Dear Ijeawele,

What joy. And what lovely names: Chizalum Adaora. She is so beautiful. Only a week old and
she already looks curious about the world. What a magnificent thing you have done, bringing a
human being into the world. ‘Congratulations’ feels too slight.
Your note made me cry. You know how I get foolishly emotional sometimes. Please know
that I take your charge – how to raise her feminist – very seriously. And I understand what you
mean by not always knowing what the feminist response to situations should be. For me,
feminism is always contextual. I don’t have a set-in-stone rule; the closest I have to a formula
are my two ‘Feminist Tools’ and I want to share them with you as a starting point.
The first is your premise, the solid unbending belief that you start off with. What is your
premise? Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only’. Not ‘as long
as’. I matter equally. Full stop.
The second tool is a question: can you reverse X and get the same results?
For example: many people believe that a woman’s feminist response to a husband’s
infidelity should be to leave. But I think staying can also be a feminist choice, depending on the
context. If Chudi sleeps with another woman and you forgive him, would the same be true if
you slept with another man? If the answer is yes, then your choosing to forgive him can be a
feminist choice because it is not shaped by a gender inequality. Sadly, the reality in most
marriages is that the answer to that question would often be no, and the reason would be
gender-based – that absurd idea of ‘men will be men’, which means having a much lower
standard for men.
I have some suggestions for how to raise Chizalum. But remember that you might do all the
things I suggest, and she will still turn out to be different from what you hoped, because
sometimes life just does its thing. What matters is that you try. And always trust your instincts
above all else, because you will be guided by your love for your child.
Here are my suggestions:

First Suggestion

Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by
motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that. The pioneering American
journalist Marlene Sanders, who was the first woman to report from Vietnam during the war
(and who was the mother of a son), 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 your child.’
I find this to be so wise and moving. You don’t even have to love your job; you can merely
love what your job does for you – the confidence and self-fulfilment that come with doing and
earning.
It doesn’t surprise me that your sister-in-law says you should be a ‘traditional’ mother and
stay home, that Chudi can afford not to have a double-income family.
People will selectively use ‘tradition’ to justify anything. Tell her that a double-income
family is actually the true Igbo tradition because not only did mothers farm and trade before
British colonialism, trading was exclusively done by women in some parts of Igboland. She
would know this if reading books were not such an alien enterprise to her. OK, that snark was
to cheer you up. I know you are annoyed – and you should be – but it is really best to ignore
her. Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you
want for yourself, and not what others want you to want. Please reject the idea that motherhood
and work are mutually exclusive.
Our mothers worked full-time while we were growing up, and we turned out well – at least
you did; the jury is still out on me.
In these coming weeks of early motherhood, be kind to yourself. Ask for help. Expect to be
helped. There is no such thing as a Superwoman. Parenting is about practice – and love. (I do
wish, though, that ‘parent’ had not been turned into a verb, which I think is the root of the global
middle-class phenomenon of ‘parenting’ as one endless, anxious journey of guilt.)
Give yourself room to fail. A new mother does not necessarily know how to calm a crying
baby. Don’t assume that you should know everything. Read books, look things up on the
Internet, ask older parents, or just use trial and error. But above all, let your focus be on
remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as ‘doing it all’. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are
able to ‘do it all’ but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the
debate about women ‘doing it all’ because it is a debate that assumes that care-giving and
domestic work are singularly female domains, an idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and
care-giving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can ‘do it
all’ but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

Second Suggestion

Do it together. Remember in primary school we learned that a verb was a ‘doing’ word? Well,
a father is as much a verb as a mother. Chudi should do everything that biology allows – which
is everything but breastfeeding. Sometimes mothers, so conditioned to be all and do all, are
complicit in diminishing the role of fathers. You might think that Chudi will not bathe her
exactly as you’d like, that he might not wipe her bum as perfectly as you do. But so what? What
is the worst that can happen? She won’t die at the hands of her father. Seriously. He loves her.
It’s good for her to be cared for by her father. So look away, arrest your perfectionism, still
your socially conditioned sense of duty. Share child care equally. ‘Equally’ of course depends
on you both, and you will have to work it out, paying equal attention to each person’s needs. 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 please reject the language of help. Chudi is not ‘helping’ you by caring for his child. He
is doing what he should. When we say fathers are ‘helping’, we are suggesting that child care is
a mother’s territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not. Can you imagine how many
more people today would be happier, more stable, better contributors to the world, if only their
fathers had been actively present in their childhood? And never say that Chudi is ‘babysitting’ –
people who babysit are people for whom the baby is not a primary responsibility.
Chudi does not deserve any special gratitude or praise, nor do you – you both made the
choice to bring a child into the world, and the responsibility for that child belongs equally to
you both. It would be different if you were a single mother, whether by circumstance or choice,
because ‘doing it together’ would then not be an option. But you should not be a ‘single mother’
unless you are truly a single mother.
My friend Nwabu once told me that because his wife left when his kids were young, he
became ‘Mr Mum’, by which he meant that he did the daily care-giving. But he was not being a
‘Mr Mum’; he was simply being a dad.

