|
9182039
|
It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you'll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You'll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. And
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
f9150c2
|
How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
9f324fc
|
We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
56e4432
|
Teach her about privilege and inequality and the importance of giving dignity to everyone who does not mean her harm--teach her that the household help is human just like her, teach her always to greet the driver. Link these expectations to her identity--for example, say to her "In our family, when you are a child, you greet those older than you no matter what job they do."
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
cd31126
|
Isn't it odd that in most societies in the world today, women generally cannot propose marriage? Marriage is such a major step in your life, and yet you cannot take charge of it; it depends on a man asking you.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
322fb76
|
He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
2553192
|
what I hope for Chizalum is this: that she will be full of opinions, and that her opinions will come from an informed, humane and broad-minded place.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
16a8641
|
Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r, the sentences starting with "so," and the sliding response of "oh really," but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curlin..
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
4a8a297
|
You know America has a way of turning everything into an illness that needs medicine.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
846e535
|
She was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
28f1f1b
|
The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
450ce84
|
My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care. So what if you weren't "black" in your country? You're in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black pe..
|
|
race
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
1b56e08
|
Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.
|
|
stereotypes
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
1950397
|
We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don't teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
b057823
|
Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.
|
|
spirit
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
9c3ff64
|
Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
487e98f
|
The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know the waiters don't intend any harm, but it is one thing to know intellectually, and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I am just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are little things but sometimes it's the little ..
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
b89023e
|
They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
95a7c4f
|
If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitor, then at some point we will all think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem "natural" that only men should be heads of corporations."
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
ecbacee
|
Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we should begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
eb93e4c
|
To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
beb4a36
|
there is nothing more beautiful than what God gave me.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
f49af40
|
Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
da1b6b4
|
Show her that she does not need to be liked by everyone. Tell her that if someone does not like her, there will be someone else who will. Teach her that she not merely an object to be liked or disliked, she is also a subject who can like and dislike.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
6bf83dd
|
But by far the worst thing we do to males -- by making them feel they have to be hard -- is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.
|
|
masculine-bravado
toxic-masculinity
masculinity
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
b059c09
|
It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
6a49124
|
Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general--but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the w..
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
503be33
|
They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It's so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
25f3f87
|
Before, she would have said, "I know," that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge"
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
03d2dd4
|
They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
7481c5b
|
whenever she felt besieged by doubts, she would think of herself as standing valiantly alone, as almost heroic, so as to squash her uncertainty.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
e21ff4d
|
How was it possible to miss something you longer wanted? Blaine needed what she was unable to give and she needed what he was unable to give, and she grieved this, the loss of what could have been.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
6eb27c3
|
hl lHbW hw hdh lHtyj lmuDll l'n tkwna l~ jwry m`Zm lwqt? hl lHbW hw hdh l'mn ldhy 'sh`ru bh 'n fy Smtn?
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
002d2fb
|
She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
4e85c61
|
Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol--in small amounts.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
576abfb
|
She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
|
|
longing
|
chimamanda ngozi adichie |
|
c56d7b5
|
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.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
2bba157
|
Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that... Marlene Sanders... once gave this piece of advice to a younger journalist: "Never apologize for working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give to your child."
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
2acbbcc
|
That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.
|
|
patriarchy
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
8cbccca
|
Tell her that her body belongs to her and her alone, that she should never feel the need to say yes to something she does not want, or something she feels pressured to do. Teach her that saying no when no feels right is something to be proud of.
|
|
empowerment
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
0ddd52a
|
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.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
180835b
|
This was love, to be eager for tomorrow.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
f0d4611
|
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking - domestic work in general - is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that can elude both men and women.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
c448432
|
We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.
|
|
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |