ELIZABETH BADINTER, the French feminist in the news, seems to have stepped from the pages of a contemporary fairy tale, so perfectly does she combine almost all the major elements of modern-day power and influence. She is a lecturer in philosophy at an elite academic institution (she smokes, so she must be a French philosopher) and is married to a prominent socialist politician. She is the major stockholder of one of the largest communications companies in the world, which was founded by her father. She’s never been a movie star, but she is so well-placed in government, business, academia, and the media, was it possible she would not be heard?

Badinter, 66, has authored a number of books on feminism. Like so many women who have achieved great success in recent decades, she is, despite her undeniable and impressive intelligence, walking proof of the intellectual inferiority of women. How many male philosophers end up writing about the male sex, championing its cause and tabulating its accomplishments in comparison to women? How many male philosophers become famous on such thin and narrow works? There is great irony in the fact that feminists should themselves prove what they have so often denied. But then mediocrity is the inevitable fruit of egalitarianism.

Badinter argues in one of her previous books that the maternal drive is not innate; another book takes issue with feminists who acknowledge essential differences between men and women. These are themes she reprises in her most recent work, Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mere, a bestseller in France two years ago that is receiving intensive media coverage here under the title, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women.

Simone De Beauvoir famously said that being a full-time mother should be illegal because too many women would enjoy it. Badinter does not advocate criminalizing motherhood. She just wants to keep it heavily stigmatized. Motherhood, when it is trumpeted as something fulfilling and pleasurable, gives the cause a bad name.

To modern mothers, Badinter hurls the accusation of betrayal. The enemy is no longer only men; it is other women. They have set up an impossible ideal of close, all-natural mothering.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines status as the “relative social standing or professional position.” It is one of those buzzwords in the feminist phrase book. To a feminist there is no such thing as status that is not accompanied by professional success, or at least economic independence. Badinter believes women must collectively march toward universal “status.”

She writes:

No country is yet in a position to boast that it has achieved sexual equality.

Sexual equality means the equal sharing of family responsibilities by men and women:

Sharing the job market has to be mirrored by partners sharing family-related tasks, which can only be achieved by profound feminist reform right through society, as much in politics as in industry, and most significantly among men.

There is nothing new about Badinter’s vision of the good society. She writes:

We know from Emile Durkheim’s work that marriage comes at a cost to women and is to the advantage of men. A century after Durkheim’s investigations, subtle differences have inflected this finding, but the domestic injustice persists: married life has always come at a social and cultural cost to women, not only in terms of the unequal division of household work and child rearing, but also in its detrimental effect on their career and salary prospects.

For years feminists have gotten away with making stupid statements like this. They have been endlessly flattered into believing they are true. In the meantime, drudgery of one kind or another remains a facet of life for all human beings, even the most powerful, even men. The idea that marriage as an institution has disproportionately burdened women is something many men throughout history would have been more than happy to concede. After all, it was they who were more likely to prefer another arrangement.

Leaving aside the issue of whether most women want men to do half of child-rearing and housework, how could a state of equality come about? Only if men submit to the rule of women in their own homes. Only if they agree to be endlessly bossed around. Badinter never spells it out, but what she is advocating is the submission of men to women.

If only Badinter could spend three weeks in the real world and get a taste of a life without “domestic injustice,” perhaps as a single mother with a job at Wal-Mart.

Breastfeeding particularly angers Badinter, and for good reason. It is something men can never do. She goes on at great length about the fanaticism of the La Leche League.

Breastfeeding, she writes, has become a “symbol of simplicity in our industrial and scientific age.” But breastfeeding is not just a symbol of simplicity, it is simple. After all, the alternative is fairly complicated and expensive. “At present, bottle-feeding is viewed as a necessary evil and is synonymous with a selfish mother,” she writes. Again, as in so many of her statements, one must ask: What’s the alternative?

Badinter dismisses findings that breastfeeding is healthier for babies than infant formula, preferring a study by Belarussian scientists that agree with her over those studies done by their French counterparts, who have concluded that it is indeed healthier.

There is truth to Badinter’s point that “naturalism” has gone too far. When breastfeeding and organic living are believed to be the equivalent of removing original sin, when the pursuit of physically healthy living is confounded with moral perfection, something is deeply amiss. But the alternative is not for women to abandon motherhood.

