Book Review: Marina Benjamin sizes up a woman's work in A Little Give
Author Marina Benjamin. Picture: Luiz Hara
- A Little Give: the unsung, unseen, undone work of women
- Marina Benjamin
- Sceptre, pb €17
It feels like a travesty to write about this book when it is so beautifully composed that a series of quotations would surely be a better way to recommend it.
Marina Benjamin offers , her most political work thus far, as the third in a non-fiction trilogy about women.
The first of these memoirs, (2016), is about reaching the age of 50 and the second, (2018), explores what happens in the minds of those who spend the dark hours wide awake.
The final volume, , does what it says in the subtitle, which is to look at work in the home. To do this Benjamin divides ‘women’s work’ into seven sections: Cleaning, Pleasing, Feeding, Caring, Safeguarding, Lapsing, and Launching.
Benjamin was told that for a woman writer each offspring means the sacrifice of a book. She feels that she has lost several books in between the birth and departure for university of her child.
A ritual visit to IKEA is the pad off which the youngster is launched, a relatively kind rite of passage, remarks Benjamin wryly. Some cultures have much worse ways of marking adulthood.
Within each chapter there are sub-sections and some of these are written in free verse whilst others address a specific philosopher.
In 'Safeguarding' Benjamin thinks and writes about the artist Paula Rego. She says that whenever she lingers ‘over the dog-woman works I experience a powerful sense of recognition’.
This is because Benjamin, ‘works like a dog’ doing all the tasks, and taking all the responsibilities, that she, as a woman, is programmed to do. Rego nursed her husband through the final stages of multiple sclerosis whilst working to earn money for the family.
In the subservience of Rego’s dog-women Benjamin sees her own willingness to bow under the yoke of domestic life, and in their animal defiance she spots her own demands for ‘a space in which to think’.
Benjamin admits, although she does not claim this for Rego, that in carrying out her duties to the limits and beyond what she can physically achieve she can reach a state of exultation. Self-sacrifice and selflessness can bring a sort of ecstasy.
In Benjamin’s home, Carlotta, does domestic work for money. Benjamin believes, having seen her mother’s cleaner, Josefina, die early, that lugging vacuum cleaners around is not healthy for her 50-year-old body. She tries to fight her urge to squat down to scrub the floor.
As a reader and thinker Benjamin can see that there are serious moral issues to be faced. Does aiding Carlotta in her navigation of administrative tasks negate exploiting her in the labour market?
Is it acceptable to place, in the face of protest, an elderly parent in a care home? Should a daughter sacrifice her professional life to nurture a mother whose existence is inexorably heading towards extinction?
Should a woman care so thoroughly for parents, elderly aunt, partner, child and dog that there is a danger of losing herself?
When her mother refuses to accept paid carers and insists on her daughter doing all the domestic and nursing work, Benjamin eventually resists and expounds her own hopes and desires.
Once these have been outlined, her mother responds by saying that she ‘has no desire to live any longer’. Benjamin is given to understand that her selfishness has sapped her mother’s ‘desire to live’. Thus she, in trying to protect herself, is defeated.
Benjamin dedicates to the cleaners whose job it is to make a home flawless knowing that their work will immediately be undone by those who live there. She prefers to make work that lasts.
