Meanwhile she is at social functions bragging about how great marriage is and is enlisting her friends to join in with her misery. She insists that her husband’s friends are stand-up guys and that you should be the woman to entertain one of them in hopes of getting a ring. She wants the credit for putting together the match made in hell. She will help you jot down all your wedding plans and essentially map out your entire life if you allow her. This is what a “desperate housewife” does; she edits her unhappy ending while creating yours.

- Akuoma Omeoga, The Snatch Trap.

Daaaaaaaaayum! At first I thought this was just a laundry list of rejiggerings of what Adichie wrote in her article but you took it far beyond that. This post is both inspiring and inspired.

Nigerian feminism is a peculiar beast. On the one hand, there is so much institutionalized bullshit from men, so much opposition to women doing anything at all that doesn't fit with the "culture" or "tradition." Yet on the other hand, we have a long history of women striving and achieving on every level and tier in those same cultures despite that opposition. Dora Akunyili is a good example that Adichie also mentioned (I don't approve of a corrupt waste of skin like Okonjo-Iweala sha but then again, she's no worse than the hundreds of monstrous thieves we have had klepto-perambulate through our government who happened to be men)

On the third hand, we have the women who have done their own life mathematics and found they have more to gain by throwing their lot in with patriarchy and playing the roles it lays out for them -- or at least exploiting it for their own advantage.

It is so important to raise our girls to be free to be able to strive freely without having to be some kind of rare extraordinarily exceptional individual just to push above the grinding miasma of societal expection, the cloying crushing hold of hearth and home and marriage and motherhood dragging them down.