ENGLISH A: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT – IBDP YEAR 1

Text 2 -
We all should be feminists is a book written by Chimamanda Adichie who is a
Nigerian author. This book is in essay format and is an adaptation from the
author's one of Ted talks in 2012. This speech was to demonstrate how some
people still consider men as the superior gender to other genders and the aim
was to bring change to the way humans view each other. The author
discusses what actually feminism is and what it is really meant to be a
feminist. The essay is written with the traditional gender binary very very
prevalent and doesn’t really take into consideration anybody who falls outside
of that traditional gender binary including trans people and non-binary people.
Chimamanda Adichie makes use of the rhetorical devices logos, pathos and
ethos to further her main argument “we should all be feminist” she calls upon
ethos when she argues that Feminism is about equality and how women’s
rights are human rights and that’s both as a woman and a human, she speaks
on how gender equality that even some self-proclaimed "feminists" are
unaware of the issue of gender inequality does not simply define and restrict
women but can cripple men as well as women. An identity not based on social
prescriptions and human-made definitions, gender expectations being one, is
one that is most likely to be the most honest; she calls upon logos when
pointing out the illogical nature of disagreement in favour of traditional gender
roles, Chimamanda Adichie makes great use of pathos using personal
anecdotes from her own life to stimulate the levels of anger, pity over the
sexism she and other woman have experienced.
Feminism is the biggest theme in the book “we should all be feminists”
Chimamanda Adichie talks about how one of her childhood friends who once
called her a feminist during a debate, At that time she didn’t know the meaning
of the word but knew that it wasn’t a compliment, in fact, the word “feminist”
has a negative association in our society, which motivated her to write this
book. Men can be feminists too, Adichie writes, misogyny devalues qualities
we view as feminine, discriminating against femininity in how we act, speak,
dress, and feel, If men pick and choose which feminist issues to care about,
they’re exercising their privilege over women, not uplifting them, She also talks
about gender which is linked to the main subject of the book feminism, she
further says how without the traditional gender roles created by the society
itself to narrow down the definition of masculinity and femininity women
shouldn’t be doing all the household chore and fit the typical gender
stereotypes that the society has created

The writer engages the reader by giving a lot of personal examples in between
a lot of quotes and a lot of important points are made and it does a fairly
decent job at touching upon a lot of broad issues faced in feminism today, and
it also briefly touches upon the difference between clas gender and race
issues and how all of these issues are treated differently by different people

Bibliography -
- https://wearerestless.org/2020/05/04/why-we-should-all-read-we-shoul
d-all-be-feminists/
- https://writingbros.com/essay-examples/analysis-of-the-speech-why-w
e-should-all-be-feminists-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/
- https://www.enotes.com/topics/we-should-all-be-feminists/analysis