Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women made me feel really sad. It’s a shame that one of the world’s leading feminist philosophers should waste her time on explaining things that are so painfully obvious to everybody who has at least some brain activity. For instance, Badinter demonstrates to the truly unintelligent among us that women who choose not to have children are neither sick nor miserable. She proves that people who choose not to have children are happy and fulfilled and that the excessive attention towards the reasons behind their choice distracts us from more important concerns:
We do not ask questions about the legitimacy of the wish to have children, although we are all aware of the devastation caused by irresponsible mothers. How many children are brought into the world to play roles of compensation or distraction? How many children are abused, neglected, or abandoned? This subject remains unexplored. Society seems more concerned with women who try to assess their responsibilities rigorously than with those who take them on with little reflection.
Badinter’s words are so eminently reasonable that I wonder how anybody can find it in themselves to disagree.
Badinter is a French feminist and, as we all know, Europe is undergoing a demographic crisis at the moment. In Germany, for example, about 1/3 of all women decide not to have children at all. Without in any way condemning that choice, Badinter analyzes the cultural and ideological environment that makes child-bearing unattractive to the growing number of women.
After the great feminist revolution of the 1960-1970, many women discovered that professional and intellectual fulfillment to which feminism gave them access is not without its costs. Fighting for success in a capitalist economy is hard. It is also an ongoing struggle that you never win definitively. The perfect sales this month don’t help you if you fail to produce any in the coming months. Several publications in one year don’t mean you can relax and publish nothing in the future. For many women, the environment of intellectual growth and professional fulfillment is the only one we can survive in.
For some, however, it proved to be too hard. So what do you do when you realize that you haven’t managed to achieve fulfillment through practicing your profession, bettering yourself intellectually, and making money? The answer is simple: you declare that none of these things are worth anything because a woman’s real value lies in her physicality. This was how the “naturalist” movement was born. This movement proposed that a woman’s only goal in life is to be a mother and created a set of pretty unrealistic expectations of what one needed to do in order to pass for a “good” mother.
[To be continued. . .]
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