I agree with Badinter that in some senses the ideal of motherhood today is too demanding. It is too demanding in some ways, and not demanding enough in others. Protecting a child from contamination by any and every industrial toxin can be exhausting, but not having to worry about what your child reads or what he learns in school or what he wears — all that is pretty easy.

It’s strange that as a philosopher, Badinter does not see children as thinking beings. Never once does she acknowledge that mothers are their children’s first teachers and mentors.

Badinter claims that American mothers are particularly obsessive. French women have always been more laid back. She points to the aristocrats of previous ages who sent their children to wet nurses and spent their days socializing and entertaining, These were important tasks. Indeed, in many cases, they were. Women at home have always done more than simply mother. Given that French women who had no masculine ambition and power once exerted so much influence on society, why can’t French women continue to play this role? To Badinter, the only alternative to the emptiness she sees in motherhood is ambition and professional success.

She has repeatedly stated in interviews that women face a meaningless void when their children are grown. But why can’t they be the force they once were, improving culture and social life?

Only a suicidal culture listens to women who make such demeaning statements about motherhood. “Learning to get along without their mother is good for children,” Badinter stated in an interview with Marie Claire magazine. She called mothers who do not remain committed careerists “infantile.”

Badinter makes her claim of obsessive mothering to Western educated women, who have one of the lowest birth rates in history. She acknowledges the low birth rate, but states it will improve if people make the job less demanding.

She is correct that her audience is prone to neurosis about the diets of their children and the perfectionist project of the multi-talented child. But then mothers with so few children will always tend to obsession about the physical health and success of the children they do have.

But, in truth, most Western women are complicit in a culture of widespread child negligence. Abortion, divorce, fatherlessness, lonely children with few siblings, teen suicide, criminality among the young, the rise of mediocrity in learning and culture, how can feminists like Badinter get away with ignoring the fruits of their ideology? Whether to breastfeed or not is a relatively minor issue amid so much decline.

The problem is not too much mothering but too little.

— Comments —

Jeff W. writes:

This is the title I think of when I see Elizabeth Badinter’s book:

The Conflict: How Transforming Women Into an Aggrieved Voting Bloc Empowers Left-wing Elites.

Kimberly writes:

Thank you for writing on the “BadSplinter!” I’ve been debating people over this book like crazy, with all their nonsense about how unfair it is that we (housewives and dedicated mothers) are trying to take away their “choices”. From now on I will simply post the link to your article, as it says everything I’ve been trying to say with far more clarity. I love your insight. This part is particularly important:

“Simone De Beauvoir famously said that being a full-time mother should be illegal because too many women would enjoy it. Badinter does not advocate criminalizing motherhood. She just wants to keep it heavily stigmatized. Motherhood, when it is trumpeted as something fulfilling and pleasurable, gives the cause a bad name.”

This is exactly what the average, unaware woman needs to hear right now. Many of them hardly realize that they are supporting a woman who feels this way.

Mary writes:

Interestingly, Badinter seems blissfully unaware of France’s impending doom via population decline, a direct result of her movement, while she cherry picks items from France’s fruitful Catholic past to support her theories on family life.

I can’t help but find it kind of comical to hear this woman sputter in frustration about diapers and baby food, for she and her ilk are responsible for the backlash she is criticising. She is an old school feminist horrified by the fruits of feminism. For what else can logically be blamed for the preoccupation with babies and housekeeping that she complains about except feminism’s suppression/denial/denigration of motherhood and domestic life?

Here is one more ambitious, extroverted, wealthy, privileged feminist, with very narrow experience in terms of the full spectrum of womanhood, presuming to speak for all women; another aging feminist telling women what kind of work is OK and what kind isn’t, what should satisfy them and what shouldn’t. Why do these women all think we want their lives?

My question is: who does she think takes care of working women’s children while they go to work, and who does the work of the home? Other women, of course. So clearly, not all women can do work that Badinter respects; for if she respects the idea of women doing other women’s domestic work, it only stands to reason that she respects domestic work itself; therefore, it follows that she must respect a woman choosing to stay home and handle her own domestic work.

