We should.

This would make a nice gift to a lot of people in all our lives. It’s not radical, it’s not even that transgressive, but it is clear and succinct.

This essay, which I listened to the author read, is a perfect distillation of the goals and tenets of feminism, while even addressing the hangups so many people have with the word itself.

It’s not a perfect text, but it is a well-reasoned and carefully argued text that has layers of argument embedded within it. If you were to give this to someone who was actually looking to consider what feminism is and what it means, and were willing to actually look into it, this book would be a good way to challenge their worldview in stark and confrontational ways, but not aggressive or wonky.

There’s still a lot of consideration to make toward various kinds of intersectionality of course, but the goals of this essays are simply to have people confront word and idea behind the concept and not necessarily deal with all the ends of outs.

Adichie focuses her argument from the perspective of Nigerian(Igbo) culture and uses what seem like overly simplistic but recognizable examples of the issues regarding gender inequality. She does a good job tackling the pushback about the word “feminism” versus something like “humanism” and she even deals with the seeds of intersectionality, especially in terms of talking with her contemporaries about how you cannot divide identity.

It’s a short book. And that’s a good thing. When your target graduates beyond this, maybe something like bell hooks’s Feminism for Everybody is the logical next step. But when looking for a primer in the basic ideals of a more mainstream kind of feminism, here you go.