How To Raise A Feminist

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a writer, a mother, a thinker, and a fashion icon—an all-in-one woman of the modern world. And she won’t have it any other way.

- Marianna Cerini

Her 2012 TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists” counts more than four million views on YouTube. It was adapted into a New York Times bestseller, and turned into a slogan touted by Christian Dior in its spring 2017 collection. Now, her latest book is being hailed as a “feminist blueprint” for how to raise a feminist daughter.

Is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the feminist icon of the 21st century?

Ask anyone familiar with the author and you’ll get a resolute, collective yes. But Adichie herself? She has a rather different answer. “No, I am not,” she says. “I have become a voice of modern feminism, I’ll concede that, even though it wasn’t at all intended. But I am not an icon, nor a leading figure of any kind. I just speak my mind.”

But she speaks it with an eloquence and purpose that has made her work reverberate across countries and diverse audiences. Which makes her, if not an icon, certainly one of the most remarkable women in contemporary culture today.

“I am, simply, a writer,” she insists. “And a person who, for her entire life, has felt very strongly about how women are treated in the world.”

Born in 1977 in eastern Nigeria, Adichie grew up in Nsukka, a university town, the fifth of six children. Despite the predominantly patriarchal nature of Nigerian culture, her household was a progressive one: her father was a professor of statistics and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria; her mother was the university’s first female registrar. They were open, kind parents, Adichie says, “who allowed me to follow my own path.”