More than a decade ago, at an annual conference directed on the future of Africa, a young woman from Nigeria spoke on the complexity of feminism and sparked a catchphrase that traveled to Hollywood and high fashion. Christian Dior models wore "We Should All Be Feminists" emblazoned on T-shirts, I seem to recall, and many of us lifted our chins enthusiastically and thought, and how!

Fast forward ten years - has there ever been a more morally anemic decade? - and (sadly) the words of novelist, and tribeswoman of Nigeria's Igbo tribe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977), still need to be written, spoken, yelled, and emblazoned on shirts. 

We should all be feminists! Why?

"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" by Natasha Rauf for The Examined Life.

Perhaps the most level-headed among us do not associate feminism with individuals who hate men or despise lip gloss - as if women would ever congregate around such banal purposes - but we should all still be feminists. (And anyway, since when do the level-headed make up the maddening masses?) Diminutions are proscribed to us women, power withheld from us, and burdens are placed on us based on our gender, not our person. (This also happens to men, read Grayson Perry's thoughtful dismantling of toxic masculinity.)

Gender matters everywhere in the world; thus, it should matter to everyone. Ngozi Adichie, who has, since her speech, become a significant essayist and author, warms the topic with a personal anecdote that, though far from the reader's life, seems familiar.

When I was in primary school, my teacher said she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor, which was a big deal. If you were a class monitor, you could write down the names of the noisemakers each day which was enough power on its own, but my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand. I wanted to be the class monitor and got the highest score on my test. To my surprise, my teacher said the monitor had to be a boy.

Our empathetic minds immediately pull something universal from this distinctive experience, animated by Adichie's storytelling:

If we do something over and over again, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitors, we think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem natural that only men should be heads of corporations.

"I left because the longer I stayed the less I loved myself." Illustration by Rupi Kaur in Milk and Honey.

How do we live with such a way of being? Not happily. Once, Adichie wrote an article about being young and female. An acquaintance told her the essay sounded angry. 

Her response was unapologetic: 

Of course, it was angry! Gender as it is today functions as a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change, but I’m also hopeful because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.

"Disappointment drives our young men to some desperate lengths," warned Martin Luther King, Jr. when imprisoned for the peaceful but disruptive protest of the U.S.'s racist laws. We see the anger and ignore the circumstances that brought it into being.

Adichie continues:

I know a Nigerian woman who decided to sell her house because she didn’t want to intimidate a man who might marry her... I know an unmarried woman who goes to conferences and wears a wedding ring because her colleagues told her it would get her respect... I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, friends, and work to get married that they are pushed to make terrible choices...

Do we not all have "I know a woman who..." stories? If not, we are not paying attention; we neglect even those closest to us.

"My grandmother (in pearls) holding the weight of the world on her shoulders her legs as big as tree trunks." Illustration by Maira Kalman in Women Holding Things.

Might we be happier and truer to ourselves if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations? Women hold the weight of the world, the excellent Maira Kalman illustrates; what else?

Yes, we should all be feminists. We should all be change agents. But how?

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people feel uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender because thinking of changing the status quote is always uncomfortable.

It strikes me that the success (in terms of appeal) of Adichie's now ten-year-old, We Should All Be Feminists rests on that crucial point: gender is a conversation. 

The role of gender in society is a dialogue, learning, a changing, and frequently it is a sliding backward into comfortable positioning. It is an allowing of complexity, of knowing and unknowing. We are forming and reforming ourselves so quickly in terms of how we see the world and ourselves in it; Adichie's writing is both resonant and comforting because she uses personal narratives to make us care about her and, thus, her message. 

That is what it's about: empathy, not an argument or cold logic, which can be ignored anyway. It is a failure of empathy - and ultimately a limit of imagination - if we cannot see how and why gender matters, and continues to matter, to the women and men we love and admire. 

Warm and expand your heart with Jan Morris' autobiography of becoming whole, Rebecca Solnit's sure-footed guide to navigating territory unknown, Stephen Fry's reconciliation of childhood pains and demons, and Rupi Kaur's groundbreaking collection of poetry and sketches that transform life's brutality into exalted love.