Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

What does it really mean to raise a feminist child? Is it about teaching slogans and fiery speeches—or something quieter, woven into everyday moments? In Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues that feminism begins in the ordinary spaces of family, language, play, and self-worth. Written as a heartfelt letter to her friend, who had just become a mother, Adichie offers fifteen deeply personal yet universally relevant suggestions for how to raise a girl who knows she matters equally to everyone else.

Adichie’s central conviction is simple but revolutionary: every child, especially every girl, must learn that she matters equally—no conditions, no caveats, no compromises. This belief is the bedrock of her feminist framework. To live by it, you must first internalize self-worth, then create spaces where equality becomes ordinary, not exceptional. The book’s wisdom isn’t offered as commandments but as encouragements—realistic, tender, and rooted in Adichie’s Nigerian upbringing and her global perspective as a writer who has lived across cultures.

Rethinking What Feminism Really Means

Adichie dismantles the idea that feminism is rigid or angry. Instead, she presents it as contextual and human. Her two foundational tools—the “feminist premise” (“I matter equally”) and the “reversal test” (“Can you reverse X and get the same results?”)—create a practical way to identify inequalities in everyday life. This means constantly asking whether the same rule applies across genders. For instance, if a woman forgives her husband’s infidelity, would the husband forgive hers? The impossibility of the reversal exposes hidden gender hierarchies and cultural double standards.

(As Adichie notes—and sociologists like bell hooks agree—true feminism challenges the structure of domination rather than merely swapping who dominates.)

Why This Conversation Matters Now

This manifesto emerges at a time when global discourse on gender equality is often either politicized or performative. Adichie strips it back to the personal. Feminism, she says, should be taught not through doctrine but through daily modeling—from how we share household tasks to how we talk about marriage and ambition. Every cultural practice must be questioned through the lens of equal worth. Her advice is not just for mothers but for anyone shaping the next generation—teachers, fathers, siblings, even governments. It’s a reminder that equality is a practice, not a policy.

Her letter embodies love and realism. It acknowledges that raising a feminist may mean swimming upstream against tradition, religion, and social pressure. But it also insists that you can anchor this rebellion within joy, wisdom, and compassion. Feminism, for Adichie, is not about denying masculine traits or rejecting femininity—it is about freedom of choice.

The Scope of Her Suggestions

Across fifteen suggestions, Adichie builds a holistic picture of feminist parenting. She begins with self-identity (“Be a full person”) and shared responsibility (“Do it together”). From there, she moves into ideology—rejecting gender roles and “Feminism Lite,” a diluted version that tolerates male dominance as long as men are “kind.” Later suggestions tackle reading and language, body image, sexuality, marriage, love, and cultural pride. Each idea expands feminism from a political label into a living, breathing mode of human respect.

By blending storytelling, humor, and moral clarity, Adichie makes her arguments disarmingly accessible. You’ll find yourself nodding at her anecdotes of Nigerian baby shops separating pink from blue clothing, or smiling at her own mother’s certainty that a child “belongs to the father.” These examples, though local, speak universally—the conditioning of gender begins almost at birth, often so quietly that we don’t notice it until we begin questioning the meaning of “girl” and “boy.”

Beyond Ideology: A Call for Human Wholeness

The deepest layer of Adichie’s message is that feminism isn’t just about women—it’s about wholeness. Her directive to “be a full person” applies to anyone, because the world loses balance when half of humanity is taught to shrink. She urges mothers to reject the glorified exhaustion of “doing it all,” to ask for help, to share parenting equally, and to demand equality not as a favor but a fact. This rhythm of equality weaves through every chapter, connecting care, work, language, and love into a coherent vision of freedom.

(Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s idea of “human flourishing” resonates here—Adichie’s feminism is ultimately about enabling each person, regardless of gender, to achieve the fullness of their potential.)

Why It Stays With You

What makes Dear Ijeawele unforgettable isn’t just the elegance of its prose, but its emotional honesty. Adichie isn’t prescribing a utopia; she’s building courage for imperfection. You may “do all the right things” and still face resistance, she says, because social norms are deeply entrenched. You may even fail. But what matters is trying—modeling equality, questioning stereotypes, speaking truth with love, and allowing your child to see your humanity.

“For me, feminism is contextual. I matter equally. Full stop.”

In the end, Adichie’s manifesto is both intimate and global—a personal letter written with the urgency of a social movement. It’s an invitation to raise children, and really to live, in a way that honors equal humanity. Because when you raise a feminist child, you’re not just shaping one life—you’re reshaping the world’s expectations of what women, and men, can be.

