Mère Knows Best: Is the American mother really a slave to her child? he newest salvos in the Mommy Wars, French edition
Elisabeth Badinter is showing her age. For decades the philosopher and grande dame of French feminism has been aiming her flaming arrows at any and all who attack the fully liberated woman. Like all good feminists, she has targeted the age-old demands of distaff duty—serving one’s husband, one’s children, and the home. But what sets her apart is the particular fury she directs at any claim that such tradition is natural and therefore necessary; appeals to nature, to her, are only vile means of subjugating women, and of convincing them that there is no other way to live their lives. Conservative forces may insist that a woman’s place is in the home, but their argument gains public potency when they assert that women are, biologically speaking, made to be the weaker sex, keepers of the hearth, and, above all, mothers first. Badinter’s first book, L’amour en plus (published in English as Mother Love), a history of maternal affection published in 1981, set out to prove that motherly love as a natural emotion was nothing but a myth.
Three decades later—and to Badinter’s unmitigated horror—the Ideal Mother is back, helicoptering over her precious one in the schoolyard, hiring tutors in reading, math, and Mandarin, wiping junior’s nose, and kissing his booboos for more years than is seemly. And so Badinter returns to her old project, reviving her attack on motherly love in The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which has sold over 200,000 copies in France and was released in the United States this April.