The baby is the best ally of masculine domination.A statement that is both true, in that sense that motherhood is the greatest obstacle to a world in which men and women are treated the same, and absolutely useless, since the only alternative to motherhood is the extinction of the species.
Badinter is a French intellectual whose latest book is a rant against "green" motherhood. Badinter thinks that pressure to do everything "naturally" -- give birth without pain medication, breast feed, use cloth diapers, eat organically, cook at home, and so on -- makes women's lives much harder and interferes with their careers. Some of the details are wrong (birth and recovery are both faster without an epidural), but of course there is something to what she says. The more energy you put into one thing, the less you have for other things. If you assume that career success is the highest good, then motherhood is one of the biggest possible obstacles to fulfillment, and anything that makes parenting more time consuming is a waste.
Ergo, Elisabeth Badinter should not have children. Ditto everyone else who would rather have a corner office than a family. (The old notion that parenting is mainly a burden for women is no longer true; mothers do more parenting work, but fathers do a lot, and men are more likely to say they don't want children because of the work involved.) My objection to Elisabeth Badinter is the same complaint I have with Linda Hirshman and all the other feminists who think work is the greatest thing in life and can't understand why everyone else doesn't feel the same way. Work is necessary for most of us, both financially and psychologically, but that doesn't make it the be all of life. I think, on the contrary, that our society puts far too much emphasis on careers and money. The cult of motherhood can be weird sometimes, but it is one of the few counter-weights to the worship of money and success that otherwise dominates our world.
It is hard to balance parenthood and career. But everything worth doing is hard, and for some of us nothing is more worth doing than raising children.
I find books like this rather puzzling, on several levels. One is that so much of the content is simply about taste. ". . . for Elisabeth Badinter, it is unthinkable to imagine that cooking for a child means anything other than an obligation." Fine, but to write a book saying that, because of this, women in general should not want to cook for children, is like writing a book whose argument is "I don't like white wine, and so everyone should drink less of it." Another is that the author herself admits “Professional life is ever harder, ever more stressful and unattractive." If so, between career and motherhood, what's to prefer?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if part of the tiresomely ongoing nature of this debate doesn't have to do with the fact that both of the upper middle class' classic life choices--stay-at-home momism in an age of mass schooling, and outside-the-home hyper-careerism, are both rather new, artificial, and unsustainable. I suspect what many folks want is challenging work they can do in or near the home, and NOT in a rigidly hierarchical, emotionally repressed situation with constant performance assessment. (It strikes me that, after all, most career people aren't so much fully actualized, tough individualists, as simply permanent children who never stop trying to please someone above them. They seem tough because they have hardened themselves to the humiliation of it all.)
I agree that none of our lifestyle options are very natural, and this is probably why many people find all of them dissatisfying.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly remarkable that so many people cannot just accept that others are different. They find the existence of alternatives to be some kind of threat to the choices that they have made for themselves. So they develop elaborate arguments about why their own choices are the best for everyone. It's crazy, but very common.