Adichie insists that feminism is taught not through grand speeches but through how you live day to day. The first two suggestions—be a full person and do it together—create the psychological foundation for equality to thrive within family and society. They address the subtle traps of gender roles and emphasize modeling behavior over preaching ideals.

Be a Full Person

Too often, mothers are taught to sacrifice their identity for their children, but Adichie warns that self-erasure breeds dependence and resentment. You cannot raise a confident daughter if you’ve lost confidence in yourself. When you remain intellectually and emotionally engaged with life—through work, hobbies, and friendships—you teach your child that women’s worth extends beyond caregiving.

She tells her friend to ignore those who call for “traditional motherhood,” reminding her that even in precolonial Igbo culture, women worked, traded, and contributed economically. “Tradition,” she says, is often selectively used to justify limiting women. (In comparison, authors like Rebecca Solnit emphasize similar themes: self-definition as an act of resistance.)

Do It Together

Equality starts at home, Adichie argues, when fatherhood stops being a performance of “help.” Chudi, Ijeawele’s husband, should not “help” with child-care—he should share it. The words we use matter: saying “he’s babysitting” implies the baby belongs only to the mother. In Adichie’s definition, a father is as much a verb as a mother. Partnership dismantles the myth of the Superwoman and teaches children that care is not gendered work but human work.

This shift requires mothers to relinquish perfectionism. Even if Chudi doesn’t wipe or bathe the baby exactly as she does, the baby will not die—she will be loved and nurtured. That humility is crucial: feminism is about collaboration, not competition.

“When child-care work is equally shared, you’ll know by your lack of resentment.”

This idea echoes contemporary research in psychology and sociology: resentment often signals inequality. When equality is authentic, both partners experience joy, not exhaustion. Through this framework, Adichie reframes feminism as relational well-being, not just political critique.

Adichie’s third suggestion—teach her that gender roles are nonsense—is the cornerstone of raising a child free from limitation. She shows how gender expectations infiltrate every corner of life, from toys to chores to clothing, long before children can even speak.

The Myth of Pink and Blue

Shopping for baby clothes, Adichie notices how “girls” are confined to pale pinks while “boys” get vibrant blues. She buys blue for her niece, only to be told that blue is for boys. This simple moment becomes an allegory for cultural conditioning—color has become a code for gender. She calls for ending the pink-blue binary and suggests organizing toys and clothes by type and color, not gender, because babies’ bodies are the same and should not be symbolically segregated.

Domestic Skills and Life Skills

Cooking, cleaning, and caring should not define femininity—they are human survival skills. Adichie points out that the ability to cook does not “come installed in a vagina.” Girls should learn to cook to live, just as men should. Instead of teaching daughters that marriage is a prize for domestic ability, teach both boys and girls that competence is dignity.

She then shares an example of a seven-year-old Nigerian girl fascinated by a toy helicopter but denied it because her mother said “you have your dolls.” That denial, though well-intentioned, limits discovery. The girl’s potential—perhaps as an engineer—was stifled by a gendered rule. (Psychologists like Carol Dweck highlight how early discouragement shapes lifelong self-concept—the same insight Adichie brings to life here.)

Freedom to Be Herself

The antidote to gender roles is individuality. “See her as an individual,” Adichie urges, “not as a girl who should be a certain way.” Teach self-reliance young—let her try to fix things, play with trains and dolls alike, and fail without shame. Feminism starts not by rejecting femininity but by expanding what “feminine” can include. In her storytelling, you feel the urgency of this lesson not as ideology but as tenderness—a push to let girls breathe freely beyond the cage of expectation.

When we strip away our unconscious language of “be nice” and “sit properly,” we open space for curiosity, courage, and authentic personality to flourish.

Adichie’s fourth suggestion—beware of “Feminism Lite”—is her sharpest critique of how society dilutes equality through politeness and permission. She argues that many modern narratives pretend to empower women while still anchoring them under male authority.

The Problem of ‘Allowing’ Women

“Feminism Lite” often celebrates men who “allow” women success. A newspaper once praised Prime Minister Theresa May’s husband for “allowing her to shine”—a phrase Adichie turns inside out. If reversed, it sounds absurd: did Theresa May “allow” her husband to shine? This reversal exposes the power imbalance embedded in everyday language. Permission implies hierarchy, and feminist progress cannot depend on benevolence from men in power.

