Inspirational Woman
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can
have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful.
Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to
marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the
most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do
we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see
each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing,
but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that
boys are.”
“Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.
“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by
me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
“It's not your job to be likeable it's your job to be yourself”
“Teach her to question language”
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“I would tell her never apologize for the space you occupy in the world. Make your strides long,
wide, and sure”
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“We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being
born female, they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence
themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow
up--and this is the worst thing we do to girls--they grow up to be women who have turned
pretense into an art form.”
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-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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text for inspirational women drawing
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, as the fifth out of six children. At the age of nineteen Chimamanda moved to the United States. She is an accomplished scholar. She was given a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and then attended Eastern Connecticut State University and obtained a degree in communication and political science. She was also a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, has an MA in African studies from Yale, and was awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and from Harvard university.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written several critically acclaimed books and poems. She is also well known for her numerous TED talks one of which was featured in a Beyonce song. She has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant, Women's prize for fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. Although, I have read many of her books but my absolute favourite is “Americanah”.
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Her books make us think of and discuss issues like feminism, race, privilege, and gender.