So which is it – is there value in domestic work or not? Or is she proposing that *some* women should get the big careers, and the rest should be the sacrificial lambs and support them in their drive to the top? She seems not at all aware that the lion’s share of humanity, not just women but men, too, don’t get to do their life’s joy as their work. She has no respect for the average worker and no respect for menial work, like many other women who share her views and live her lifestyle.

I love this, what a great point: “How many male philosophers end up writing about the male sex, championing its cause and tabulating its accomplishments in comparison to women? How many male philosophers become famous on such thin and narrow works? There is great irony in the fact that feminists should themselves prove what they have so often denied. Mediocrity is the fruit of all egalitarianism.”

In her mind all men love their jobs and are totally fulfilled by them and therefore men’s choices should be emulated. Because she has never in her life done anything she finds distasteful or unfulfilling, and in her imagination she lives as a man with all of a man’s supposed privileges, she doesn’t know the truth: that there are legions of fine men out there who work to be good providers for their families at jobs they may not find fulfilling at all, or may even truly despise, or at which they may be treated unjustly, etc. etc. etc. In turn, she also doesn’t understand a woman who stays home and does with less for the good of her family.

In other words, she has no understanding of self-sacrifice, that beautiful secret of all truly happy families. But when we don’t look up for the answer to our deepest longings, which are, after all is said and done, spiritual ones, we look down and focus on ourselves. She mistakes these longings for earthly desires and tries to no avail to fulfill them by striving for more and more earthly accomplishments. And so she drives on, pulling others along in her wake.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

Badinter does spend quite a bit of her book addressing the issue of demographic decline (she does not present it explicitly as decline, but expends so much of the book on the issue that it is clearly a concern). She makes the fantastic claim that the more laissez-faire mothers are, the more women will be inclined to have children because they will not be burdened by high expectations. For instance, she boasts that France has a higher birth rate than other European countries, including Ireland, Italy and Germany. The reason, she believes, is that French women have a long history of being less passionate about motherhood. Germany’s birth rate is lower than Sweden’s, she contends, because of its policies discouraging women from working.

There are many problems with Badinter’s arguments, all of which I cannot address here. But her contention that France’s relatively high birth rate is not significantly affected by the higher birth rate of immigrant women is extremely weak. She says immigrant women have the same birth rate in the second generation in France. That still leaves the influence of the many first generation immigrants of recent years.

But the bottom line is, even French women, at an average of two children per woman, have a below replacement level birth rate. All Western countries have dramatically lower birth rates than before the advent of feminism, which I date to the late eighteenth century, and significantly lower birth rates than before the cultural revolution of the 60s, which sent women in large numbers into the workforce.

Laura writes:

One of the consequences of the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s is that it so glorified careerism in women that only the most committed mothers remained home. This is an extremely important point to bear in mind in connection with Badinter’s thesis.

There will always be women who are less maternal and less comfortable with the intimacy of motherhood. But it used to be that even these women made a life that largely revolved around home and community. They even had children. As Badinter herself says in her chapter on French women in history, women’s role at home was not entirely maternal.

But, she contends, there are no options for these women today other than full-bore careerism. Unless all women participate in the cultural affirmation of careerism they are doing these less maternal women an injustice and placing pressure on them to become mothers.

This is such a strange thing for a philosopher to argue. Can’t a person philosophize anywhere? Wouldn’t a philosopher place some value on the inner life and intellectual freedom? There is no job that offers more intellectual freedom than that of someone who is unemployed and not seeking paid employment. And yet Badinter has said in interviews that women at home have nothing to do once their children are raised. Also, while she never once quotes a woman complaining about office drudgery, she features a long quote from a woman who says “emptiness is the overwhelming experience” of being at home with a baby.

Mary writes:

Thank you for nailing it, Laura. Badinter won’t come out and say it, because she wants as much influence as possible and she knows she would lose a huge portion of her audience if she did, but she is singling out non-maternal elites like herself to alone enjoy the glories of feminism (she is, of course, appealing in part to the junior elites, young women in good colleges who are still maleable). The women who support these elites on their way up are simply doing their duty for the sisterhood, taking a hit for the cause, and she assumes they benefit in some vague way although she is never pressed to elaborate. That her way of thinking has actually destroyed the fulfillment of many more women than it has helped is entirely lost on her.

