Title:

The Role Of Privilege And Oppression In Shaping Women's Autonomy: An Intersectional

Exploration Of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi's We Should All Be Feminists

Abstract:

The struggle for women’s independence rarely occurs in a vacuum; it is woven into a broader fabric of
power relations and social hierarchies that shape everyday experience. For decades the feminist
movement has pressed for equal treatment between men and women while also recognising that other
social markers—such as race, class, and culture—profoundly affect how equality is lived. This essay
turns to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s popular essay “We Should All Be Feminists” and reads it through
an intersectional lens in order to map how overlapping identities produce both privilege and disadvantage.
By doing so, the paper shows how the various dimensions of gender, skin colour, economic status, and
upbringing combine to either expand or limit a woman’s sense of freedom and self-direction. Adichie’s
text, the analysis concludes, does more than catalogue injustice; it urges lawmakers and citizens alike to
reconsider social categories when crafting policies that genuinely advance gender equality.

Keywords: Intersectionality, Women's Autonomy, Privilege, Oppression, Genuine Gender Equality

Introduction:

The journey toward women’s autonomy is both empowering and, at times, deeply complicated.

Regardless of whether a woman lives in a traditional setting or a contemporary, secular context, she

encounters power structures that limit her capacity to express, shape, and control her own story.

Feminism, at its heart, aims to dismantle patriarchy and correct gender imbalance— this principle remains

central to the movement in its most genuine forms. Yet, numerous scholars, Kimberlé Crenshaw among

them, warn that such efforts risk being wholly ineffective if they overlook the multiple identities that

frame any single woman’s experience. Far from being a piece of academic buzzword, intersectionality

actually provides a lens for seeing how overlapping privileges and oppressions build, almost unnoticed, to

influence a woman’s opportunities and sense of self.

Nigerian novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses storytelling and criticism to expose

inequalities that exist both in her homeland and around the globe. In her celebrated essay “We Should All

Be Feminists,” she invites readers to recognise the everyday paradox of gender inequality—moments in

life shaped by familial expectations, language, and social norms that quietly shape and often shrink one’s

potential. She observes: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to

girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much.’” That stark remark captures a larger truth: although

girls today can recite the language of empowerment, societal pressures still box them into carefully

calibrated limits. Yet neither Adichie nor Kimberlé Crenshaw remains with that one observation. Both

scholars explore the intersecting struggles faced by women whose racial, ethnic, cultural, or economic

identities influence the ways they meet and manoeuvre around those confining borders.

We Should All Be Feminists offers a powerful snapshot of how privilege and oppression work together to

shape a woman’s sense of autonomy, and in doing so it clearly lays out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s

commitment to an intersectional understanding of gender. From the very first word, “we,” the essay

reaches out to a broad audience, though an unvoiced reminder lingers: not every “we” occupies the same

place in the social landscape. Consider, for example, women in Nigeria who must navigate local customs

that dictate acceptable behaviour while also negotiating the wider, transnational hierarchies that still

favour Eurocentric models of success. In contrast, many women in the West carry privileges of class or

race that allow them to experience similar restrictions yet suffer them less keenly and therefore resist

them with a different degree of urgency.

This study takes a closer look at overlapping layers of identity—gender, race, class, and culture—and

how those layers operate, both on the surface and behind the scenes, by reading Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie’s essay through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. Adichie sketches the public
lives of women constrained by self-imposed rules: the need to appear “proper,” the pressure to cloak

ambition in polite language, and the silent bargains they strike with society. While the ways individual

women try to claim that public space can vary widely, many of them share core desires—chief among

them, the need to be recognized and the wish to manage a broader set of resources in order to turn that

recognition into lasting power. Viewed together, the essay and this analysis push against traditional

feminist frameworks and advocacy efforts by calling for a move away from monolithic narratives and

toward a complex, structurally grounded critique that genuinely reflects the tangled realities lived by all

women.

Literature Review: Feminism, Intersectionality and Women’s Autonomy

A comprehensive assessment of women’s autonomy today cannot afford to focus on gender alone.
Feminist scholars repeatedly remind us that a woman is never “just a woman” in isolation; her family
background, economic status, and cultural context shape the ways in which she experiences freedom,
constraint, and everything that lies between the two. Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated this idea under
the banner of intersectionality, and her insight has since become a cornerstone of contemporary feminist
discourse.

