Speaking with The Guardian of London, the author who was recently elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a foreign honorary member said she wanted people’s marriages to change for the better; and for women to walk into job interviews and be treated the same way as somebody who has a penis.
“Feminism is not that hot. I can tell you I would sell more books in Nigeria if I stopped and said I’m no longer a feminist. I would have a stronger following, I would make more money” she said.
The novelist added: “I was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn’t experienced before as a writer and public figure.”
This is one of the reasons she has written a new book, Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions, apparently to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers, a category within which she would include certain other progressives, and to lay down in plain, elegant English her beliefs about child-raising.
“Dear Ijeawele is, in some ways, a very basic set of appeals; to be careful with language (never say “because you are a girl”), avoid gendered toys, encourage reading, don’t treat marriage as an achievement, reject likability,” she said in the interview.
“Her job is not to make herself likable, her job is to be her full self,” she writes in reference to women, elucidating a choice which Adichie has come to elevate almost above any other.
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