But here’s the thing: isn’t this type of mindset what the feminists were complaining about in the first place – that one group (men) were the elites who got to go out into the world and enjoy it’s glories, while a perceived lesser group (women) were to do their duty by doing unfulfilling lesser work and sacrificing for the good of the cause? It is, in fact, more iniquitous, actually disgraceful, for elite women to push this agenda on lower status women, under the guise of helping all, and using the trickery and manipulation and coersion they have resorted to.

Ibtisaam writes:

Your post on Elisabeth Badinter was very informative. Perhaps it is common knowledge, but I was interested to learn of her advertising company’s ties with Nestle and other major baby formula producers, which renders her dismissal of breastfeeding irrelevant.

Also, regarding the ‘equal’ division of labour in the home pursued by feminists, this is what I had to say following a similar discussion:

“Comment on Facebook:

”the solution is not to get women out of the workplace but to get men also to learn the “finer points of cooking and housekeeping” (many do so already of course).”

Straight out of “feminism 101″ – the problem is not the time (and skill) constraints faced by working women, but the fact that men aren’t doing their ‘fair share’!

The London School of Economics and Political Science actually paid for research into “Men’s Unpaid Work and Divorce: Reassessing Specialization and Trade in British Families”.

The abstract:

Economists have spent a good deal of time examining and trying to explain the positive association between female employment and divorce. However, in doing so, they have paid very little attention to the behavior of men. This paper addresses that oversight. Using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study – a study conducted at a time when gendered specialization was the normative household arrangement for families with small children and when economic theories of marriage and divorce were first being developed – this study considers whether and how fathers’ contributions to unpaid work are associated with divorce.

 The results contain a lot of impressive stats, and conclude unsurprisingly, that the couples least likely to divorce are those with a stay-at-home wife and husband who helps out at home. Most likely to divorce are the dually employed couples where the husband does not help around the house. (who would have guessed?) What is NOT clear, is which couples are second most likely to divorce: wife at home, husband not helping, OR wife at work, husband helping. I wonder….

So while this is a nice intellectual exercise and lovely daydream fantasy of a world in which husbands cook 15 out of 30 days and clean the toilet exactly half the time, it still begs the question:

Who looks after the children when mothers work outside the home? Oh, and, when can we expect husbands to do half of gestation, labour and lactation? Thanks.”

Jane S. writes:

Every time I hear the left start complaining about some kind of social injustice, it is always involves privacy. They have this fanatical hatred of privacy. This makes sense: if you’re out to destroy Western civilization, you would want to abolish the things that hold it together, like privacy.

Domestic life takes place in private, therefore it must be repressive and demeaning, and must be done away with. Work life takes place in public, therefore it must be uplifting and worthwhile.

Laura writes:

Can’t a person philosophize anywhere? Wouldn’t a philosopher place some value on the inner life and intellectual freedom?

Of course! But whatever you do, just make sure you do it in public. Spend as much of your life as you can in a fishbowl, such as a work environment, where everything you do comes under the scrutiny of interfering busybodies, aka, feminists.

During my years abroad, one very important thing I learned is how much privacy is a uniquely Judeo-Christian concept.

In our culture, it is customary for newlyweds to go on a honeymoon, so they can get to know each other in private. Oftentimes they don’t even reveal their destination. Honeymoons are still customary, even though prenuptial cohabitation is now the norm. Everyone takes it for granted that a couple is entitled to spend the first days of their marriage alone.

In non-Western cultures, not so much. You don’t marry an individual, you marry a family. Right after the wedding, you get with the program of having your in-laws tell you what to do every single minute of the day.

I once read an autobiography of a woman, daughter of Chinese immigrants, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1920s and 30s. She was the youngest child of the family. Her older sisters had already married and left the nest by the time she was growing up. When she started school, she developed the habit of stopping by her sister’s house on her way home and they would have tea and exchange confidences. Her parents would not have approved of these cozy little tête-à-têtes. For people to spend time in private conversation, even family members, was frowned on in their culture. Based on my personal experience, that sounds about right.

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