Natural Woman: Why Motherhood Returned to the Center of Women’s Lives
Breast milk is freighted with more symbolic weight than any beverage should have to bear. The stuff signals femininity, fertility, and naturalness. It is thought to possess quasi-magical properties: to protect babies from infection, to enrich their brains, and to bestow them with devastating good looks. (Okay, that last one hasn’t been studied yet, but watch out for a future issue of JAMA.) To a certain subset of feminist, breast milk represents the awe-inspiring abilities—to sustain life, to nurture—that distinguish the female sex.
To another kind of feminist, the substance is considerably less worthy of reverence. It embodies the duties that biology has foisted on women, keeping them from more interesting pursuits. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, viewed breastfeeding as “exhausting servitude.” For this kind of feminist, scientific advances, such as formula, can free women from the shackles of the nursery.
The philosophical dispute over nursing encapsulates a larger debate about how women should live: Embrace a distinctively female set of values, focused on care and connection? Or strive to join men on their turf?
Elisabeth Badinter is firmly in the second camp. A French philosophy professor, she has written a number of contrarian books about womanhood, including Mother Love: Myth and Reality (1981), which challenges assumptions about the maternal instinct. In 2010 Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mère, her most recent salvo, became a bestseller in France. She is considered one of that country’s most influential intellectuals and has also achieved an unusual degree of celebrity in the United States, with profiles in the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Now an American version of Le Conflit has been released, with the title The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. In the book, Badinter lambastes the return of motherhood to the center of women’s lives, a shift she observes throughout the West. She examines a wide assortment of policy and cultural factors at play since the 1970s. But her chief culprit is an ideology she calls “naturalism,” the belief in the infallible wisdom of nature. She sees naturalism at the heart of breastfeeding absolutism, as well as other trends, such as un-medicated childbirth and cloth diapers. In the name of nature, all of these deprive women of conveniences that could ease the burdens of motherhood. “Nature has become a decisive argument for imposing laws or dispensing advice,” she writes. “It is now an ethical touchstone, hard to criticize and overwhelming all other considerations.”
Badinter is right to call out the excesses of contemporary motherhood in some quarters. She is also right that knee-jerk allegiance to the “natural” warrants interrogation. But too often, she fails to persuasively defend the particulars of her argument, and her rejection of ambiguity hurts her case. At least in an American context, Badinter’s charges inflate the importance of her favorite targets while under-emphasizing some of the guiltiest parties.