Should we raise our daughters Feminists when gender roles are already in their favour?

A response to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book: Dear Ijeawele, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

One thing modern Feminism seems to gloss over is the fact that the societal constructs for gender are heavily swayed in the favour of women. The disposability of men has been ingrained in our interpersonal relations not because women are the weaker sex but because of the life bearing power that only women possess. Women have the ability to bear and carry children meaning that in any given circumstance they ought to be protected because if not for the safe guarding of women, our species could become extinct. In extreme circumstances involving life or death, women and children’s lives are always put first over men for this very reason. That being said, we have gotten to the stage in our evolution that we are not under immediate threat of going extinct so these lines of gender hierarchy are blurred.

Men in the past have had to be bread winners for the family while women are the child rearers but these roles have been exacerbated meaning on the one hand that men who can afford to tend to become polygamous, either officially or unofficially, which is not in and of itself an issue depending on which religious construct has dictated this. On the other hand, because of the biological makeup of the genders the role for men was to be the hunter, it has meant that contemporarily women who need to fend for themselves and earn have issues in the workplace such as maternity leave and finding someone to rear the children and in some cases even deal with a pay gap. These are some of the reasons for the growth of Feminism, but I write this essay to draw attention to the fact that the original untainted gender roles in society are in favour of women and we should remember this when considering how to emotionally train our children. Feminism is a way that women demand rights when they already have an intrinsic right over men. Chimamada Ngozi Adichie was broaching this topic, when in an interview with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show that caused controversy amongst Nigerians, she recently and infamously said that she doesn’t believe men should open the doors for women simply based on the act of chivalry. Chivalry is birthed from the construct of the disposability of men. Men are supposed to put women first while putting themselves last, obliging themselves to be courteous to women showing them intrinsic respect because of the hierarchy of the genders (as I spelt out earlier), not because they are weaker as Chimamanda mentioned. There is of course the issue that respect should not be gender based and women should also have respect for men and there is of cause flaws in the way that chivalry plays out because women are trained from a young age to believe they are on a pedestal.

Chimamanda in her book mainly deals with the training of women, the beauty and burden of motherhood, the goal of marriage for women as a negative reinforcement while trying to get rid of gender roles. In her book she

mentions some of the gender roles that are negative for women: “it is funny… that we are still talking about cooking as some kind of marriageability test for women” but what she does not mention or consider is that there are aspects of gender roles that are in favour of women. The flaw in Chimamanda’s writing is perspective: Chimamanda’s feminism doesn’t talk about the male perspective at all, how men have been catering to the needs of women and putting themselves last, it only talks about the misfortunes of gender roles on women such as domesticating women because of their conditioning of being the home keeper as an extension of looking after the children and what this means for courting for marriage. This consideration does not take into the reasons this has come to be and gives her book the feel of a series of complaints about Nigerian society rather than a balanced assessment of how the roles are and what needs to be done to balance out the misfortunes for both males and females. The lack of a holistic consideration further perpetuates the placing of women on pedestals, further willing women to put themselves first over men.

Another way that child rearing is already in favour of girls, which Chimamanda does not consider in her book, is the clear difference that male and female children are trained to deal with their emotions that ultimately affects and reflects in the emotional welfare as well as the relational skills of the two genders later in life. An example of this is when a female child (not baby) is crying she is consoled and petted while a male child is given a time limit and chided for crying. Males are supposed to be strong and not vocalise their emotions while females are much more in touch with their emotions. Later in life in relationships, females then learn to wear their hearts on their sleeves which puts them at an advantage over men; men are made to look after the emotional wellbeing of their significant other but male’s often are left to deal with issues on their own by their families or because of their own lack of ability to share their feelings. In Chimamanda’s book she tends to deal with the superficial aspects of what needs to be done to raise a female child but she does not take into account the emotional rearing of a child, and how this compares between a female and a male. Taking this further would have helped in posing a stance on how a feminist striving for equality would also strive for emotionally balancing between the sexes.