Hidden Sexism in Polite Culture

Feminism Lite pretends equality exists while maintaining control “behind the scenes.” Adichie notes how even progressive men claim their wives secretly “run the home,” as if female power must be disguised. True equality wouldn’t need to be hidden or softened by metaphors like “neck and head”—it would be openly shared.

“A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl.”

Her indignation also reveals loneliness; she confesses to feeling angrier about sexism than about racism, because even her allies often fail to recognize gender injustice. (This mirrors Audre Lorde’s reflections on being marginalized within movements that claim equality.)

Power Should Be Transparent, Not Tolerated

We live in a world uncomfortable with powerful women. Adichie’s call to reject Feminism Lite means abandoning narratives that ask women to be humble, grateful, or charming in power. Those expectations reflect unease, not equality. Her advice to mothers is simple but radical: raise daughters who expect respect, not permission.

Feminism Lite doesn’t make room for real agency—it rewards compliance. Authentic feminism demands reciprocity, honesty, and the courage to question every sentence that hides a hierarchy under a smile.

Adichie dedicates her fifth and sixth suggestions to two tools of worldview formation: reading and language. For her, they are not mere educational tools—they are how culture is transmitted, questioned, and rebuilt.

Teach Her to Read Widely

Reading is freedom. Adichie urges Ijeawele to surround her daughter with books not tied to school but full of stories, history, and imagination. “If she were not to go to school,” she says, “and merely just read books, she would arguably become more knowledgeable.” Books teach girls that the world is large, complex, and open to interpretation. They allow escape and enable empathy. Adichie even jokes that paying her child five cents per page could be a worthy investment—anything to make reading habitual, because reading trains the mind for independence.

(This echoes Neil Gaiman’s argument in his 2013 reading advocacy speech: fiction teaches children to think differently, a skill vital for freedom.)

Question Language Itself

Language shapes bias. Adichie asks parents to monitor their words, because every phrase teaches value. Stop calling your daughter “princess,” for instance, because it implies fragility and rescue. Instead, call her “star,” “angel,” or “champion.” The metaphors we use either empower or confine. Similarly, she stops joking that girls are “old enough to find a husband”; instead, she says “old enough to find a job.”

Words like “allow,” “lady mechanic,” or commercials that applaud men simply for cooking—all expose the subtle sexism baked into everyday conversation. Children absorb hierarchy long before they can analyze it. Teaching them to notice and name those biases—without jargon like “patriarchy” or “misogyny”—creates intuitive awareness. Explain the unfairness with examples rather than abstract labels.

“Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.”

Through reading and speech, feminism becomes lived consciousness rather than rote ideology. Every bedtime story or casual comment becomes a seed for seeing the world differently.

In her seventh and eighth suggestions, Adichie explores two powerful social norms that shape women’s lives: marriage as achievement and the pressure to be likeable. These cultural expectations, she argues, are some of the most enduring obstacles to equality.

Marriage Is Not an Achievement

Adichie argues that girls are raised to aspire to marriage while boys are not, creating structural imbalance in adult relationships. Women carry the emotional and social weight of “making marriage work,” often at their own expense. She cites Hillary Clinton’s Twitter bio listing “wife” first, contrasted with Bill Clinton’s “founder.” The difference feels natural because society glorifies marital status in women but personal identity in men.

Adichie shares her own experience being renamed “Mrs. Husband’s Surname” by journalists—an act she refused because her name, she insists, is part of her selfhood. The societal obsession with “Mrs.” reflects how marriage changes a woman’s status but not a man’s. Her witty proposal: couples should choose a new mutual surname together so they both share the bureaucratic burden equally.

Reject Likeability

Girls are socialized to please others, to be agreeable, and to suppress their true feelings. Adichie recounts how a friend constantly told her not to say or do things because “people won’t like it.” This form of censorship keeps women trapped in smallness. Tell your daughter her worth is not measured by how much she is liked, but how fully she lives truthfully. Teach her kindness, yes—but also boundaries. If someone takes her toy, she should take it back. Consent, ownership, and self-respect grow from such simple lessons.

“We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have folded themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.”

In rejecting the cult of likeability, Adichie calls for authenticity over approval. Let your daughter’s courage matter more than her charm. As author Glennon Doyle writes in Untamed, “The braver she is, the freer you become.” Both voices converge: real empowerment means refusing to be small.

Adichie’s ninth and tenth suggestions explore identity and appearance—how culture and body image intertwine to shape belonging and self-confidence. She shows that fostering pride and individuality helps girls resist external validation.

