The mediocre mother

You know I have my strong reservations about Elisabeth Badinter but she’s right on with this bit about pregnancy then and now:

“Thirty years ago, we lived our pregnancies with insouciance and lightness,” Badinter has remarked. “Today, to be pregnant seems not far from entering into a religious order.”

We have become incredibly controlling and uncompromising about women during their pregnancies.

“Some of them say they will not have a second or third child because everything is forbidden when one is pregnant. No cigarettes, zero alcohol – not even a glass of champagne for a birthday celebration. They treat women like babies – they take us for idiots. This idea infuriates me. For sure, it is not recommended to smoke a packet of cigarettes a day when one is pregnant” – she raises her eyebrows and smiles – “even though I did it! I recognise that one has to be careful, but one glass of wine in the evening is not going to do any harm.”

I very much like the idea of the ‘mediocre mother’ that Badinter argues in favour of… though am really not partial to the way Badinter so often attaches her criticism of the culture of motherhood to the child rather than to sexist domestic relationships and inflexibe work institutions.

So what, exactly, is rotten in the state of motherhood? “Before I began this book,” she says, “young women were coming to me, and talking about how guilty they felt.” She shakes her head. “To my stupefaction, this was the key word: guilt. Guilt about breastfeeding, about smoking, drinking, working, child care; about not doing ‘the best for your child’. ”

“In my own life, as a young woman, this is the one thing I never did – it was never even thought of. I never asked myself if I’d be a good mother, or whether I could meet the demands. Young women do this constantly now. In fact, many say no to motherhood altogether for these reasons. ‘I cannot be a perfect mother; I will not be a mother at all.’ ”

Those feminists who have argued strenuously in favour of mothers staying attached to the workforce have annoyed a lot of mothers, they can be willfully ignorant on the satisfactions of being at home with one’s children and also ridiculously doubtful about the needs of small children, but in most cases I think their hearts are in the right place.

“Some women may leave to settle their scores with their own mothers,” she says after a moment. “This is the case for me, certainly; I think girls have always said, ‘I don’t want to be like my mother.’ “And for women who are now around 40, who are often the most privileged and the most sensitive to these views, their mothers were more or less feminists, and wanted to have children and also a professional life. And their daughters are now saying, ‘My mother was completely wrong. She wanted everything, and instead she lost everything: she had to work double the amount, her husband left her for a younger woman, professionally she had a glass ceiling and when she came home she was exhausted and always in a hurry. And who paid for this? Me, her daughter.’ ”

According to Badinter, however, complete investment in parenting is misplaced. “We live 80 to 85 years in our industrialised countries,” she says, raising both hands. “Children take up 20 to 25 years, if that. Staking your whole life on 20 years is a bad bet.

“Nowadays, in the West, one couple out of two separates [about one in three in Australia divorce], often when the child is very young,” she says pragmatically. “This is simply a fact. And if you don’t have a job and financial independence, you are in a terrible situation.” Elizabeth Broderick, 51, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner of Australia, agrees.

Broderick has two children, aged 14 and 15, and when they were born, she was a partner at a large law firm in Sydney. Today, she regards one of her main roles as encouraging women’s financial autonomy. “Economic independence is what ensures women can leave abusive relationships,” she says. “That we can care for our families if our relationships break down, that we don’t live in poverty in retirement just because we chose to care for our children.”

What is needed, she says, is far better and cheaper childcare options, so it’s realistic for women to return to work. Historically, Australia has been very bad at this: until the introduction of the paid parental leave scheme last year, we were one of only two OECD countries without comprehensive paid parental leave provisions. There also needs to be financial recognition of the caring roles performed by women.

In the UK, for instance, extra pension payments can be made to grandmothers who take on significant childcare duties. Broderick would like to see similar schemes here. “What I say is, is poverty to be the reward for a lifetime spent caring?” she asks. “Unless we elevate women’s status as being more than ‘just carers’, we won’t enable them to have strong economic independence across their lifetimes.”