Thanks to Dati the debate about career Vs stay-at-home moms is back with a bang
WHY IS it we feel the need to pillory any woman for the choices she makes? For the choices she is lucky enough to be able to make? Is it because she is in the public eye?
Did Rachida Dati, the French justice minister, realise the Pandora’s box she was throwing open when she stepped out in high-heels and a tight, black mini-dress to return to work five days after giving birth by Caesarean section?
Chances are she knew well what she was at. Because for Rachida Dati, daughter of Arab immigrants and one of 12 siblings, to succeed she had to be extraordinary, she had to be truly exceptional to transcend the boundaries of her birth, her culture and her sex.
To stay in her job as one of the senior ministers in Sarkozy’s cabinet, Dati had to prove that she was, if not quite one of the boys then an uber-girl; tough, strong, capable and easily able to juggle the demands of a cabinet job with the demands of being a new mom to an infant daughter.
It could be argued that staying home to nurse your five-day-old baby is ultra uber-feminine territory and needs oodles of strength, toughness and capability. Obviously Dati didn’t see it that way. She would have had to fight harder than her compatriots to get to where she is today and you get the feeling nobody, certainly not the equally ambitious Carla Bruni Sarkozy, who is rumoured to harbour resentment against the exotically gorgeous Rachida, or, indeed, a tiny new baby will stop her.
The audacious move to a press conference and a meeting when she was still in post-operative recovery has garnered her acres of publicity.
She was doing what stars and celebrities the world over do when they have given birth; she was showing us ordinary mortals, just how extraordinary she is by bouncing back into her regular clothes and her high-powered job.
It helps, of course, the high-powered career because she would have the wherewithal to employ a retinue of staff around the clock to look after baby Zohra. And, just like celebrities, employ personal trainers and chefs and motivational therapists to help get her back into ship-shape for the demands of that superwoman career.
Dati was continuing her elevation from ordinary. She was ensuring her tenure as “different and exceptional” by refusing to conform to the norms expected of a post-partum woman.
What is the freedom bestowed upon us by feminism and its derivative, equal opportunity, if not the freedom to choose, whether we like or admire those choices, whether we like the messages implicit in those choices, whether or not we agree with those choices?
The bit that’s fascinating many mothers of all varieties is how she felt well enough to don the little black dress and the four-inch heels with a fresh Caesarean scar, tiny and all though these scars may be, with the progeny less than a week old. Women who have had births through the regular channel and also many who have had C sections are wincing, thinking of the considerable “ouch” factor (and let’s not even go near breast feeding).
We can certainly thank Dati for one thing: the debate about career mothers Vs stay-at-home moms is back with a bang. As a stay-at-home mother I rarely need to defend my decision. Perhaps as a society we have moved on from the assumption that a homemaker is one of the lowest forms of organism. If anything I feel lucky, not smugly lucky, as in aren’t I the jammy one that can afford to stay home with my brood, but that I have never felt that overwhelming need to get back full-time into the workplace.
It is that hoary old debate, the reason our grandmothers and mothers marched; to have the right to choose that option or not.
Vilifying Rachida Dati because she exercised her right to choose and be extraordinary is surely not what our predecessors had in mind.