INTERVIEW:The French feminist philsopher Elisabeth Badinter has stirred up a new debate about motherhood in her latest, best-selling book
FEW FRENCH COUPLES have an aura quite like the one that surrounds the Badinters. In a way, sitting in their apartment overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg, our bottles of Perrier on the table and the smoke from her cigarettes wafting towards the ceiling, this genial, preternaturally calm woman in the woollen jumper and the tracksuit bottoms could be your next-door neighbour. Yet her striking blue eyes – so familiar after her recent tour of TV studios and from the sleeve of the book that sits atop the French bestseller charts – are a helpful reminder of just who we’re dealing with here.
Elisabeth Badinter is one of the foremost feminist philosophers in France, the author of some groundbreaking work, an Enlightenment specialist and a teacher at one of the country’s most prestigious colleges, the École Polytechnique. Her father was Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, founder of Publicis, one of the world’s biggest advertising firms. She remains its second-biggest shareholder. Lest her status be in any doubt, one of France’s biggest radio stations recently had an “Elisabeth Badinter Day”.
Later, Elisabeth’s husband Robert arrives home with a “bonjour, monsieur”, a friendly handshake and another moment of instant recognition. A historian, teacher and lawyer, he has little else to his name, unless you were to count his having been the celebrated Socialist justice minister who finally abolished the death penalty in France in 1981. You call to the Badinters’ ready to forgive them their airs and graces. What you get instead is a laid-back conversation, some fine company – and seething anger.
Elisabeth Badinter's recent ubiquity is down to her latest book, Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mère(Flammerion, €18 in France), which has stirred an impassioned debate by taking three of France's biggest preoccupations – the economic crisis, the environment and motherhood – and fashioning a rousing and provocative battle cry for a feminism she believes is in reverse. Released 30 years to the day after she published her major work attacking the idea of a maternal instinct, Le Conflitargues that a coalition of modern forces – from the environmentalists and their back-to-basics credo to breast-feeding activists, New Age feminists and doctors – are undoing the progress made by earlier generations.
In short, they are making today’s young women slaves to their own children. They have created a skewed ideal of the “good mother”, stigmatising women who don’t fall into line, and Badinter is angry about it. Her book is a call for women to reassert the right to make their own decisions about motherhood – to choose bottled milk, baby minders or no children at all if they wish – and to stop babies becoming the sole object of their lives.
Despite what the “ayatollahs of breast-feeding” or the peddlers of the “natural-maternalist ideology” might say, “we’re all mediocre mothers”, Badinter says evenly, her gravelly voice filling the room. “I’m 66 years old. I know one woman who was a Mozart of motherhood. And I’d say it’s as rare as a Mozart. She raised three children. She knew how to be a very good mother. Most of us do what we can, but we’re limited, and we’re limited because we have an unconscious, we have a personal story, the values of the society weigh on us and, very often, we don’t understand what our children need.
“A human mother is not a baboon. There’s no instinct that tells her, ‘that’s exactly what the child needs’. The child grows up, and we make do with our meagre means. Often, we make mistakes.” Although she follows the climate change debates closely and is grateful to the ecology movement for raising awareness about man’s responsibility to nature, Badinter is scathing about “radical environmentalism” and its attack on many of the tools – powdered milk, disposable nappies, nurseries – that freed previous generations of women from all-consuming motherhood.
"There are certain problems that are global in nature and call for a reevaluation of our behaviour. We owe that to environmentalists, and I think it's very important. But should environmentalism become a moral code, or even a religion? Certainly not . . . The idea that it's women who pay the high price of having a minor effect on nature – washable nappies and all that – non, non, non."
Then there’s the medical establishment, which bears the brunt of Badinter’s counter-attack. She details studies that debunk the claims of pro-breastfeeding groups such as La Leche League and excoriates doctors and nurses for swallowing them unquestioningly and making women feel guilty for thinking any differently.
“I think our western civilisation is absolutely frozen with fear by the principle of precaution, which we’re applying in a radical and excessive way, and which has the effect of making motherhood seem like taking holy orders. The idea of telling women: ‘not a drop of wine, not a single cigarette’. It’s ridiculous.”
We live in a litigious age, she accepts, and doctors don’t want to take the smallest risk. “But, really. Do they take us for children or what? My generation, we smoked, we drank a glass of wine with dinner, and everyone had marvellous children.
