Growing Up as a Girl: What Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2017 Controversy Confirmed for Me About Women's Voices

If someone can convince you that speaking about mistreatment is worse than the mistreatment itself, they have found a powerful way to protect those re

If someone can convince you that speaking about mistreatment is worse than the mistreatment itself, they have found a powerful way to protect those responsible.

In 2017, when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about the differences between growing up as a girl and growing up as a boy, the reaction stayed with me.

a group of women sitting next to each other

Photo by Ben Iwara

Adichie and I agree on some things and disagree on others. But I don’t need to agree with a woman on everything to recognize when she has said something true about women’s lives. I do think that I owe much of that to training and experience to being an advocate for women’s and girls’ safety. You’re going to hear a lot of universal and intersectional truth from women who you may not agree with on much else.

What struck me wasn’t simply what Chimamanda said. It was how people responded. I saw the posts. The ones where people used their real names. Some of the harshest responses came from women, including Black women whose experiences I believed could have helped explain exactly what she was talking about.

I remember thinking that we still had a long way to go before women were truly heard. I was certain of it.

Growing Up as a Girl Is an Experience, Not a Costume

All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership Author: Darcy Lockman Published: 2019

You do not have to take away a woman’s voice to silence her. Sometimes all you have to do is make speaking so costly that silence begins to feel like peace.

It’s only recently that that life truth has been remixed as “hateful,” to say. A conversation we’ve been having in circles and families since we grew up and realized what we lived through.

Growing up as a girl can mean watching boys enjoy freedoms that girls must negotiate for. It can mean being underestimated, sexualized, harassed, and expected to prove your competence while boys are encouraged to explore theirs.

It can mean having your weight monitored before you have even finished growing. People comment when you eat too much, too little, or simply enjoy your food.

You are told to read more and socialize less. Then, when you enjoy your books, someone complains that you don’t socialize enough.

Your voice is too loud. Your opinions are too strong. Your tone is too sassy. Boys can speak with excitement and confidence while girls are reminded to behave like young ladies.

People prepare you for marriage before you have even figured out who you are, sometimes by means of violence, abuse, torture, and mutilation.

And for Black girls, even your natural hair can become everybody’s business. Too straight. Too curly. Too thick. Too much. Not enough. Your facial expressions and ordinary moods may be interpreted as having an attitude.

You can spend an extraordinary amount of your girlhood being corrected for simply existing.

One of the oldest ways to silence women is to make the conversation about how they spoke rather than what happened to them. A girl who is constantly told to lower her voice, her eyes, or her body coverings on command may grow into a woman who apologizes before she speaks. Then the world congratulates itself for teaching her manners.

Even Our Bodies Become Public Business

For some girls, growing up means painful menstruation, period poverty, period huts, or being made to feel ashamed of normal bodily functions.

In some parts of the world, girls face female genital mutilation, child marriage, and restrictions on their education and independence.

Across cultures and faith traditions, girls may be taught to cover their developing bodies, conceal their hair, and take responsibility for how other people respond to their appearance.

Even in schools, girls are sometimes removed from classrooms because their shoulders, legs, or clothing are considered distracting.

The message is difficult to miss. Your body is something other people believe they have a right to regulate.

And these lessons do not always come from men. Women can enforce them, too.

What I Heard in 2017

I wasn’t asking everyone to agree with Adichie. I was asking something much simpler.

Could we acknowledge and remember that growing up female involves experiences that cannot be reduced to personal identity, clothing, or feminine behavior?

Not every girl experiences the same hardships. Girls are not interchangeable, and girlhood should never be defined entirely by suffering. There is laughter, friendship, curiosity, ambition, rebellion, and joy.

But there are also social expectations and bodily realities that shape female childhood.

A girl does not have to embrace those expectations to be affected by them. She can reject every stereotype about femininity and still be subjected to discrimination because she is female.

And recognizing those experiences does not require us to deny that other people experience hardship.

We should be able to tell the truth about girls without continuing to treat their experiences as an inconvenience to somebody else’s conversation.

Memory Lane Might Be Yesterday

That was what stayed with me about the responses I saw.

Some women criticizing Adichie could have looked back on their own childhoods and remembered being told to sit properly, lower their voices, cover their bodies, watch their weight, or stop behaving in ways considered inappropriate for girls.

They might not even have needed to look back that far. Memory lane could have been yesterday.

A comment about their hair. An interruption at work. A man who wouldn’t accept “no.” Someone questioning their intelligence or criticizing their appearance.

Women know these experiences. We discuss them with our daughters, sisters, friends, and sometimes complete strangers.

Yet when the conversation turned to female socialization, I watched the discussion become something else. And I was reminded that being heard is not the same as being allowed to speak. I watched insults being thrown at a beloved author because she spoke the truth we lived and were still living on the day she said it. Girls are intentionally socialized differently from boys.

Them “witch trials” are not ancient history.

What I Became Certain Of

When a woman finally names what has been happening to her, some people will accuse her of making things worse. Often, what has changed is that she has stopped helping them pretend everything is fine.

What 2017 and Chimamada clarified was how easily women’s accounts of their own lives could be challenged, redirected, or pushed aside, even when the subject was female childhood itself.

I don’t expect women to agree on every question. I do expect us to be able to speak plainly about our lives, our bodies, our histories, and the conditions under which we were raised.

Girls deserve to have their experiences recognized while they are living them. Women deserve to speak about those experiences without having to make them disappear.

Nearly ten years later, I still believe we have a great deal of listening to do. One of the great contradictions of our time is hard to reckon with. Women have made extraordinary gains in education, employment, law, medicine, science, business, and public leadership. Yet achievement has not automatically translated into being listened to, respected, or taken seriously.

I have no idea how we got into this mess, but we have made room for women’s accomplishments without always making room for women’s authority over their own experiences. Maybe it is that the words ‘It’s no big deal’ have excused a great deal of behavior that somebody should have been required to stop.