1. Theoretical Foundations of Intersectionality

In her influential 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Kimberlé Crenshaw

argued that the experiences of Black women cannot be fully understood by analyzing either race or

gender in isolation. Instead, those experiences emerge from the overlapping and reciprocal effects of

multiple systems of oppression acting at the same time. As Crenshaw put it,

“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that

does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which

Black women are subordinated.”

She then proposed the term “intersectionality” to capture that insight, which suggests we must look

beneath surface identities to see how overlapping axes of advantage and disadvantage—claiming race,

class, gender, sexuality and beyond—shape unique and context-dependent realities. A feminist

perspective that privileges the white, middle-class voice, however inadvertently, risks reverting to a

colonizing logic in which everyone else is either made invisible or forced to conform to a foreign

standard.

Patricia Hill Collins, in her book “Black Feminist Thought,” and bell hooks, in “Ain’t I a Woman?,” built

on Crenshaw’s foundation by insisting that meaningful feminist activism must account for the full

complexity of social identities and power structures, and must invite Black women themselves to define

the terms of that conversation.

2. African Feminism and the Postcolonial Context

African feminist thinkers have pointed out several gaps in the way Western feminism is often presented.

Scholars like Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Amina Mama, and Obioma Nnaemeka argue that African versions

of feminism shouldn’t be copy-and-paste jobs from outside; they need to grow out of local traditions,

value systems, and histories that include colonial times, waves of globalization, and ongoing neo-colonial

pressure.

That line of thought feeds directly into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s own beliefs. Her feminism is not

confined to Nigeria, yet it never forgets Nigerian roots. By weaving together local stories with larger

global conversations, she crosses borders without leaving home. Adichie’s sharp critiques feel complex

on the page but come across in plain language, so her message, grounded in lived experience, can connect
with a wide range of readers. She gives voice to this uneasy blend in her essay “We Should All Be

Feminists,” saying,

“I am a Nigerian. And I am a feminist. And I was not raised to think that those two things could go

together.”

That tension between local identity and worldwide feminism sits at the heart of postcolonial feminist

studies. Like many of her peers, Adichie pulls feminism back from the foreign label people have stuck to

it, and she tries to remake it in a way that makes sense within her culture.

3. The Concept of Autonomy in Feminist Literature

At its core, autonomy means being able to govern yourself without outside interference, but feminist

ethics and political theory remind us that freedom is rarely that simple. For many feminists the idea

stumbles precisely at the point where real life begins: centuries of structural inequality still meddle with

the choices people imagine they have. When Christine Friedman and K. Suneeta Narayan looked at

standard Western liberal thought, they found a glaring blind spot: the notion of the self-contained

individual ignores the way women are socialized, taught from the earliest years to weigh their wishes

against family, class, and community norms. Narayan has insisted that any honest discussion of autonomy

also reckon with the collective identities that dominate life in many non-Western cultures, where

belonging often trumps the lone individual.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie thickens the picture even further by zeroing in on context. Her work makes

clear that a woman’s private decisions rarely unfold in a vacuum; they tangle with expectations about
social standing, religious duty, and the culturally prescribed ways one is supposed to perform

womanhood. In one of her essays, for instance, she recounts how an adult relative bluntly told her to

“lower her ambition” the moment he discovered she was a girl. The remark stung, yet it also serves as a

microcosm of the many invisible checks placed on women’s dreams.

“Why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?” she asks with deliberate

provocation. The question is rhetorical, of course, but it lands hard, exposing the hidden wires that

connect gossip in a village square, tax incentives set in a legislature, and the daily grind of economic life.

Long before any woman sits down to make a choice, a whole system has already begun to sketch the

limits of her imagination.

4. Global Feminism and the Critique of Universalism

Feminism has long been a global conversation, but in that talk some voices have overshadowed others.

