And Feminism Lite enables this.





FIFTH SUGGESTION




Teach Chizalum to read. Teach her to love books. The best way is by casual example. If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable. If she were not to go to school, and merely just read books, she would arguably become more knowledgeable than a conventionally educated child. Books will help her understand and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in whatever she wants to become—a chef, a scientist, a singer, all benefit from the skills that reading brings. I do not mean schoolbooks. I mean books that have nothing to do with school, autobiographies and novels and histories. If all else fails, pay her to read. Reward her. I know this remarkable Nigerian woman, Angela, a single mother who was raising her child in the United States; her child did not take to reading so she decided to pay her five cents per page. An expensive endeavor, she later joked, but a worthy investment.





SIXTH SUGGESTION




Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. But to teach her that, you will have to question your own language. A friend of mine says she will never call her daughter “princess.” People mean well when they say this, but “princess” is loaded with assumptions, of a girl’s delicacy, of the prince who will come to save her, etc. This friend prefers “angel” and “star.”

So decide for yourself the things you will not say to your child. Because what you say to your child matters. It teaches her what she should value. You know that Igbo joke, used to tease girls who are being childish—“What are you doing? Don’t you know you are old enough to find a husband?” I used to say that often. But now I choose not to. I say “You are old enough to find a job.” Because I do not believe that marriage is something we should teach young girls to aspire to.

Try not to use words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” too often with Chizalum. We feminists can sometimes be too jargony, and jargon can sometimes feel too abstract. Don’t just label something misogynistic; tell her why it is, and tell her what would make it not be.

Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.”

Teach her to ask questions like What are the things that women cannot do because they are women? Do these things have cultural prestige? If so, why are only men allowed to do the things that have cultural prestige?

It is helpful, I think, to use everyday examples.

Remember that television commercial we watched in Lagos, where a man cooks and his wife claps for him? True progress is when she doesn’t clap for him but just reacts to the food itself—she can either praise the food or not praise the food, just as he can praise hers or not praise hers, but what is sexist is that she is praising the fact that he has undertaken the act of cooking, praise that implies that cooking is an inherently female act.

Remember the mechanic in Lagos who was described as a “lady mechanic” in a newspaper profile? Teach Chizalum that the woman is a mechanic, not a “lady mechanic.”

Point out to her how wrong it is that a man who hits your car in Lagos traffic gets out and tells you to go and bring your husband because he “can’t deal with a woman.”

Instead of merely telling her, show her with examples that misogyny can be overt and misogyny can be subtle and that both are abhorrent.

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always say something like “if it were my daughter or wife or sister.” Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy. Teach her, too, to question the idea of women as a special species. I once heard an American politician, in his bid to show his support for women, speak of how women should be “revered” and “championed”—a sentiment that is all too common.