Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“Dear Ijeawele” is an example of epistolary, meaning it was written in the form of a letter. This format testifies to the fact that this book is based on a real correspondence between the author and her close friend, Ijeawele. However, there is no reason why, in principle, it had to have been written in this format—it could have been written simply as a list of 15 principles aimed at parents. The fact that Adichie chose to keep the original format is a significant aspect of the book from voice to content, as well as how we interpret its suggestions.

The main advantage of the epistolary format is its ability to speak in a deeply intimate and personal voice, which places it in stark contrast to academic-style writing. The simple, clear prose gives the impression of a conversation more than it does a typical philosophical essay, and it’s far more accessible for that reason. The fact that it’s an informal piece of writing addressed to a friend means that, even when she writes about heavy subjects like oppression and discrimination, the tone remains positive and friendly. She manages to weave humor and light-hearted personal anecdotes between her more serious points. What further differentiates her book from more academic works of feminism is that her suggestions tend to focus on constructive, actionable advice, which is always grounded in specific situations.

The familiar tone of voice creates an automatic sense of kinship between author and reader. Her use of the second person “you” as well as the way she frequently starts her passages with the phrase “remember when…” both serve to address the reader directly and draw the reader into the work. The way Adichie opens the book with the line “your note made me cry. You know how I get foolishly emotional sometimes” expresses the author’s vulnerability from the very beginning and builds an emotional bridge with the reader (7).

Her relentless humor and positivity, her willingness to concede her own failings, her unwillingness to lay blame on individuals, and the fact that she frames her points a “suggestions” rather than imperatives, all serve to disarm a hostile reader and invite them to reflect freely on the points she makes.

Consideration of the work’s target audience offers important analytical context. Just as in her fiction, Adichie’s nonfiction writing is characterized by a sort of balancing act in who she’s addressing. On the one hand, Adichie originally wrote the letter for a specific person, and this shines through in some of the anecdotes, which can get embarrassingly personal and verge on critical. For example, when advising Ijeawele to surround her daughter with good male role models she says, “this will be harder, judging from the kind of friends Chudi [Ijeawele’s husband] has” (46). On the other hand, the scope of the book manages to transcend specificity by addressing problems experienced by women and girls all across the globe.

There is another dimension to this balancing act, and that is the way she manages to speak to both the Nigerian and US experience simultaneously, and in the process, enact a kind of encounter between these two cultures. There are very few anecdotes from her childhood in Nigeria that aren’t also relatable to the US context. When, for example, Adichie relates how her mother admonished her for not sweeping “like a girl,” it’s hard not to hear the echo of similar censures issued by American mothers: “sit straight, be nice, behave like a girl.” Even where the two cultures differ, in explaining their difference, she breaks down the wall of “otherness” and makes them comprehensible to each other.

While the book is broadly relevant to parents across different contexts, not all of the suggestions Adichie offers are applicable to everyone in every situation. This shouldn’t be a surprise given what she says in the introduction to the book: “feminism is always contextual” (7).

Suggestion number 9, for instance, which calls for Chizalum to learn a sense of pride in her identity, refers specifically to the situation of an Igbo child growing up in an imbalanced media environment. Adichie suggests that it might be necessary to be more deliberate about introducing Chizalum to Black writers and Black role models in order to counteract negative stereotypes of African people and Blackness that she’s likely to encounter in the media. This suggestion will be most relevant to parents of non-white children growing up in the US or other western countries.

Other suggestions are relevant to raising girls in almost any context. For example, the suggestions about teaching girls not to find sex shameful, to aspire to marriage, or to be “likable,” are directed specifically at girls and only girls. That’s because these suggestions are all about redressing disparities in the way girls are raised relative to boys; we don’t raise boys to find sex shameful or to be likable, so there’s nothing to redress in the case of boys.

However, some of the suggestions are more general in nature and could be applied to the raising of boys as well as girls. The first two suggestions—not identifying too strongly with motherhood and sharing domestic and child-raising labor equally—could go a long way in deconstructing gender roles in the minds of young boys. The third suggestion, about not placing the straitjacket of gender expectations onto our children also implies that we shouldn’t force boys to behave ‘like boys’ either. If we give boys the freedom to express themselves emotionally, to learn skills like cooking and caring, and to pursue whatever interests them without the limitations of masculine gender expectations, then boys will also enjoy greater possibilities to thrive and succeed as well.

In this sense, the book functions as much as a parenting manual as it does a feminist manifesto. At the end of the day, the suggestions in this book are not aimed just at raising girls, but rather at raising all children—girls and boys alike—in a way that enables them to fully develop their capacities and maximize their potential. Doing that, according to Adichie, just happens to mean rejecting the arbitrary constraints that gender roles place on children.

The implication here is that raising girls as feminists does not mean raising them to be a certain kind of person, i.e., someone who avows feminism, but rather raising them in a way that doesn’t put arbitrary limits on their development. Raising girls to be feminist and raising girls to be fully developed, independent, free-thinking individuals, to Adichie, is the same thing.