Whenever one-size-fits-all ideas of freedom come from outside, women in Africa and Asia can be painted

as victims waiting to be rescued. Chandra Talpade Mohanty called out that image in her famous essay

“Under Western Eyes,” saying it ends up repeating colonial power by forcing a Western map on lives that

never fit.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie helps us see the problem in a more layered way. I admire her take on global

feminism—so do millions who heard her TED speech and then hummed along while Beyoncé borrowed

the same words. Yet Adichie also pushes back when African women keep getting jammed into Western

frames. She wants a seat at the table, but not as a story stripped of context. Her line, “Culture does not

make people. People make culture,” wraps that wish in a single punchy sentence. Instead of treating rural
traditions as stone-carved and unbreakable, she imagines change bubbling up inside communities. Lots of

African feminists think that way, too: they ask for fresh choices, not copied blueprints.

Methodology:

This article undertakes a qualitative textual analysis through the lens of feminist intersectional theory in

order to illuminate patterns of privilege and oppression presented in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay

“We Should All Be Feminists.” The analytic process emphasizes thorough, engaged reading as the

principal mode of inquiry rather than as a conventional exercise in literary critique. Such close reading

requires the critic to look beyond plot and character, observing how lived experience bleeds into the very

fabric of the story. Adichie herself, by weaving autobiographical anecdotes into broader socio-political

claims, invites readers to treat her narrative as a site for interpretation; thus, her work becomes an

especially productive ground for this method.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality supplies both a theoretical scaffold and an ethical

imperative for the inquiry. It warns analysts against isolating single axes of identity—race, gender, class,

or culture—and instead pushes them to consider the overlapping and mutually reinforcing systems that

mold women’s daily realities. In this context, Adichie’s reflections offer a starting point for probing the

more systemic and institutional dimensions of feminist concerns, since such questions demand

infrastructure, not simply decoration. Treating intersectionality as a mere additive layer to traditional

feminist critique would reduce its analytical power; when properly centered, it emerges as the bedrock on

which Adichie’s argument stands.

The text under consideration is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay “We Should All Be Feminists.” What

began as a TEDx talk in 2012 matured into this accessible yet layered essay published in 2014. Adichie

uses anecdote, statistics, and sharp critique to weave together memoir, manifesto, and cultural polemic.

The essay asks readers to see the world through various angles—Nigerian, African, Black, middle-class,
and cosmopolitan—rather than through the single lens often presented in mainstream feminism. In

preparing the analysis that follows, I have selected passages that illuminate several overlapping issues:

patterns of gender socialization, class constraints, racial identity politics, and postcolonial legacies. The

reading proceeds from these working assumptions:

1. A woman’s life is shaped by the many social locations she inhabits simultaneously.

2. Privilege and vulnerability can coexist within the same identity.

3. Any feminist account must reckon with its particular context and the broader system that frames it.

4. Storytelling itself counts as valid knowledge, especially when conventional data fall short.

Consequently, we do not treat Adichie’s autobiographical accounts as simple acts of self-exposure; rather,

we recognize them as instances of situated knowledge—evidence of the ways individuals encounter, push

back against, and occasionally internalize the structural forces that shape their lives. In the words of bell

hooks, the phrase “the personal is political” has endured not because it relies on anecdotes, but because it

effectively reveals how expansive systems infiltrate and govern the rhythms of ordinary life.

Limitations:

Examining ideology always comes with a few built-in restrictions, especially when the evidence we rely

on is strictly textual. Because this project does not include interviews or participant observation, it can’t
fully reveal how different women in Nigeria or elsewhere read Adichie’s essay. Nor does it pretend to

speak for the totality of her lived experience. What it does aim to do, nevertheless, is unpack the ways her

writing interweaves various forms of inequality—social, economic, racial, and political—that repeatedly

block a woman’s path to real freedom and self-sufficiency.

Although the essay springs from Adichie’s own Nigerian background, its treatment in Western outlets

already gestures toward a wider readership and raises valid worries about how much of her critique might

be softened or reshaped once the work travels beyond its original context.

Analysis and Discussion:

1. Gender and Patriarchal Socialization in Nigerian Contexts

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie opens her essay “We Should All Be Feminists” with a wry anecdote about

being labelled a feminist by a childhood friend called Okoloma. At first, the term is tossed off teasingly,

yet it lands on her with the weight of an accusation, suggesting that being a feminist is somehow extreme

or unladylike. Reflecting on that moment years later, she observes, “The problem with gender is that it

prescribes how we should be rather than how we are.”

