Letter to Ms. Adichie (Isabella Ciriaco)

March 25, 2024

Dear Ms. Adichie,

My name is Isabella, I’m 27 years old and I was born in São Paulo, Brazil. We have different backgrounds, but there is one thing that bond us: we are women. And being a woman in man’s world is somehow have the certainty that we are all going to share the feeling of impotence and the burden of gender expectations at least once in our lives.

After listening to your speech “We should all be feminists”, many ideas came to my mind. First, it upsets me deeply the fact that you delivered this powerful lecture in 2013, and since then (more than ten years later) so little has actually changed. The misconceptions of feminism you encountered and mentioned in your speech are still around and alive. The gender expectations are still a burden that I, and all the other women in the world, need to carry. Listening to your words made me remember of my own father saying that companies “should not hire women because women get pregnant, and this causes financial losses”. But then, when I tell him I do not wish to be a mother ever, he gets upset and says that “I should think about family”. Now, I don’t want to portrait my dad as an evil man, he is the result of a society who reinforces the roles men and women have. And for him, me not wanting to fulfill my “role” as a woman can lead to my unhappiness.

Another part of your speech that hit me really hard is when you said, “we raise girls to see each other as competitors not for job or for accomplishment, which I think could be a good thing, but for attention of men”. I immediately thought of a younger version of myself, changing my whole personality and appearance to attract a boy’s attention; putting myself in situations I wasn’t comfortable or safe at all just because I thought I needed to please others; shrinking myself and my masking my knowledge so I wouldn’t embarrassed the man I was trying to impress; ignoring all the red flags because a guy was giving me attention. All these things are SO messed up and I wish I had listened to your words before. It took me many speeches like yours and a couple of therapy years to understand I don’t need to be a wife, or a mom, or fulfill any gender expectations to be happy and complete.

I agree with your point that we should start to raise our kids differently – this is the only way we can start breaking the cycle of this misogynistic system and create a better future – but I would like to make an extra (and more immediate) suggestion: to start taking these issues to a political level. Men cannot (and should not) be the ones creating and passing laws regarding women rights anymore; equal salary pay should become a reality; projects and laws to support women in different scenarios/levels should be created and reinforced.

I want to finish my letter by thanking you for your inspirational words, I hope your ideas become a reality soon. I also hope that one day we can share a better and more equal world, so this way we can talk about the good similarities that bond us together, beyond the burden of being a woman.

Kind regards,
Isabella Ciriaco.