The Organic-Zucchini-Baby-Food-Mixing Streamline Mommy

By Cécile AlduyAugust 5, 2012

The Organic-Zucchini-Baby-Food-Mixing Streamline Mommy

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women by Élisabeth Badinter

FORGET SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, Betty Friedan, and Naomi Wolff. Descartes gave us all that we needed to claim gender equality. Historians rarely remember it this way, but women’s rights were dramatically (if hypothetically) advanced when, on November 19th 1619, René Descartes, snow-bound in a stove-heated room in Neuberg, Germany, had the crazy idea to bet that the body might be entirely an illusion of the senses. But — and how cool is this — when “I” am thinking that very thought, “I” must exist, therefore “I” am. And this “I” is a thinking thing (“cogito ergo sum and sum res cogitans”). Now, Descartes was too busy with the Existence of God argument to spell out the full consequences of this simple fact for the so-called weaker sex, but, had he looked into it, the old man would have agreed that this “I” defined by Reason alone is necessarily gender-neutral (no body, no sex, right?). Or, as French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter puts it in What Is A Woman?, ontologically speaking, “a woman is a man like any other.”


That women would trade the blissful spiritual equality conferred onto them by Reason to embrace the disgusting side effects of motherhood is entirely beyond Badinter’s understanding. In her new book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, Badinter embarks on a crusade to demonstrate that all the fuss about maternal instinct, breast-feeding, attachment parenting, and co-sleeping is theoretical garbage, and reactionary. In a tone of voice better suited for a summer thriller, she warns of a sinister conspiracy against women: “Over the last three decades, almost without our noticing, there has been a revolution in our idea of motherhood. This revolution was silent, prompting no outcry or debate, even though its goal was momentous: to put motherhood squarely back at the heart of women’s lives.And being defined as a mother (God forbid: being determined by one’s body? by nature?) is for the Cartesian Badinter a no-no. 


In Badinter’s account, this surreptitious backlash against emancipated women involves villains who look like angels (babies) and good guys (here, gals) who have yet to realize that their enemies are lurking under the guise of lovey-dovey pals (compassionate nurses pushing for breast-feeding; eco-friendly products that in the end add more tasks to a woman’s workload; and even certain feminists, who impose onto mothers unachievable ideals of maternal devotion). As in any good conspiracy theory, the end of the world as we know it is at stake. The dark forces of reaction and the brave soldiers of the Enlightenment are locked in a deadly battle: “An underground war is now being fought between naturalist and culturalist proponents of motherhood […], between people who claim to act as ‘advocates for the defense’ of children […], and women who refuse to see their hard-won freedoms eroded.” The apocalypse is near; the suspense nerve-racking: “We do not know what the outcome will be.” Spoiler alert: as in your typical French flick, the denouement is left up in the air at the end of the book, even though we get a clearer picture of who, according to the author, is on what side in this cosmological fight between Good and Evil (hint: Badinter is an eighteenth-century scholar).


I like drama as much as the next person, but Badinter has her plotline and villains wrong. More to the point, she goes on a quixotic fight against demographic trends that she never substantiates with hard facts. Her argument is twofold: she makesIneke Kamps an historical claim (a new trend has women embracing an extreme version of mothering that impedes their true self-fulfillment and forces them back home) and a theoretical one (full-time motherhood is intrinsically alienating and in direct conflict with a woman’s identity). Both are on shaky ground.


[Photo (detail) © Ineke Kamps]


An Inconvenient Truth


A “sacred alliance of reactionaries,” as Badinter tells it, is responsible for the return of the idea of the perfect mother. Chief among this alliance is the environmental movement and its reverence for a mythological “Nature” over the advancements of modern chemistry and pharmaceuticals. This new “eco-biological prejudice” leads gullible mothers to forego epidurals, hire doulas, fret over baby bottles containing Bisphenal A (BPA), and care about the ecological impact of “the one ton of waste in the form of diapers” that a baby produces during its first thirty months of life (here Badinter goes into a surprisingly detailed evaluation of poop). To which Badinter responds (pardon my French): F— the trees.


