review: The Conflict

Having just finished French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, I remain conflicted.

On the one hand, I agreed with her about the return to naturalism, the rise of the child-free woman and the conservatism of dominant ideologies of motherhood. On the other hand, I found myself closing the book with a dissatisfied ‘and?’. I was right there with her as she critiqued the cult of the ‘natural’ starting off with Rousseau and coming into the present (including certain strands of feminism), I was interested to read about the origins of La Leche League in fundamentalist Christianity and its continued proselytising mission regarding breastfeeding, and I was intrigued by her diagnosis of the rise of child-free women as a ‘nuclear option’ - a kind of Lysistrata-like riposte to the impossible demands placed on women and mothers in the present moment. I was also interested in what she appeared to pose as an answer: individualistic hedonism, most especially as seen in France. Was the answer to the question of how to manage motherhood and everything else as simple as hopping on a plane?

Um ... no.

For me, alarm bells start ringing when exceptionalism is posed as an answer, whether it’s nationality-based or class-based. What France does do well is provide State support for mothering, in the form of at least four months’ paid parental leave, jobs held open for three years (although this is not solely applicable to new mothers) long post-natal stays in hospital, free community-based referral services to find childcare, affordable high-quality child-care and pre-schools, and after-school care that enables full-time working. What this improves, according to Badinter’s analysis, is not necessarily women’s options in the wider society, nor men's ability to fully enter the domestic sphere but the birth-rate, most especially the number of women having children. While France has a high, but not outrageously high, birth-rate by Western European standards (New Zealand’s is much higher, for example, for particular demographic reasons of our own), where France differs from other countries is that far fewer women choose not to have children at all. Badinter contrasts this with neighbouring Germany, where a third of women of child-bearing age are choosing not to have children. She concludes that this ‘must be because they feel that becoming mothers is not worth the cost ... it must mean they are fulfilling their potential through something other than the kind of motherhood imposed on them’. (The Conflict, p 169) 

US journalist Judith Warner, who spent her early mothering years in France before returning to the States, agrees that there are many positive aspects of mothering in France. Aside from the material benefits, she notes that:

Guilt just wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t considered a natural consequence of working motherhood. Neither was the word ‘selfish’ considered the necessary accoutrement of a woman with children who wanted to take time for herself. On the contrary, work was considered a normal part, even a desirable part, of a modern mother’s life .... Taking time for herself was equally considered to be a mother’s right - indeed, a mother’s responsibility - as was taking the time for romance and a social life. The general French conviction that a person should live a ‘balanced’ life was especially true for mothers - particularly, I would say for stay-at-home mothers, who were otherwise considered at risk of falling into excessive child-centredness. (Perfect Madness, p 10)

Warner is convinced, however, that ‘there is a price to pay for the wonderful (and expensive) benefits [French women] enjoy: a pervasive and all-but-unchallenged kind of institutional sexism.’ (Perfect Madness, p 281). According to Warner, this sexism can prevent women of childbearing age from being hired in the first place, and can affectthe rights of women who do become pregnant while working. Even Badinter admits things are far from perfect: French fathers take on few domestic responsibilities and the decisions regarding children are still the primary responsibility of the mother (The Conflict, p 167). She also has little to say - in this book, at least - about how women and mothers fare in the wider society. More women may work - but what do they work at and how do they deal with obstacles in their careers? What about French fathers - are they making strong inroads into the domestic sphere? What is the composition of the State-funded army of childcarers and how are they remunerated? More broadly, are French women free of the influence of the beauty myth, eating disorders and body fascism? What about domestic violence? In short, is patriarchy on its knees in France because of the more generous State support of mothers, and the cultural vibe that it’s okay to have a glass of vin rouge while pregnant? 

Um ... no.

In addition, France is not the only European country that has generous parental leave provisions (for both mothers and fathers). But here’s the thing.  It’s hard to read this as solely a feminist triumph, even though it undoubtedly benefits women, not least because the origins of some of these policies pre-date second-wave feminism. Leaving aside the issue that there are still numerous cultural obstacles to men and women sharing the benefits equally (Badinter notes that where paternity leave provisions exist, men may be unwilling or unable to take them up), these provisions were developed less to free women from the drudgery of childcare and home-making, but more to protect children. Arguably, they represent less an affirmation of women’s rights, than the rights of their children (this is a topic I want to address in a future post: why should it be one or the other?).