That statement serves as a touchstone for sociologists who examine the machinery of patriarchy. In

Nigeria, as in many other societies, gender norms do not merely float as casual opinions; they are woven

into the culture itself, shaping law, ritual, and everyday conversation. Women are often socialised to

practise obedience, modesty, and self-sacrifice—the virtues of a good wife—and men are urged to take

charge, to lead, and to protect, as though authority were their birthright. Adichie notes that from earliest

girlhood, children hear marriage framed as the crowning life goal, as if personal worth can be measured

only by someone else’s promise to commit.

From an early age girls are often encouraged to regard their peers as rivals—not for careers or personal

achievements, both of which can foster ambition, but primarily for male attention. That lesson,

transmitted through compliments, comments, and classroom dynamics, plants a sturdy seed of

comparison long before the school bell rings its final chime.

This social conditioning operates in two directions. On one hand, a father’s or teacher’s praise directed at

a daughter can help her feel powerful and visible; on the other, the same praise teaches her that her worth

is measured against the appeal she holds for boys. The result is a curious tug-of-war: independence is

quietly undermined because success is reframed as charm, not competence. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

observes the toll this imbalance exacts: women who dare to step outside the prescribed roles often earn

labels like “difficult” or “mannish.” The sting of that verdict follows her every time she names the system

that limits her, every time she claims room to breathe as an equal citizen. In Nigeria, as in many places,

the consensus emerges long before law does, and it polices not only what a woman is permitted to say but

also how she is permitted to dream.

2. Race, Class and the Global Reception of Feminism

Even though Adichie sets her narrative in Nigeria, her essays are meant for a wider audience. The tension

between the local (specificity) and global (legibility) creates both problems and opportunities. Now,

Adichie’s voice is the emblematic of a global feminist consciousness.

It entered popular culture when it was quoted in Beyoncé's song Flawless.

Nevertheless, the globalization of feminism neglects to address the racial hierarchy that organizes the

reception of feminisms. Adichie’s popularity with Western audiences can be traced to her command of

English, her cosmopolitan upbringing, and her dependence upon Western literary traditions. Her success

in transnational feminist spaces cannot be separated from her class status or transnational identity. This

duality is illustrated by Crenshaw’s intersectionality:

The identities of certain women receive more attention not because their ideas have merit, but because

those women’s identities are more digestible within a globalized perspective. While this does not detract

from Adichie’s scholarship, it underscores the complicated generosity of representation. Her experience

as a Black African woman shaping her analyses on American cultural stereotypes results in telling such

stories as where a valet erased my existence entirely and attributed his service to an attending gentleman.

“The man assumed I was not important simply because I was a woman.”

The offer goes unmentioned that would require suffering under race and class poverty: had she been some

other version of a black woman—poor, poorly educated or literate, uneducated, or lacking documented

status—she would likely have encountered different outcomes.

Consequently, although her stories draw from personal experiences, they expose underlying structures of

domination that systematically differentiate how women’s autonomy is acknowledged or disavowed

based on their social location.

3. Class and Economic Agency in Women’s Lives

Adichie analyzes the effect of economic resources on a woman's mobility and freedom. She reminisces on

the cultural tradition in Nigeria where men are expected to bear the financial weight of women. She

states:

“The man is expected to provide and when the woman does, she is seen as threatening.”

There is also class within gender: A woman’s economic dependence is considered a virtue, but earning a

living as a married woman repaid to work becomes derogatory. This logic curtails economic opportunities

for women and regulates their social acceptability. Here, social class transcends an economic

categorization; it becomes moralized. Adichie examines the professional wives who earn more than their

husbands and how they become targets of stinging judgment. The assumption that such independence

imposes upon normative heterosexual arrangements reveals how far, deep, and rigidly social class

organizes gendered relations . Even married professional women “shrink” their accomplishments

anticipating—preemptive damage control—an imagined assault on male pride.

Once more, Crenshaw’s framework exemplifies its importance. Having socioeconomic resources may

shield some women from certain forms of oppression, but not all. An affluent woman may evade certain

economic dependencies, yet still endures opposing social expectations. Conversely, a working-class

woman is likely to face intensified constraints—bolstered by an economy of struggle that primarily serves

patriarchal interests.