Then there’s the brand of “essentialist” feminism that advocates gender difference and value in motherhood intrinsically “feminine” qualities unique to women, allowing mothers no choice but to shower their children with infinite amounts of disinterested affection and care, or else fall short. Add to this a set of new childrearing ideals, such as attachment parenting, and what Badinter refers to as the “new” responsibilities that come with our increased understanding of children’s physical, psychological, and cognitive development (now, incredibly enough, “mothers must communicate with their babies from birth, decipher their crying, their facial expressions…” which, for the author, is “overloading the boat”), and it’s no wonder that a mother’s life has become so much more complicated than it used to be. Even pregnancy has become a drag: “In the 1970s, pregnancy was something to be enjoyed”; now a mother is “strenuously discouraged from smoking a single cigarette (or a joint) or from drinking a drop of alcohol.” If the ideal way to balance motherhood and the pursuits of one’s pleasures is, as one fears it might be for Badinter, the system of wet nurses employed by the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, then, indeed, motherhood has become a real burden.


Badinter’s primary targets, however, are the La Leche League and the modern day imperative to breast-feed. Although she does not add any new material to Hanna Rosin’s 2009 Atlantic article on the topic, her chapter on the rise of the American pro-lactation movement and its victory on the ideological front is probably the most convincing in the book. But why the sound and the fury against breast-feeding on her part? If there is a societal norm in France it is overwhelmingly to not breast-feed. The table of breast-feeding rates in various countries she offers shows France as being literally off the charts, hovering around zero at six months postpartum (compared to 70% in Norway and 44% in the United-States). Badinter rightly questions how much of a democratic choice there truly is in countries where the vast majority of women breast-feed: “The notion of 100 percent of women wanting to breast-feed is as troubling as 100 percent of women not wanting to do so.” Yet Badinter is not troubled by the hegemony of baby bottles in France and the underlying message that women must “free” themselves as early as possible from their offspring to go back to their work and love lives.


Implicit in her argument is indeed the troubling assumption that a woman’s breasts belong not to her child, not to herself, but to the dad (apparently, the rest of her body belongs to her boss and the economic machine she needs to plug back into as soon as possible). “There is no greater antithesis to the couple as lovers than the couple as parents,” warns Badinter repeatedly. “The challenge is that much greater with the difficulty of distinguishing the breast-feeding breast from the sexual breast.” In her 2012 page-turner, Bringing up Bébé, Pamela Druckerman, a U.S. expatriate mom of twins in the city of lights, was keenly aware of the innuendos of French cultural norms: what with perineum rehab reimbursed by social security after birth to ensure that women are tight and firm in all the right spots, a new mom had better be a hot mama again soon. Breast-feeding is just not sexy enough, as is baby-weight, which (trust me) a young Française has a moral imperative to drop within six weeks. While American moms are under the tyranny of babies, French ones are under the tyranny of sex. But Badinter has repeatedly chosen to turn a blind eye to that kind of alienation: sexual objectification. During the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal in the summer of 2011, she violently condemned the “possible injustice” committed against her longtime friend Strauss-Kahn (now indicted in a prostitution scandal in France). Before that, she had attacked attempts to pass anti-sexual harassment laws in France in her book Dead End Feminism.


Some critics of The Conflict have pointed out that Badinter is at once the heiress and the largest single shareholder and Board Chair of Publicis, an advertising company which has signed hefty contracts with the likes of Nestlé, Pampers, and other corporations with a vested interest in the growth of the formula, diapers, and baby food markets. In an interview with Le Monde, Badinter herself attributed the origin of the book to the French government’s decision in 1998 to ban advertisement for and free samples of baby formula in public maternity wards. And yet, however tempting, it is unfair to dub the book The Conflict (Of Interest) too quickly. There is no reason to believe that Badinter is insincere. She made her name in 1980 with a book denouncing the myth of mother love, already rejecting the idea that caring for infants had anything to do with maternal instinct. But her long-time dismissal of essentialist definitions of motherhood does not prevent her from being blinded by the dominant norms of mothering in the culture she comes from, and which she strongly defends.


