Best selling and award winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, wrote the book a couple of years ago after delivering it as a TED talk. She was raised in Nigeria but now divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Chimamanda believes we all should be feminists and promote feminism all over the world. Why, you may wonder, should we do that? Following are a couple of examples - not from her book - but from the news this past week.
- Today we learned that Japan and South Korea reached an agreement to end the controversy over the Korean women who were used in brothels as comfort women in World War II. By "comfort women" they mean sex slaves (200,000 of them) who were provided to Japanese troops. By "brothels" they mean being shipped everywhere to instantly provide sex in, most often, brutal situations.
- Right here in Central Florida, today, I have friends who are working with young girls who are sex slaves. Many of them runaways, they are kidnapped, drugged, beaten and brutally raped to condition them to life on the street, controlled by pimps.
- I read two stories this past week about girls who were sent to study in France, being seduced by ISIS members, impregnated and sent to Syria. After having their babies it's almost impossible to leave.
What does this have to do with feminism? Feminism is about respect. It begins at home.
A couple of weeks ago, when the word came down that American women can now "legally" be engaged in combat in our armed forces, I read several of our newspaper's irate letters to the editor. One was written by a (I'm sure loving) father and ended by asking if you would let your daughter go into combat,
All I could think about is how, for centuries, parents have been proudly sending their sons off to war. How can we say to our grown daughters, who have the skill, training, determination and the legal right that they cannot.
I love this quote from the book:
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.
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