Edit: I don't agree with the author and her views, my original review stands below.

We Should All Be Feminists is a book I feel that I have come to 6 years too late. However, perhaps the time to develop and contemplate my own association of the term feminism and my only beliefs only heightened how much this book resonated with me. This book is only 50 pages and it still manages to be unbelievably powerful as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's words and convictions spill from the pages.

There's little I can say on this subject or book that hasn't been discussed before. There were two aspects of this book that felt really important and poignant to me which were Adichie's discussion of masculinity and her thoughts on likeability.

Her discussions on masculinity and the topic of the male ego resonated strongly with me. I will never forget my mum telling me I needed to stop being so pig-headed and be aware of the male ego because it was too fragile and I would just stomp all over it (this is definitely paraphrased - although she definitely called be pig-headed). To tell a 15 year old, even if it was a jest, is a powerful statement. To think I should be concerned about the male ego; what about my own? This is why Adichie's discussions resonated with me as she spoke about how we need to be careful about the messages we teach our youngsters. We should not be teaching our boys that they have fragile egos, and we should not be teaching our girls that they need to cater to this.

"We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage."

I think this book remains so, so relevant as we continue to impose harmful gender stereotypes onto the youngsters of today and uphold those amongst all generations. I think I, like Adichie, am still struggling with the way in which gender constructs have been imposed upon me from an early age and reinforced by how society behaves.

"I'm trying to unlearn many lessons of gender internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations."

The other aspect that really struck me was the concept of likeability. Why do we instil in our girls the need to be liked, the need to be compliant. These are not behaviours thrust upon boys and it irritates me when people say I shouldn't get angry about things. I see men rage on a daily basis about many inane things, yet when I get emotional and angry about injustices in the world I am told to calm down.

This book is so powerful and I think the perfect and easiest introduction to understanding why feminism is important and relevant. Why feminism is accessible to all. And why, as Adichie argues we should all be feminists.

"My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, "Yes there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.""