In fact, the book sounds rather like an ode to French mothers, who valiantly resist the world-wide injunction to immolate their sense of self in the name of mother love, while still performing their social duty of replenishing the nation with new blood, scoring an enviable birthrate of 2.01 child per woman in 2010, one of the highest in Europe. Badinter notes (after some fact-twisting) that countries with the highest fertility rates are those that embrace a more relaxed approach to parenting. The more you turn motherhood into boot-camp, she says, the less women line up to enlist. (Reading Badinter’s depiction of the living hell that modern mothers inhabit, it’s a wonder that babies are brought into the world at all.) There are at least two problems with this theory: it’s factually flawed and it’s politically stinky.


Throughout the book, the author has an annoying tendency to cherry-pick her data. In her presentation of breast-feeding, she leaves out Iceland from her comparison charts under the pretext that it does not belong to the European Community: that’s unfortunate, since Iceland, which has some of the most supportive and gender-neutral policies for parents in the world, a reasonably high breast-feeding rate and whose Presidential candidate last June was a very pregnant mother of three, outdid France in 2011 with a fertility rate of 2.2. A culture that embraces motherhood and all its consequences does not necessarily result in fewer children per woman; much still depends on the social policies in place. But even Badinter’s skewed tables should lead to more nuanced conclusions: instead of dropping with the emergence of the new “momism” trend she decries, fertility rates have been slightly rising after a big dip in the ‘80s and ‘90s in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.


If anything, Badinter should rejoice that women are less and less burdened by their offspring rather than deplore the drop in birth rates in Western nations. Yet she resorts to a sneaky, pro-natalist argument to urge society to free women from the rigors of extreme motherhood so that they don’t balk at having more kids. Her discourse verges dangerously close to a race-based nationalist argument against the demographic decline of old nations. Why are immigrant populations, whose birth rates are historically higher, not good enough to counterbalance the lesser enthusiasm of the natives? She warns of the economic catastrophe of a generation (hers) of baby-boomers with fewer and fewer grandchildren stepping up to pay for the former’s retirement. But there is an easy way to compensate for demographic trends on the decline: it’s called immigration, which she omits to mention. One suspects that for someone who testified in front of the Parliament to support a ban on the burka and the Islamic veil, some births are more desirable than others.


 


A Quixotic Fight


More profoundly, Badinter’s overall claim that women are pushed back home and away from work is denied by recent statistics and long-term trends. In the United States alone, for the first time in history, women make about 50% of the workforce, a figure never achieved before. And the proportion of women who go on the job market has steadily increased, from 43% in 1970 to 60% in 2007. In the same interval, the proportion of men in the labor force declined. These figures are more striking when you consider women of child-bearing age: in France, 83 % of women aged 25-49 work or are looking for work, and this figure has been steadily rising — and never, ever, falling — since the 1950s. This looks to me like a pretty robust trend towards rather than away from work for women.


