Feminism

I recently heard a TEDx talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who is the author of Americanah and Half of a yellow sun among other novels, about feminism which really caught my attention. As she quite eloquently put in her talk the word feminism itself is heavy with baggage maybe because the forerunners of the feminism movement went to extremes to try and prove a point, some even today are accused of bigotry and for seeking to put women's rights above men's and not seeking equality at all. I am not sure when and how but all I know is that somehow and at some point feminism left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouth, without a thorough appreciation of what it was all about including me to some extent.

Without fully understanding the initial point of feminism, I proclaimed myself a feminist at the age of 12 and decided that boys were treated better and it wasn't fair because girls were even better,the problem with that is, its like the red shirt analogy if you are not looking for them in a crowd you don't notice how many they are, but if you make it a point of looking for the red shirts you begin to see them everywhere and before long you miss everything else and they are all you see.

Adichie introduces a new idea and perspective of an old concept in this essay, what I believe was the initial intention of feminism. Although men and women are created differently and have different functions there should be equal pay for equal work and equal recognition for equal achievements. Adichie argues that maybe we enable sexism and inequality by the way we raise our kids and by what we accept as culture, from caressing men's egos and by teaching girls how to.

Maybe if we raise our children to recognize that all humans are equal and that no one person is better than the other and no task is beyond a particular sex, that we all, men and women can achieve what we set in our minds to do there would be no need for extremism in both directions.

By doing this we would have achieved true feminism and its original intention to support and be the advocate of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

So what do you think of Adichie's argument? Should we all be feminists?