I was already in college before I finally understood that my entire life had overlapped with second-wave feminism, a force that transformed American culture without so much as registering on a certain young woman in Alabama. All my life I had been stepping through open doors, it turned out, blithely unaware of the vision and sacrifice and passionate persistence of the women who had opened those doors for me. Once I understood that, I also understood that I wouldn’t want to have landed on this planet a single moment earlier than I did. A woman born in Lower Alabama in…

Nigerian universities come up in the news these days to announce either the inauguration of new dress codes or the revival of dormant rules. Fixating on appearance is not new in Nigeria, but the frequency—especially by academic institutions—in the past months is head-scratching. Hardly a month passes these days without some university or polytechnic issuing a sartorial decree. One can trace this mania to several factors. First, we are a culture that insistently regulates every sphere of life, and we cannot but extend that attitude to other people’s virtues. The orientation stems from our political history when our consciousness was…