Writer: Lina Meruane
Publishing: Literatura Random
House
Year: 2018
Pages: 192
IBSN-13: 978-8439734062
Mark: 9/10
SYNOPSIS
Rough and impious and full of
humour, Against children questions the cultural speeches that promote
the pre-eminence of the son and takes him to a despotic spot in the 21st
century. It is a revisited and extended version of the one published in 2014,
this essay is an agitator warning against the return of a conservative model
that plans to take women back to the domestic confinement.
A maleficent angel that go
across our consciences with impunity: it is the messenger of procreation. In
this diatribe, Lina Meruane analyzes the return of that “angel” that, protected
by the ecologist rhetoric, make imperious callings to the extension of the
breastfeeding, the intensive raising and a never-ending list of prescriptions.
From her controversial analysis about one of the topics more decisive and worst
discussed of our time derives observations about the rules of the contemporary
couple, the workplace discrimination of women and the current education system.
PERSONAL ASSESSMENT
JUSTIFICATION
I been craving for reading this essay a long time and,
the fact that it has the same edition as King Kong theory encouraged me to
buy it. I have not investigated so much but this is one of the few, not to say
the only one (tell me if I’m wrong) that talks about maternity from a feminist
point of view and how it is used by patriarchy to keep us submissive (Watch
out! I am not saying that having children is against feminism). It is a rather
interesting point of view (that I share) about patriarchy and its ways to keep
us submissive.
PLOT
The book is an essay about maternity in patriarchal
systems, how they deceive us to believe that maternity is an essential stage in
our life, that our personal fulfillment is to have children, whereas men become
disregarded or are not pushed as women, because he is not set up to worry about
having them.
WRITING STYLE
Lina has a clear, straight language, not as tough as
Despentes’, but is a colloquial language. What she thinks or what she explains
it is understood without any problem. She does not want a pretentious or high
use of the language, but she wants to reach the highest number of people, that
is why she chooses a colloquial language. This is a point in her favour since
she writes for everyone. She writes for every women (and men), of any social
class, independently her educational background. And that makes her a great person.
GENERAL COMMENT
It is in the line of Despentes (please, Penguin, we
need more feminist essays in cute editions). It is a must-read essay for every
person, to question us the ‘feminine mystique’ (recalling Betty Friedan). We
need to question what it means to have children and why it is so normalized the
belief in a ‘biological clock’ that warns us when we are supposed to have
children, otherwise we will be ‘left on the shelf’, and how this pressure is
not upon men, when they make up the other 50% needed procreate. This inequality
is also perceived in the maternity leave, which are always larger than the paternity
leave. That is why it is inconceivable for a lot of women, who due to maternity
are forced to leave their job because they have fulfilled their role in life.
That women who decide not to have children and suffer the constant pressure of
society with their ‘you will change your mind’, and if they don’t change their
mind, they will be seen as ‘non-human’. Let alone those who have had children
and dare to say that maternity it is not as idyllic as it always has been said,
that it changes your life and you lose quality of life (recalling Samanta
Villar), those are rejected by society.
In short, whatever women do regarding maternity, we
will always be in the gun sight of society, and this essay is a review of all
of that ‘micro’machism that women suffer per se.
-Saru
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