http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7070165.ece
Thanks to breastfeeding, organic purees and eco nappies, the baby has
become a tyrant, says a bestselling book in France
March 22, 2010
Adam Sage in Paris
You wanted to be the perfect mother, so you gave up work, shopping,
sex and all the other things you loved to breastfeed, make purées and
wash nappies. But it's proving to be an exhausting, strife-ridden,
painful experience.
Here's an answer. Give the baby a bottle and have a drink and a
smoke, too, if it takes your fancy. Then turn to industrial baby
food, disposable nappies and a childcare arrangement that allows you
to get your life back.
Not only will you free yourself from the Great Oppressor (we're
talking about the baby here, not the father), but you will become a
role model for angst-filled contemporaries and encourage a long-term
rise in the national birth rate.
That, at least, is the view of Elisabeth Badinter, a French
philosopher who has shaken her fellow feminists with a frontal
assault on the breastfeeding, pumpkin-peeling, earth motherhood
ideologists who she believes are a threat to women's liberation.
Her latest book, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The
Woman and The Mother), which is topping the bestseller lists in
France amid intense debate, maintains that women have thrown off the
shackles of male domination only to impose a far more pernicious
tyranny on themselves that of their own children.
She advocates a return to the old French model, which involved
whatever necessary powdered milk, baby minders, nurseries, you name
it to prevent les enfants from taking over their mothers' lives.
"We live 80 to 85 years in our industrialised countries, and children
take up 20 to 25 years of that," she says. "Staking your whole life
on 20 years is a bad bet."
Unsurprisingly, Badinter has drawn furious reactions from all those
she blames for making motherhood a prohibitively daunting challenge
an unlikely coalition of ecologists, New Age feminists,
paediatricians, conservative Christians and breastfeeding activists.
They have accused her of, among, other things, endangering the
planet, serving the cause of sexism andsecretly seeking to boost
Nestlé's profits.
But when I met her for an interview in her imperiously large flat
overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens in central Paris, she seemed like
a fine example of the lifestyle she advocates 66 years old, three
children, loads of grandchildren and up for a fight. Her blue eyes
flashed, her voice was gravelly and the cigarettes glowed between her
lips as she defended her belief that a woman who gives birth to a
child is a woman first and a mother second.
"Mon pauvre monsieur," she said when I asked whether she had
continued to smoke during her pregnancies. "Of course, we all did
then. You don't enter a religious order when you have children."
There was another puff on the Stuyvesant. "Today, we're told we're
not allowed to smoke, to eat unpasteurised cheese or seafood or even
to a drink a glass of wine when we are pregnant. It's time to stop all that."
Badinter is the daughter of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the founder of
Publicis, the world's fourth-biggest advertising agency in which
she retains a 10 per cent stake and the wife of Robert Badinter, a
former Justice Minister who is celebrated for his role in the
abolition of capital punishment. But it has been 30 years since the
French referred to her as an appendix of her illustrious male
relations. She is known in her own right as the intellectual who
broke a taboo by attacking the concept of maternal instinct.
Female chimpanzees may be driven by instinct, she said, but female
human beings look after their children out of love or a sense of duty
or do not look after them, as the case may be.
The claim propelled her to the head of France's postwar feminist
movement at a time, in the early 1980s, when feminists thought that
they were on the point of overturning a patriarchal society.
But then it all went wrong. Rather than continuing the struggle for
equality, younger women have returned home to place themselves at the
service of their children, she says.
"The baby has become a tyrant despite himself," she says. This to the
joy of men, who are able to sit back and watch the football,
unconcerned by the offspring-mother battle.
So what has driven women to accept this modern form of slavery? The
economic crisis is one reason, she says, with motherhood suddenly
looking like a better option than the uncertainty of the workplace.
The Green movement is another, with its back-to-nature beliefs in
home-made food, mother's milk and washable nappies all obstacles on
the road to emancipation in her eyes. "Between the protection of
trees and the liberty of women, my choice is clear," she says. "It
may seem derisory but powdered milk, jars of baby food and disposable
nappies were all stages in the liberation of women."
A third explanation is the contemporary American feminist movement,
which, she says, has made the mistake of trying to feminise the world
in the hope of turning it into more a compassionate, tolerant and
peaceful place.
"These new feminists say that we have hidden and undervalued the
essence of women, which is motherhood." Badinter dismisses the theory
as wrong, because "men and women resemble each other enormously", and
dangerous because "it shuts the sexes in different circles", leaving
women closed off with their children.
The final and most important cause of the social regression she
has pinpointed lies with the doctors and nurses who lap up the
arguments of pro-breastfeeding groups such as La Leche League which
offers mother-to-mother support, she says. Although most of the "1001
claims in favour of breastfeeding" are unfounded she points to
studies debunking the idea that mother's milk produces healthier and
more intelligent people than the powdered variety they are still
dished out in maternity wards.
"If you don't want to breastfeed, you are asked, 'But Madame, don't
you want the best for your child?'. It makes you feel terribly
guilty." So most mothers breastfeed anyway, and many go on to do so
for months or years. "This worries me, because we are creating
another model of motherhood where the mother is with her baby 24
hours a day for at least six months. This is a model that eats the
personal part of each woman as an individual," she says.
Hence the conflict in her book's title. Women grow up in the me-first
hedonism of today's society and are then asked to renounce
self-fulfilment in the name of total motherhood. "These are radically
opposed imperatives."
Edwige Antier, a paediatrician, disagrees. "Elisabeth Badinter is an
archeofeminist who does not know what are the aspirations of women
today. She's in denial of motherhood. For neofeminists such as me,
it's obvious that women want self-fulfilment both in their careers
and in motherhood."
And for Bénédicte Opitz, chairwoman of the French branch of the Leche
League: "Badinter is, like Simone de Beauvoir, a supporter of
French-style feminism, which shuns motherhood. The days are over when
women claimed rights on the basis of a masculine model as in the
1970s. Today women want us to take account of their feminine
specificities. Besides, breastfeeding is not incompatible with
professional activities."
But Badinter backs her arguments up by contrasting the fertility rate
in France (2.0 children per woman) with that of Germany (1.3
children). The explanation she gives is that France is more resistant
to earth motherhood, with only just over half of mothers
breastfeeding, for example, compared with almost 100 per cent in Germany.
"We've always been mediocre mothers here," Badinter said (pointing
out that in the 18th century French women farmed their children out
to nurses "so that they could continue to have social lives and sex
with their husbands"). "But we've tended to have happier lives." In
other words, you can still be une mère and une femme as well even
if the tension between the two is rising in France as it is elsewhere.
For die mutter, on the other hand, "once you become a mother, you are
only a mother" an unacceptable choice for the quarter of young
German women (more than double the French proportion) who are opting
not to have children at all.
Britain is somewhere in between, she says pulled by tradition
towards the French model and by fashion towards a touchy-feely,
child-centred future. We should stop before it is too late. "The
English tradition of sending children to boarding school from a young
age is like the 18th-century French tradition of sending them to
nurses a way of getting rid of them."
And that, to Badinter, is no bad thing.
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