“You mustn’t eat soft cheese. You mustn’t eat shellfish. You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that. They’d prefer you stayed at home doing some embroidery.”
A mother of three, and now a grandmother, Badinter is passionate, formidable, brimming with energy. When a point excites her, she lifts her arms and brings them down in an arc towards her heart. Later, when I listen back and translate our conversation, I notice that she speaks in long, fully-formed sentences, as if she has been crafting them for decades.
In a way, she has. When Badinter published her taboo-breaking book attacking the idea of a maternal instinct in 1980, feminism was much more cohesive than it is today. “Most women of my generation thought the same thing. There was a united front,” she says. But now feminism is in crisis, she believes, because it has split two ways.
The first generation, à laSimone de Beauvoir, took as their starting point the belief that men and women should be equal because they were essentially the same. Women could do everything men could do and men could do almost everything that women could; therefore, their roles and functions in society should be the same. A second wave, which originated in the US in the 1980s, stresses not only that femininity is an essence but that it's a virtue and that what lies at its heart is motherhood.
"So there are two feminisms, and these two feminisms are in total opposition," Badinter says. "The only theme on which feminists are in agreement today is one I find very reductive, and that's the woman as victim. Voilà. The only thing on which we can campaign together is [the idea that] the woman is a victim. And for the past 10 years we only talked about women who were harassed, raped, beaten, murdered. I don't find that a very good idea."
In other words, the two feminisms cancel each other out and become inaudible. Then there are those women who would never think of calling themselves feminists, or those who think the men-and-shoes empowerment of Sex and the Cityis a token of progress. Could feminism be a victim of its own success? "I disagree," she replies flatly. "In many cases, young women are feminists without knowing it or without claiming it. Young women find it's a little out of date to call themselves feminists. Most of them say, 'I'm not a feminist, but . . .' and then you find they make feminist claims.
“But it’s very striking to see how in France the word feminism has dated. Young women of 30 years of age, they say, ‘that was for our mothers’.” Badinter bristles at the criticism some have levelled at her that she wants to turn women against motherhood. To support her case, she points to France’s birth rate, which at 2.0 children per women is significantly higher than Germany’s (1.3 children) and other European countries (Ireland’s is also one of the highest). And yet French women are consistently the most resistant to earth-motherhood and tend to return to work sooner after giving birth.
This exception françaiseowes a lot, she believes, to the long-standing French tradition of farming children out to nurses or minders in order to let women get on with their lives. So, while the figures suggest German women have an "all or nothing" approach, and many end up deciding against having children for that reason, the French have learned to be women and mothers at the same time.
Le Conflit, perhaps more than any of her books, is addressed to women – a cri de coeurto resist the stifling pressure to conform to a single ideal of what's natural and right. "Do what you want!" is how she sums up the book's message, with a broad smile and a raised arm.
“Do what you want. The book is not a critique of motherhood, it’s a critique of a new model of intensive, exclusive motherhood that’s starting to impose itself in France. I’m asking the question: Is that not damaging to a woman’s personal interests, and damaging to her own life as a woman?” With that, her arm completes its arc and finally comes to rest.
What the critics say . . .
"Completely wrong," said Cécile Duflot, the 35-year-old mother of four who leads the French Green party. "To hold environmentalism responsible for deficiencies inherited from a patriarchal world is both wrong and pointless." Elisabeth Badinter was simply "not asking the right questions".
Although many have cheered Badinter's new book, her critics have been taking turns to dismiss her as out of touch and anti-mother. Others have been critical of her for omitting to consider greater threats to women's liberty, such as domestic violence, prostitution and pornography.
One prominent woman Badinter cites disapprovingly in the book is Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet who, as ecology minister in 2008, proposed an eco-friendly tax on disposable nappies. Kosciusko-Morizet wrote that she was sympathetic towards Badinter's critique of "maternalism", or "the way society – that of masculine power – reduces the woman to her sole position as mother". But eradicating a retrograde "naturalisme" and replacing it with a "progressive artificialism" seems "quite a jump", the politician remarked, "but it's true that I'm not a philosopher".
"Since I'm interested in the position of women today and the difficulties they face, I'm working on a number of questions that preoccupy me more than breastfeeding," she wrote. "I'm thinking . . . of the glass ceiling that blocks women's careers, or of the current debates over the veil. This 'feminist' book doesn't say a word about any of that."