4. Local vs. Global Feminism: The Politics of Translation

Adichie’s feminism navigates the challenge of balancing appreciation for a Nigerian audience while

engaging with Western audiences accustomed to specific narratives. The quotation, “Culture does not

make people. People make culture,” captures her focus on context relevance.

This claim, at first glance simplistic, calls for culture to be analyzed deeply without resorting to the

interpretation that African women must bear the burden of oppressive traditions. At the same time, it

serves as resistance against the domination of Western feminist discourse—feminism which ignores local

feminisms and historicizes without regard to meaning.

Adichie’s critique invokes a restructuring reconsideration of feminist international alliances. Instead of

assuming gendered oppression as a universal experience, she argues alliance can be forged out of shared

values justice, equity, and listening. Her essay addresses both sides of patriarchal Nigeria and what I

would term global feminism—a conversation dominated by white voices from the west. She attempts

translation—not in terms of language but rather political sensitivity, demonstrating that one cannot erase

differences or reduce identities to singularity. Therefore, global feminism should unmake a single

narrative constructed around women’s experiences and allow those rooted in particular contexts to surface

freely. Adichie’s theory reveals story illuminates what theory conceals instead of framing need narrate

liberatory tell reclaiming interpretations worlds imagined crafted whispered echoed silenced resound

unravel where truths weave.”

5. Storytelling as Feminist Resistance

As Adichie tells stories and uses narrative to push back against oppression, we understand that such a

form of resistance offers more profound dimensions to the feminism she portrays. Storytelling is one of
the most neglected forms in academia. Stories can be transformed into data, and feelings into evidence.

To quote her:

“I decided to call myself a Feminist. And I say it wherever I am, and I say it with pride.”

Such self-identification is never just political; in this case it is also an act of defiance. Women’s lives have

too often been reduced to anecdotes in sociological bodies of work devoid of deeper analysis and

emplaced narrative subtleties; Adichie shows that lived experience need not be silenced because it has

value in knowledgeable critique, pluralizing the theory-story academic divide framework and disrupting

the sociopolitical status quo power imbalance.

Through her personal accounts, she allows others to participate as well. Her work provokes a deep

reflection owing to its emotional intensity, and it is offered in clear language, making feminism

appealing: not alien or aristocratic but accommodating to their lives. Through overtly personal yet

methodically crafted frameworks, the gendered oppression of women can never be absolute or singular; it

is always conditioned by race, class, and culture. Understanding this allows us to strive toward a

feminism that embraces difference among women's lived experiences and truly seeks to honor diversity.

Conclusion:

Women's autonomy is often interpreted as a voice which can be found, society has to be resisted, and a

choice has to be made. “Finding one’s voice,” as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us in We Should

All Be Feminists, cannot happen alone—autonomy is always intertwined with culture, economy, race,

gender along with the persistent privilege and oppression structures.

Along side calling out for feminism, Adichie’s text does an intersectional analysis without having to

name it explicitly. Her narratives of women being dismissed at restaurants or a mother who works but

does not view her labor as work because she has always done it without payment serves to normalize
social hierarchies. Such moments transcend patriarchal sexism; what Crenshaw refers as compounded

marginalization where the subjugation of gender confronts an encounter with race, class and cultural

identity amalgamation adds one unique form of dominance.

The autonomy described here illustrates a form of stratification as differing women's access to mobility

reveals greater anthropological barriers. The coexistence of local patriarchal norms with global feminist

precepts demonstrates that feminism cannot simply be adopted and applied everywhere; it requires

thoughtful adaptation grounded in the specific reality of the situation shaped by attentive engagement

with local voices and an awareness of history, understanding how inequality is sustained by structures not

simply attitudes and how those structures can be dismantled.

That framework relies on feminist ethics stressing intersectionality, which does not accept empty slogans

or symbolic acts but demands change at the systemic level, including culture and lived experiences. That

might mark both the greatest challenge and deepest promise of Adichie’s work.

References

Adichie, C. N. (2014). We Should All Be Feminists. New York, NY: Anchor Books.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of

antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum,

1989(1), 139–167.

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of

Empowerment (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Narayan, U. (1997). Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York:

Routledge.

Ogundipe-Leslie, M. (1994). Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women & Critical Transformations.

Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.