Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

You don’t even have to love your job; you can merely love what your job does for you—the confidence and self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning.

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.

Teach her that the idea of “gender roles” is absolute nonsense.

“Because you are a girl” is never a reason for anything. Ever.

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.

I cannot help but wonder about the clever marketing person who invented this pink-blue binary.

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.

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.

If she were not to go to school, and merely just read books, she would arguably become more knowledgeable than a conventionally educated child. Books will help her understand and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in whatever she wants to become—a chef, a scientist, a singer, all benefit from the skills that reading brings. I do not mean schoolbooks. I mean books that have nothing to do with school, autobiographies and novels and histories. If all else fails, pay her to read.

Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.”

Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement.

“Mrs.” is a title I dislike because Nigerian society gives it too much value. I have observed too many cases of men and women who proudly speak of the title of Mrs. as though those who are not Mrs. have somehow failed at something.

Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.

Never, ever link Chizalum’s appearance with morality. Never tell her that a short skirt is “immoral.” Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.

I cannot overstate the power of alternatives. She can counter ideas about static “gender roles” if she has been empowered by her familiarity with alternatives. If she knows an uncle who cooks well—and does so with indifference—then she can smile and brush off the foolishness of somebody who claims that “women must do the cooking.”

But if we truly depended on biology as the root of social norms, then children would be identified as their mother’s rather than their father’s because when a child is born, the parent we are biologically—and incontrovertibly—certain of is the mother. We assume the father is who the mother says the father is. How many lineages all over the world are not biological, I wonder?

Most childhood development experts say it is best to have children call sexual organs by their proper biological names—vagina and penis.

Periods are nothing to be ashamed of. Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist.

what I hope for Chizalum is this: that she will be full of opinions, and that her opinions will come from an informed, humane, and broad-minded place.