Curiously, around the same time that Badinter’s book was published in France, the American media started to be obsessed with two intertwined storylines that paint a strikingly different picture of women’s achievements in the workforce from that of Badinter’s: they reported massively on the decline of men on the one hand and on the rise of women in power on the other, with a new generation of career-driven alpha girls determined to achieve financial independence. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “The Female Economy” (2009), Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre forecast a new era where women become the decisive economic agents as workers, employers, and consumers: nowhere do they spot a reversal of the trend towards a more intense participation of women in the workforce. From the New Girl Order described by Hanna Rosin in “The End of Men” (The Atlantic, July 2010) to Kay S. Hymowitz’ Manning up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys (2011) and titles like “Women: Saviors of the World Economy?” (CNN, 26 Octobre 26, 2009); The Richer Sex (Liza Mundy, 2012); “Women Will Rule the World” (Newsweek, 5 July 2010); Why Women Should Rule the World (Dee Dee Myers, 2008); Man Down (Dan Abram, 2011) and the even more alarming The Disposable Male (Michael Gilbert, 2006), Save the Males (Kathleen Parker, 2008), and “Are Men Necessary?” (New York Times, June 30th, 2010), American scholars, journalists, economists, and sociologists must have lived on an entirely different planet from Badinter’s. This would make sense if she had been depicting some local peculiarities of France or Europe, but her target is squarely the Anglophone world, and American readers will have no trouble recognizing in her descriptions the organic zucchini-pumpkin-baby-food-mixing, cloth-diaper addicted, helicopter moms one finds in Park Slope or Noe Valley.


Looking at large-scale trends, one can hardly find a trace of the homebound journey that Badinter claims women are forced to take to obey the diktats of modern motherhood. In fact, the correlation might be the reverse in some cases: in the United States, rather than keeping mothers away from work, kids might well send them looking for more ways to pay for the unforgiving cost of childcare and education. And studies show that, in developed countries, the women most likely to breast-feed longer than six months, to take time away from work, and to dive into any of the extreme parenting fads that make motherhood sound like joining the army are the ones that are the most educated and the highest earners. In other words, there is something beyond gender at stake, something with an unsavory name one would tactfully avoid in the refined aristocratic circles that Badinter navigates: class.


Badinter herself has to admit that “for now” the trends she denounces don’t exist. After having argued that women stop working because it does not make economic sense for low-wage earners to spend their income on childcare, she concedes that the so-called “opt-out revolution” advertised in the New York Times in 2003 was mostly for professionals of the wealthy kind, and that “for now, the statistics of working women have remained fairly stable.” One wonders what is more frustrating: the casualness with which she massages statistics to suit her ideological needs, or her last-minute admission that most of what she fears is hypothetical? Descartes too used speculative arguments to test the boundaries of knowledge, but the Evil Genius hypothesis (the hyperbolic skeptical argument that a God-like demon is constantly deceiving us) was for grander purposes than proving mere opinions about the alienating properties of breast-feeding and cloth diapers.


 


A Problem With Ethics


Then there is the theoretical argument of the subtitle, How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which pits motherhood against womanhood. If you accept without discussion that “hedonism” (the quest for pleasure above any other moral or social obligations) and “a passion for the self” not only are but should be the hallmarks of a good life, then I guess we can grant Badinter’s premise that being a mother conflicts with a woman’s identity — and forego forming any meaningful relationship based on something a little more altruistic than self-interest.


Badinter, whose fortune is evaluated at over 460 million Euros, has a surprising tendency to conceptualize motherhood as an investment gone awry: “The moment a woman chooses to bring a child into the world for her own satisfaction [my emphasis], notions of giving are replaced by debt. The gift of life is transformed into an infinite debt toward a child that neither God nor nature insists you have and one who is bound to remind you at some point that he or she never asked to be born.” Never mind that a simpler way to rephrase this equation is that parenting (and not just motherhood) requires one to step back from the dominant model of market analysis and agree to give freely one’s time, energy, attention, money (in the United States as much as the price of a two-bedroom apartment in New York), and even that most irrational of gifts: love. For Badinter, one of the most damning aspects of modern motherhood is this notion of selflessness, which she takes to literally mean an abdication of the self (a self-less state) rather than the antonym to selfishness. Not once does she question the ethical value of “individualism.”