Build Identity Deliberately

Teach children cultural pride while allowing them to question harmful traditions. Adichie wants Chizalum to grow into a proud Igbo woman, but one who distinguishes between beautiful and oppressive elements of her culture. Celebrate community and language while rejecting sexist taboos. This approach, she says, inoculates girls against internalizing inferiority, especially in a world saturated with Western images of beauty and power.

She urges parents to teach pride in African resilience and history—to balance the global images of whiteness dominating media. Through stories of black heroes and historical achievements, parents can create counter-narratives of dignity. (This aligns with Toni Morrison’s call to imagine blackness without apology.)

Appearance Without Shame

Adichie tackles the politics of beauty with humor and rebellion. Let girls enjoy fashion and makeup if they want, or ignore them if they don’t—feminism doesn’t equal rejecting femininity. The only rule is freedom. Appearance must never be linked to morality. A short skirt is not “immoral,” it’s just clothing. Such moral policing teaches shame, not ethics.

She also redefines “neat.” Nigerian schoolgirls are often punished for natural, curly hair. Adichie calls for redefining neatness as health and comfort rather than conformity. Loose plaits and natural styles are beautiful—and practical. Parents should challenge institutions enforcing beauty through pain. This small act of defiance teaches children that societal norms are negotiable, not absolute.

“Never link hair with pain, or clothes with morality.”

By surrounding her child with “a village” of inspiring women and men, Adichie promotes beauty as diversity. Love your culture, she says, but always with a lens of justice. Identity becomes both grounding and liberating when it’s chosen, not imposed.

Adichie’s twelfth and thirteenth suggestions—about sex and romance—push parents into territory often tinged with discomfort. But silence, she warns, only breeds shame. She wants girls to own their bodies and emotions without apology.

Talk About Sex Honestly

Instead of threats and guilt, teach sex as both physical and emotional. Children should know their bodies belong to them, not to social approval or male desire. Explain real consequences—pregnancy, emotion, safety—but without moral punishment. Give body parts proper names; secrecy about anatomy creates shame. “Vagina” should not be whispered; it’s normal biology. Adichie’s humor cuts tension: when a man compared menstruation to excrement, she quipped that periods are “sacred shit,” because humanity depends on them.

She dismantles cultural control over female sexuality, noting how societies claim women must cover up “to protect men.” That logic reduces women to props for male self-control. Every conversation about virginity, she says, is a conversation about shame—and therefore unhelpful. Reclaiming sex education becomes reclaiming dignity.

Romance and Reciprocity

When love arrives, it must be mutual. Teach daughters that love is both giving and expecting to receive. Too many women are trained to sacrifice endlessly while men are not. In rooms full of women, Adichie hears stories of betrayal and endurance, but few from men lamenting women. This imbalance begins early—when we teach girls to aspire to “a good husband” while boys are never told to aspire to “a good wife.”

“Love is the most important thing in life, but we raise only one half of the world to value it.”

Adichie’s feminism doesn’t reject love—it humanizes it. Teach girls that love should be a dialogue, not a performance; that marriage proposals can come from either gender; and that financial independence is not optional. Equality in intimacy builds equality everywhere else.

Adichie’s final suggestions emphasize humility and universality. To raise a feminist, teach her that oppression doesn’t make saints, and that human difference is normal, not superior or inferior. This turns feminism outward—from rights to compassion.

Oppression Does Not Require Saintliness

Social justice should not depend on moral perfection. Rural women deserve property rights not because they are saints, but because they are human. Women can be flawed, unkind, or selfish and still deserve equality. Adichie warns against idealizing the oppressed; doing so creates unrealistic standards and weakens feminist credibility. She acknowledges female misogyny and refusal of the label “feminist” as evidence of patriarchy’s reach, not proof of feminism’s failure.

Making Difference Ordinary

Teach children to accept diversity of thought, identity, and religion as ordinary facts of life. Difference needs no justification—it simply exists. Tell them some people are gay, some are not; some pray in mosques, others don’t pray at all. Avoid raising “non-judgmental” children who have no opinions; raise informed, humane thinkers who respect other paths while owning their own values.

“Teach her that difference is normal—the only necessary humility.”

In closing, Adichie emphasizes that feminism’s goal is not dominance but dignity. A feminist child learns to meet difference with curiosity instead of fear. This makes her adaptable, empathetic, and capable of shaping a fairer world. The manifesto’s tone turns gentle here—a mother’s blessing: may her daughter be healthy, happy, and herself.