Adichie's latest, Dear Ijeawele, urges us to raise a generation of feminist

Adichie's response was a long letter, now published as a book titled Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. It talks about everything from how to choose toys to teaching self-reliance to challenging traditional gender roles.

Adichie, a best-selling author and a known leading feminist voice says the letter was useful for her as well and by the time she had completed it, she was a new mother as well.

“Now that I, too, am the mother of a delightful baby girl,” Adichie writes in the introduction, “I realise how easy it is to dispense advice about raising a child when you are not facing the enormously complex reality of it yourself.”

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And so the piece became a message to her friend Ijeawele, to Ijeawele’s daughter Chizalum, to the world, to herself and to her own child. Dear Ijeawele is indeed a letter to a friend preparing to take on the difficult task of raising a girl in a world where gender is, as Adichie describes it, “a straitjacket” of damaging rules and restrictions for women. But it’s also a love letter to our younger selves (Adichie’s included) because most of us were conditioned to think of girlhood and womanhood as something to be survived.

Part of the 15 suggestions to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman highlighted in the book ranges from encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can “allow” women to have full careers. The book also thoroughly explores the misuse of the word “feminism.”

Adichie believes if we start early to start to challenge those issues centered around gender inferiority, push back, then, you know, a woman is more likely, when she is an adult, to have those tools to say, "You know, in the end, I'm going to live the life I want to live."