The conflict Badinter is concerned with, then, is that between 'the woman' and 'the mother' (the French subtitle of the book) - as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive. As some reviewers have noted, this opposition risks harking back to the untenable position that motherhood itself is at odds with women's emancipation. Others have noted that Badinter seems to let men off the hook when it comes to parenting, as if it's solely the responsibility of the mother, whether she be French and 'mediocre' or intensively attached. For the conspiracy theorists out there, still others have noted the links between Badinter and Nestle, controversial manufacturers of infant formula, and questioned her ethical stand-point.

Between all the myth-busting and truth-telling surrounding modern motherhood, there’s plenty of analysis about what the problem is (whether it's offered from an explicitly feminist point-of-view or not). Much more difficult, of course, is solving the problem. Looked at this way, Badinter’s recourse to individualistic hedonism as the answer seems limited at best. As that arch-feminist (ha!) Karl Marx once observed, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’.

'it's only natural ...'

Nature baby, Natural baby, Organic Baby, Natural Organic Bio baby: from natural birth to Only Organic pureed vegetable baby food, raising babies is as natural as it gets.  

Or so culture would have us believe.

Practically everywhere you look - proliferating the higher up the socio-economic ladder you go - are shops, websites and products galore dedicated to the cult of nature. Birth without drugs followed by breastfeeding on demand for as long as possible is the natural and best course presented to new mothers. Wrapping your baby’s bottom in organic cotton re-usable nappies is the best way to go too: this is not only best for baby, but also best for the planet. Not living up to these ideals - a highly-interventionist birth, a guilty trip to the formula aisle in the supermarket, frustration with being chained to the washing machine - can leave women feeling like failures. 

I don’t want to dismiss these products and positions entirely. I attempted a natural birth (failing dismally due to my ... um ... body and baby’s desire to not conform to hospital schedules), breastfed for a little over a year (I was physically able to and was also able to take a year-plus off from my job to enable continued breastfeeding), and have mostly opted for the make-your-own-babyfood option (occasionally feeling somewhat disheartened when the baby refused my all-natural pureed veges and opted instead for a jar of baby-food). I’m sitting on a ‘B’ then so far on the ‘nature is best’ report card. Where my grade-point-average drops way down, however, is in the nappy department. I have to confess we didn’t even try re-usable nappies. I know, I know, bad for baby (although she’s never had nappy rash) and worse for the environment (hmmm ... although we live in a country that has implemented a cap and trade emissions scheme - without a cap! - and giving the worst polluters - the dairy industry - the opportunity to delay entry into it). I’m not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t be doing with their babies when it comes to using natural products or not. Instead, I want to take a step back and ask, more broadly, what this turn to nature means.

Like the Romantic painters and poets of the early nineteenth century, contemporary culture idealises and sentimentalises nature. As French feminist Elisabeth Badinter points out, ‘rather than mastering and using nature to address human needs and wants, humans are instead called to submit to the laws of nature ... This call to love and respect the natural environment came hand in hand with warnings of catastrophe and revenge: if we damaged the earth, we would pay dearly. Sooner or later, Mother Nature would severely punish her children’ (The Conflict, p 34)  Beginning in the 1970s, and gathering momentum in the 1980s, Badinter identifies three areas in which naturalism has gained ascendancy, specifically to the detriment of mothers: ecology, behavioural sciences based on ethology (the scientific study of animal behaviour), and a new essentialist feminism (The Conflict, p 33).  To this list, I add the following:

• intensive mothering, which remains the dominant ideology of motherhood. Ideally, mothers are expected to devote their every waking - and many sleeping - hours to the care of their young children. Pureeing carrots and rinsing pooey cloth nappies are just parts of this mothering agenda.
• neurosexism, which expounds the natural differences between boys and girls. As the fantastic Cordelia Fine has shown in Delusions of Gender, we’re also in a moment where the supposedly hard-wired differences between boys and girls are informing everything from product development to the school curriculum. 
• environmentalism. While climate change is real and serious, and directly concerns our children’s future, the choices that mothers make over a few years at best seem to earn more column inches than serial industrial polluters, climate change deniers, and politicians implementing short-sighted policies. Mothers are already at risk of screwing their children up psychologically, so why not just add the guilty burden of screwing up their futures and the whole planet as well? And it’s probably the fault of their mothers that people deny climate change, institute bad environmental policy and pollute waterways anyway. A recent article I read on disposable nappies was so venomous in its polemic against selfish mothers (yep, them again) that I felt a little concerned about the writer’s state of mind. But I digress.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner asked why women were continually positioned as closer to nature than culture and what it meant. In still-pertinent observations, she said:

Woman is being identified with – or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of – something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is “nature” in the most generalized sense. Every culture, or, generically, “culture,” is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest. We may thus broadly equate culture with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature. Now the categories of “nature” and “culture” are of course conceptual categories – one can find no boundary out in the actual world between the two states or realms of being. ('Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?' p 72)

So while we we are in a moment of continuous and increasing reliance on the technological, we also reify nature and the natural. We may say nature is best - but we don’t hesitate to intervene when we think it necessary. My attempted natural birth is one such example. Neither my body nor my baby decided that time was up on pain-free labour and that artificial induction should begin, and, eventually, that the forceps should be produced. But, by the same token, I don’t want to suggest that the use of technology in my case - however botched - wasn’t instrumental in saving either mine or my baby’s life. We are mistaken if we think that Nature cares one way or another. It simply is. It is humans - with our capacity for culture or ‘human consciousness’ - that make nature mean anything at all.

To paraphrase Michel Foucault in his discussion of the ‘author-function’ in literature, when something is represented in a way that inverts its historical function then it is likely to be ideological - that is, it is a concept produced by social power relations (‘What is an author?’ p 3). In the case of literature, the truth of a text is conventionally thought to be what the author meant. This may may seem like ‘natural’ common sense; however, there are in fact many ways one could read a text: using a historical lens, a feminist one, a Marxist one and so on. These might generate meanings of which the author had no awareness and with which he or she might heartily disagree - yet they are still valid readings of the words on the page. When it comes to mothers, the idea of Nature operates in a similar way, constraining the possible meanings of motherhood. Mothers are exalted as both natural and good - as long as they follow the cultural script set for them. By contrast, women who don’t become mothers or mothers who defy cultural convention, intentionally or not, are unnatural. Nature therefore defines all women. 

But the way we think about motherhood doesn’t have to be this binary: either / or, good / bad, natural / unnatural.  As beings endowed with consciousness, women, like men, are able to draw on culture as well as nature and make meanings from both. In a 2012 article for the Huffington Post, Elisabeth Badinter concluded that a cultural response is necessary to combat the return to naturalism:

Women ... are endowed with consciousness, personal histories, desires and differing ambitions. What some do well and with pleasure, others do badly or out of duty. By failing to take account of women's diversity, by imposing a single ideal of motherhood, by pursuing the notion of a perfect mother -- one who has the exclusive responsibility of making or breaking her children -- we fall into a trap. We neglect the other business of modern women: the unfinished assault on the glass ceiling, the fight to close the salary gap, the struggle for equality at home. We overlook women's need for financial independence at a moment when one marriage in two ends in divorce.

Women might begin to reverse the trend by rallying behind the breadth of their aspirations -- personal, maternal, and professional. We might begin by affirming that whether mothers give birth by epidural or in a hydrotherapy tub, breast-feed or mix formula, co-sleep or opt for a crib, stay at home or enroll in daycare, their children will be fine. In our developed world, both sets of children will thrive. In their effect on our children, the differences in approach are marginal. By losing sight of this truth, we lose sight of another: that the choices we make as mothers have no small bearing on our status as women. ('A Philosopher's Case Against Modern Motherhood')  

Paying a little less attention to what culture says nature means, and beating ourselves up when we inevitably fall short, seems like a good place to start. Because, contrary to what culture tells us, motherhood doesn’t come naturally.