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Dans une récente interview au journal britannique "Sunday Telegraph", la romancière anglaise Hilary Mantel estime qu'une fille est capable d'avoir des enfants dès 14 ans et estime que dans une monde parfait, il devrait être OK pour une fille de choisir d'être mère dès l'adolescence. Selon Hilary Mantel, l'instinct naturel d'une fille est d'avoir des enfants et condamne la société qu'elle considère comme "programmée" pour les hommes, et qui force les filles à "supprimer" leur instinct naturel (avoir des enfants) au profit de la poursuite de leur carrière professionnelle. Hilary Mantel estime que les filles doivent pouvoir avoir le droit de procréer à l'adolescence et poursuivre leurs études plus tard.
Sans enfants, Hilary Mantel regrette de ne pas avoir eu d'enfants à l'adolescence car à 20 ans, elle a été touché d'une maladie qui l'a empêché d'avoir des enfants.
Teen motherhood is not all bad, says Hilary Mantel
The age at which women have babies is dictated by men's timetables, the prize-winning author Hilary Mantel has claimed.
The novelist said society encouraged women to run their careers and have children later because it fitted in with a timetable "based on a former era, when men ran the world and women ran the home".
Some women might benefit from having babies earlier but society's structure, built around men's development, was not conducive to that, she suggested.
"Even at 21, 25, 30, young women are completing their education and building their careers, and dare not take time out. In a perfect world, one we don't live in, it would be possible to have more flexible arrangements," she told the Guardian. "Imitating men can't be the way forward for women. That way they are bound to fail."
Mantel, 57, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, was speaking after an interview in the Sunday Telegraph in which she said there was "a breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong".
"We were being educated well into our 20s, an age when some of us wanted to become mothers – probably little bits of all of us wanted to become mothers … You know, I was perfectly capable of setting up a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought, 'Now is the time to have a couple of children, and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD.' But society isn't yet ordered with that kind of flexibility, and is incredibly hypocritical about teenage sex, teenage mothers and so on."
The author, unable to have children after a debilitating illness, added: "Having sex and having babies is what young women are about. And their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable." Other women pushed their careers, only to realise in their late 30s there was a part of life they hadn't experienced, and which they wanted, she said.
"If there were some paradise for women, both those models would be valid. I think … men's lives have set the timetable."
Her comments seemed at odds with government policy, with growing concern that Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe, despite a 10-year campaign to reduce the numbers.
However, Mantel said she was not "advocating or advising early motherhood or teenage motherhood". She added that, if she had been able to have children, she "wouldn't have wanted to do so until my mid-30s", and said: "My larger point is that our idea of what is appropriate at each stage of life may need to be revised."
"We may need to stop thinking of education as something that stops in the early 20s. In the future it could be something that both men and women move in and out of, upgrading their skills and developing their talents right into what is now considered old age."
She said society was trailing "the assumptions of a former era about how men and women should behave. We haven't thought them through, even though we have gone through huge social changes."
She added: "We have to think out our own way. I'd like to imagine we are doing it, bit by bit."
source : The Guardian
Hilary Mantel.
Sans enfants, Hilary Mantel regrette de ne pas avoir eu d'enfants à l'adolescence car à 20 ans, elle a été touché d'une maladie qui l'a empêché d'avoir des enfants.
Teen motherhood is not all bad, says Hilary Mantel
The age at which women have babies is dictated by men's timetables, the prize-winning author Hilary Mantel has claimed.
The novelist said society encouraged women to run their careers and have children later because it fitted in with a timetable "based on a former era, when men ran the world and women ran the home".
Some women might benefit from having babies earlier but society's structure, built around men's development, was not conducive to that, she suggested.
"Even at 21, 25, 30, young women are completing their education and building their careers, and dare not take time out. In a perfect world, one we don't live in, it would be possible to have more flexible arrangements," she told the Guardian. "Imitating men can't be the way forward for women. That way they are bound to fail."
Mantel, 57, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, was speaking after an interview in the Sunday Telegraph in which she said there was "a breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong".
"We were being educated well into our 20s, an age when some of us wanted to become mothers – probably little bits of all of us wanted to become mothers … You know, I was perfectly capable of setting up a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought, 'Now is the time to have a couple of children, and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD.' But society isn't yet ordered with that kind of flexibility, and is incredibly hypocritical about teenage sex, teenage mothers and so on."
The author, unable to have children after a debilitating illness, added: "Having sex and having babies is what young women are about. And their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable." Other women pushed their careers, only to realise in their late 30s there was a part of life they hadn't experienced, and which they wanted, she said.
"If there were some paradise for women, both those models would be valid. I think … men's lives have set the timetable."
Her comments seemed at odds with government policy, with growing concern that Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe, despite a 10-year campaign to reduce the numbers.
However, Mantel said she was not "advocating or advising early motherhood or teenage motherhood". She added that, if she had been able to have children, she "wouldn't have wanted to do so until my mid-30s", and said: "My larger point is that our idea of what is appropriate at each stage of life may need to be revised."
"We may need to stop thinking of education as something that stops in the early 20s. In the future it could be something that both men and women move in and out of, upgrading their skills and developing their talents right into what is now considered old age."
She said society was trailing "the assumptions of a former era about how men and women should behave. We haven't thought them through, even though we have gone through huge social changes."
She added: "We have to think out our own way. I'd like to imagine we are doing it, bit by bit."
source : The Guardian
Hilary Mantel.