Narrator: Imagine a nine-year-old girl in a primary school classroom in Nsukka, Nigeria. Her teacher announces that the student with the highest score on the upcoming test will be named the class monitor, a position of small but significant prestige. The girl, a bright and ambitious student, studies diligently and earns the top score. But when the teacher is ready to announce the monitor, she hesitates. She looks at the girl and says that she had forgotten to mention one detail: the monitor must be a boy. The role is then given to the boy with the second-highest score. The girl never forgot that moment—the first time she was explicitly told that because she was female, she was ineligible for something she had earned.

This small, stinging injustice is the seed from which a powerful global conversation grew. In her seminal work, We Should All Be Feminists, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses this personal memory and others like it to dismantle the complex, often misunderstood, and deeply necessary concept of feminism for the 21st century. She argues that the problem of gender is not a niche issue but a systemic one that limits the potential of everyone.

Narrator: Before Adichie can make her case for feminism, she must first address the word itself, which she notes is burdened with heavy and often negative baggage. Her first encounter with the term was not a moment of enlightenment but an accusation. At fourteen, during an argument with her dear friend Okoloma, he called her a "feminist." As she recalls, "It was not a compliment." The word was delivered with a tone that implied she was difficult, abnormal, and somehow un-African.

This experience was not an isolated one. Throughout her life, Adichie encountered a host of stereotypes attached to the label. A Nigerian journalist once advised her never to call herself a feminist, explaining that feminists are simply women who are "unhappy because they cannot find husbands." These misconceptions paint feminists as man-hating, angry, and fundamentally opposed to culture and tradition. To navigate this, Adichie humorously developed a series of qualifiers for herself, calling herself a "Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."

This satirical title highlights the absurdity of the stereotypes. Adichie argues that this negative baggage prevents many people, both men and women, from identifying with a movement whose core principle they might otherwise support. The first step, therefore, is to strip the word of these false connotations and understand what it truly means.

Narrator: The reason the nine-year-old Adichie was denied the role of class monitor was not because her teacher was a malicious person, but because the teacher was acting on a deeply ingrained and unexamined societal norm. Adichie argues that gender inequality is built and maintained through repetition. Small, everyday actions and assumptions, repeated over and over, create an architecture of bias that eventually seems natural and logical.

She illustrates this with a powerful anecdote from her adult life in Lagos. One evening, she went out with her friend Louis. A parking attendant theatrically helped them find a space, and as they were leaving, Adichie pulled out some money to tip him. She handed the cash directly to the attendant, but he took it, turned to Louis, and thanked him profusely. The attendant’s assumption was automatic: the money must have come from the man. It was inconceivable to him that a woman would be the one paying.

For Adichie, this was a familiar, if frustrating, experience. But for Louis, it was a revelation. He had never noticed this subtle form of erasure before. He had never considered that society is conditioned to see men as the default providers and actors, while women are often rendered invisible. This incident demonstrates how gender inequality operates not just in overt acts of discrimination, but in the silent, unconscious assumptions that shape our daily interactions and reinforce a world where men are seen as the primary source of power and money.

Narrator: A central argument in Adichie’s essay is that rigid gender roles are damaging not only to women but to men as well. Society, she explains, places boys inside what she calls a "hard, small cage" of masculinity. From a young age, boys are taught to suppress their emotions, to fear weakness, and to perform a narrow version of strength. Their egos are made fragile, requiring constant validation and positioning them as the ones who must always be in charge. This cage stifles their humanity and emotional range.

Simultaneously, we teach girls the opposite. Adichie states, "We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller." They are conditioned to be likable, to suppress their ambition so as not to intimidate others, particularly men. They are taught that their success is a potential threat to male egos and that their ultimate goal should be marriage.

Adichie shares the story of an American female executive who took over a managerial position from a man known for being a "tough go-getter." When she disciplined an employee for the exact same kind of infraction her predecessor would have, the employee complained to upper management that she was "aggressive" and "difficult to work with." The same behavior praised in a man was condemned in a woman. This double standard creates an impossible situation for women in leadership: they are expected to be competent but not too assertive, strong but not threatening. Both the cage of masculinity and the pressure on women to shrink create a world where no one is free to be their full, authentic self.

Narrator: After deconstructing the stereotypes and illustrating the harms of gender inequality, Adichie offers a clear path forward. She returns to the dictionary, where she found a simple definition: "Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes." This is the foundation. It is not about female superiority but about balance and equal rights.

However, she offers her own, even more direct definition, one born from her experiences. For her, a feminist is simply someone who looks at the world and says, "Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better." This definition is not an accusation but an observation and a call to action. It reframes feminism as a movement of constructive change, not of anger for its own sake. Adichie argues that while anger is a perfectly valid and human response to injustice, the ultimate goal is to build a better, fairer world.

This requires raising both boys and girls differently, focusing on ability instead of gender, on interest instead of expectation. It means creating a world where a woman’s success is not a threat to a man, and a man’s vulnerability is not a sign of failure. It is a vision of a world where all individuals are freer.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from We Should All Be Feminists is that feminism is not a fringe ideology for a select few but a fundamental human rights issue that concerns everyone. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie masterfully strips away the political and cultural baggage from the term, revealing a simple, undeniable truth: the world as it is currently structured by gender is unjust and limits us all. Her argument is not a war against men or tradition, but a powerful and personal plea for a world where our daughters are not taught to shrink and our sons are not confined to emotional cages.

The true power of this short book lies in its ability to make the systemic personal. It challenges us to look beyond grand theories and notice the small, everyday moments—the parking attendant, the classroom monitor, the language we use around marriage and success—where inequality is perpetuated. The ultimate question Adichie leaves us with is not whether we are feminists, but whether we are willing to see the problem and commit, in our own ways, to doing better.