The Evolution and Changes in Feminism from Mary Wollstonecraft to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Written by: Karla Špiranec (FFOS)

Issue 3 (May 2018)

“Word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage,” is a sentence found among the first few pages of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay We Should All Be Feminists, which is focused on feminism in the twenty first century. Mary Wollstonecraft had never uttered the word feminism, yet she is still considered one of the first feminist writers due to openly voicing the struggles women were constantly facing in the eighteenth century. Both Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Adichie, in We Should All Be Feminists, discuss very similar points and questions regarding the rights of and prejudices towards women which is why this paper is going to focus on whether the treatment of women has changed since the eighteenth century up until today.

Although women were oppressed in every aspect of their social and private lives, Wollstonecraft started with the simplest and most needed change; she wanted women to have the right to education. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft claims that by not having proper education, women “are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species” (71). Wollstonecraft states that just because women have less physical strength than men, they should not be regarded as less intelligent. She criticises the ignorance of education in favour of beauty. In this statement it is visible that Wollstonecraft “perceives the rational and independent male as the model that women should be allowed to approach” (Gerson 798). Adichie, just like Wollstonecraft, irrevocably admits that men are naturally stronger, but she stops at that because according to her that is the only advantage they truly have. She does not comment on the lack of education for women today because that is not the case but openly recalls a situation in her life in which she lost a position in class to a boy just because the teacher thought it was obvious that only boys were qualified enough to carry it out. So even though women are not excluded anymore, there are still places where they are denied positions just because they are not male. Similarly to this, Adichie states how “in the US, a man and a woman are doing the same job, with the same qualifications, and the man is paid more because he is a man” (17). She then explains how this made sense a thousand years ago because then “physical strength was the most important attribute for survival” (Adichie 17), but as today’s world is different, a person qualified to lead is “the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative person” (Adichie 18), no matter which gender. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie through this essay (and all her novels) shows how important she is for Nigerian literature because Nigerian authors and critics often claim how their literature is “phallic, dominated as it is by male writers and male critics who deal almost exclusively with male characters and male concerns, naturally aimed at a predominantly male audience” (qtd. in Hewett 77).

Based on her observations of the society she was living in and watching how women were being treated, Wollstonecraft says that:

In the middle rank of life, to continue the comparison, men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously. (129)

With that statement she acknowledges how different values of men and women were in the eighteenth century. Men were the ones who had to be focused on education and business and the only thing women had to do was find a husband, and after they had done that, they had no other tasks but to live with him and render themselves “a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself” (Wollstonecraft 91). Although today’s society’s levels of equality are not as bad as they used to be, one of Adichie’s main and probably most important points focuses on marriage, moreover on how just because they are female, women are immediately expected to aspire to marriage. She says how she is “expected to make her life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important” (Adichie 29). Not even today are women allowed to reject the idea of marriage, because if they do, they will not be seen as real women anymore. Onward, Adichie also questions “why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don’t teach boys to do the same?” (29). Women are put under so much pressure to fit in, to find a husband, to have children and that often leads to them making some terrible choices they could regret later, and that is all because, as Adichie says, “Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick” (30). Wollstonecraft mentions how only men were educated and supposed to work because women were not supposed to do anything except be pretty and quiet. She calls men out for being scared to give women the same education they get, and says how they should not have a problem with women getting education because if women really are less intelligent, they will still stay inferior to men. Adichie’s essay shows how society today is not that far away from subordinating women in a very similar way. Adichie says how society teaches girls “to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller” (27) and she criticizes that same society for saying to girls that they “should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man” (Adichie 27). So although women today do not have to be just pretty and quiet, according to society, they also should not be too ambitious or too loud or too independent because that will scare off all potential husbands who do not want to be emasculated.

Looking back at women’s rights and their treatment in the eighteenth century, changes are visible but all those changes are made in small fragments and not even one problem has been eradicated completely. Women are allowed to get education but are still held back from certain positions just because they are female. They are allowed to reject the idea of marriage but they will be stigmatized for it. At one point in the essay, Wollstonecraft asks if a woman can truly believe that she was only made to submit to a man, if she can consent to be occupied merely to please him, and the answer is no. She cannot and she should not. Women should not have to feel guilty for being female just because someone might think less of them because of their gender. Changes all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people are getting included in the feminist movement. Hopefully, in the near future, most of the struggles women are still facing will be in the past.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. Fourth Estate, 2014

Gerson, Gal. “Liberal Feminism: Individuality and Oppositions in Wollstonecraft and Mill.” Political Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2002, pp. 794-810.

Hewett, Heather. “Coming of Age: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voice of the Third Generation.” English in Africa, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 73-97.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 71-149