A forgetful historian, Badinter proves here to also be a poor moral philosopher. “Responsibility” is in her mouth a dirty word. Altruism, empathy, self-sacrifice, caring wholeheartedly for someone else: the bread and butter of parenting is viewed by Badinter as an atrocious vice leading to obscurantism, oppression, and the most hideous flaw of all — the loss of one’s “autonomy.” Children are never viewed as persons with whom mothers develop meaningful relationships (a “loving” one would be downright suspicious, smacking of an “essentialist” definition of maternal love), and very rarely as human beings. At best they stand in the way like very demanding pets or plants; at worst they are perverse tyrants sucking life out of their mother’s breasts. In Badinter’s view, only a few letters separate bonding from bondage.


Yet, as Badinter must acknowledge, kids continue to be born and someone will have to take care of them: if not their mothers, then caregivers and teachers, two professions that are still predominantly female. From wet nurses to daycare workers, outsourcing care and education seems to be the solution for Badinter. But these systems that supposedly promote gender equality actually reinforce class inequities. By a bizarre transfiguration, the same full-time attention required to take care of young children is called slavery when performed by parents but emancipation for the caregivers who are paid to do so (I doubt that the wet nurses of the eighteenth century, who were routinely raped to enable them to produce milk, thought about it that way). The logic that asserts that it’s liberating to wipe others’ babies’ bums but alienating when that little tush comes from yours sounds a little skewed. What Badinter fails to see is that it is not a zero sum game: one woman’s “freedom” from the vicissitudes of childrearing is another woman’s alienation. The mothering does happen: it is only outsourced to other, less fortunate, and mostly female workers.


In Enlightened Sexism, the media critic Susan J. Douglas addresses the pressure of the new “momism.” But instead of attacking motherhood as inherently anti-feminist, she digs up another culprit, “the inhumanity of many workplaces whose workaholic cultures are hostile to men and women alike.” Although one would suspect that the author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women would be rather sympathetic with The Conflict’s general argument, Douglas refuses to widen the gap between motherhood and the workplace whereas Badinter cashes out on the conflict she denounces.


Badinter asks a legitimate question: whom does all the back-to-Nature rhetoric serve? But the same question could be applied to her ideas about pushing women into the workforce at all cost. Looking at the recent trend of career-driven alpha girls whom Kay S. Hymowitz describes in Manning Up, or at their “superwomen” mothers of the ‘80s, one can legitimately wonder whose interests are ultimately best served by the rise in numbers of this generally cheaper, dedicated, obedient female workforce, and by the new dogma that work and the money you get from it are the ultimate measure of self-worth, or even, where the self resides. Not surprisingly for the heir of existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, Badinter seems to posit that a woman’s existence precedes her essence. You are what you do, not what your XX chromosomes tell you to be. It is unfortunate that second wave feminists like her tend to limit the range of worthy self-defining actions to the mandated “work as self-fulfillment” imperative that serves a capitalist economy so well.


Badinter has very little patience with people who are not cartésien. Yet, being simplistic about complicated issues doesn't strike me as the wisest strategy. Nor is it the ethical stance we rightly expect from public intellectuals. In the end, The Conflict, while addressing real issues, is a sloppy book that lacks intellectual rigor and honesty. It’s a book that does not make you think: instead, it aims for the gut and blurs simple facts into fantastical conspiracies.


It is a difficult task to engage with a work that is factually wrong and philosophically twisted, but Badinter is a preeminent French intellectual, and having produced many interesting titles in the past she deserves serious attention, if only to understand why more than 250,000 French readers rushed to grab her book. As one progresses through The Conflict, its political and cultural function becomes clear: it is to reassert the universal value of the French version of motherhood — to conform to, rather than to confront prevailing cultural norms.


Descartes praised Reason above all, attempting to prove God’s existence by reasonable means alone. One wishes that Badinter, in her discussion of the new God Baby religion, had been a little more Cartesian in method and much more Pascalian at heart. To Descartes, Pascal famously replied: “The heart has reasons that Reason cannot fathom.”


 


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LARB Contributor

Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French Literature at Stanford University. She is a contributor to Zyzzyva, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Le Monde, and has appeared on the international news TV channel France24 to cover the French-American cultural divide.

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