Third Suggestion

Teach her that the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she
should or should not do something because she is a girl.
‘Because you are a girl’ is never a reason for anything. Ever.
I remember being told as a child to ‘bend down properly while sweeping, like a girl’. Which
meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish I had been told simply, ‘bend down and
sweep properly because you’ll clean the floor better’. And I wish my brothers had been told
the same thing.
There have been recent Nigerian social media debates about women and cooking, about how
wives have to cook for husbands. It is funny, in the way that sad things are funny, that we are
still talking about cooking as some kind of marriageability test for women.
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.
We also need to question the idea of marriage as a prize to women, because that is the basis
of these absurd debates. If we stop conditioning women to see marriage as a prize, then we
would have fewer debates about a wife needing to cook in order to earn that prize.
It is interesting to me how early the world starts to invent gender roles. Yesterday I went to a
children’s shop to buy Chizalum an outfit. In the girls’ section were pale creations in washed-
out shades of pink. I disliked them. The boys’ section had outfits in vibrant shades of blue.
Because I thought blue would be adorable against her brown skin – and photograph better – I
bought one. At the checkout counter, the cashier said mine was the perfect present for the new
boy. I said it was for a baby girl. She looked horrified. ‘Blue for a girl?’
I cannot help but wonder about the clever marketing person who invented this pink-blue
binary. There was also a ‘gender-neutral’ section, with its array of bloodless greys. ‘Gender-
neutral’ is silly because it is premised on the idea of male being blue and female being pink and
‘gender-neutral’ being its own category. Why not just have baby clothes organized by age and
displayed in all colours? The bodies of male and female infants are similar, after all.
I looked at the toy section, which was also arranged by gender. Toys for boys are mostly
active, and involve some sort of doing – trains, cars – and toys for girls are mostly passive and
are overwhelmingly dolls. I was struck by this. I had not quite realized how early society starts
to invent ideas of what a boy should be and what a girl should be.
I wished the toys had been arranged by type, rather than by gender.
Did I ever tell you about going to a US mall with a seven-year-old Nigerian girl and her
mother? She saw a toy helicopter, one of those things that fly by wireless remote control, and
she was fascinated and asked for one. ‘No,’ her mother said. ‘You have your dolls.’ And she
responded, ‘Mummy, is it only dolls I will play with?’
I have never forgotten that. Her mother meant well, obviously. She was well versed in the
ideas of gender roles – that girls play with dolls and boys with helicopters. I wonder now,
wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been
given a chance to explore that helicopter.
If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to
reach their full potential. Please see Chizalum as an individual. Not as a girl who should be a
certain way. See her weaknesses and her strengths in an individual way. Do not measure her on
a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.
A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved ‘like a boy’ – she
liked football and was bored by dresses – until her mother forced her to stop her ‘boyish’
interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story
made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I
wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called ‘behaving like a boy’ was
simply behaving like herself.
Another acquaintance, an American living in the Pacific Northwest, once told me that when
she took her one-year-old son to a baby playgroup, where babies had been brought by their
mothers, she noticed that the mothers of baby girls were very restraining, constantly telling the
girls ‘don’t touch’ or ‘stop and be nice’, and she noticed that the baby boys were encouraged to
explore more and were not restrained as much and were almost never told to ‘be nice’. Her
theory was that 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.
Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us that we will often follow them even when they
chafe against our true desires, our needs, our happiness. They are very difficult to unlearn, and
so it is important to try to make sure that Chizalum rejects them from the beginning. Instead of
letting her internalize the idea of gender roles, teach her self-reliance. Tell her that it is
important to be able to do for herself and fend for herself. Teach her to try to fix physical things
when they break. We are quick to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her try. She might not
fully succeed, but let her try. Buy her toys like blocks and trains – and dolls, too, if you want to.

Fourth Suggestion

Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equality.
Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing and bankrupt idea. 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.
Feminism Lite uses analogies like ‘he is the head and you are the neck’. Or ‘he is driving but
you are in the front seat’. More troubling is the idea, in Feminism Lite, that men are naturally
superior but should be expected to ‘treat women well’. No. No. No. There must be more than
male benevolence as the basis for a woman’s well-being.
Feminism Lite uses the language of ‘allowing’. Theresa May is the British prime minister
and here is how a progressive British newspaper described her husband: ‘Philip May is known
in politics as a man who has taken a back seat and allowed his wife, Theresa, to shine.’
Allowed.
Now let us reverse it. Theresa May has allowed her husband to shine. Does it make sense? If
Philip May were prime minister, perhaps we might hear that his wife had ‘supported’ him from
the background, or that she was ‘behind’ him, or that she’d ‘stood by his side’, but we would
never hear that she had ‘allowed’ him to shine.
Allow is a troubling word. Allow is about power. You will often hear members of the
Nigerian chapter of the Society of Feminism Lite say, ‘Leave the woman alone to do what she
wants as long as her husband allows.’