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WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie New York: Anchor Books, 2015
REVIEWED BY LAUREN FORNIER
We Should All Be Feminists is a pocket-sized book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that functions as a non-academic defence of feminism. Adichie writes this essay from the perspective of her experience as a woman based out of contemporary Nigeria and America. Following the thesis established by the book's title, the form and the content ofthis book are intended to make feminism-as a term of self-identification and as a social and political movement-accessible to a mass audience. Adichie uses anecdotal evidence to make her argument that gender-based discriminations persist in contemporary life, and that feminism is needed to actively face "the problem ofgender." Adichie directly reasons with those who say that feminism is no longer needed today. She chooses examples that resonate with a wide readership; the informal tone and straightforward language suits an audience that might not be accustomed to thinking critically about gender.
While Adichie took up the issue of male violence against women in her 2003 novel Purple Hibiscus, the moments of gender-based discrimination that she illustrates in We Should All Be Feminists are less explicitly violent and therefore...