Thanks to breastfeeding, organic purees and eco nappies, the baby has become a tyrant, says a bestselling book in France.
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.
source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7070165.ece
