Strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.
In the sprit of that phrase, I want to share a talk with you. This is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a woman I discovered through a Beyonce ‘s visual album. This talk is 30 minutes long, but I promise you it’s worth it. Pretty much every TED talk is worth it, but this one more than most.
I find myself on the train now, watching teenage girls stare each other down and listening to them talk badly about other girls they know, and I think how Chimamanda says that we raise our girls “to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men.”
I’ve been thinking about the strongest women I know – how much they have influenced me and taught me about life, and how much I wish I knew more strong women. If you feel the same, let this woman teach you about feminism:
http://www.tedxeuston.comChimamanda Ngozi Adichie a renowned Nigerian novelist was born in Nigeria in 1977. She grew up in the university town of Nsukka, Enugu State where she attended primary and secondary schools, and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale University. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught introductory fiction. Chimamanda is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the 2007 Orange Prize For Fiction; and Purple Hibiscus, which won the 2005 Best First Book Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the 2004 Debut Fiction Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2009, her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck was published. She was named one of the twenty most important fiction writers today under 40 years old by The New Yorker and was recently the guest speaker at the 2012 annual commonwealth lecture. She featured in the April 2012 edition of Time Magazine, celebrated as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She currently divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.Intro and Outro music by Kadialy Kouyate performed at TEDxEuston 2011. You can view the full performance here:http://youtu.be/KUfD5WGL3hw.
