We Should All Be Feminist — Chimamanda Adichie — Nigerian Writer Ted Talk

You have almost certainly heard the word “feminist” used as an insult before it was ever used as a description. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie opens her talk with exactly that memory — a childhood friend using the word the way you would call someone a supporter of something shameful. What she builds from that one memory is not an argument about anger; it is an argument about law, custom, and the ordinary rules a society enforces on people without ever writing them down.

In two minutes

Adichie's talk argues that gender inequality is not maintained mainly by law but by culture and socialisation — the unwritten rules that assign ambition, money, marriage and even cooking to one sex and not the other — and that because culture is something people make, not something fixed, it can be remade.

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