The philosopher and woman of letters was invited to France Inter this Thursday, to present her latest essay, Gentlemen, one more effort… She deciphers the major inequality that women still experience when they become mothers, despite the feminist revolution of recent years.
A voice that counts. Élisabeth Badinter publishes a brand new work: Gentlemen, one more effort, published by Flammarion-Plon, where she questions the links between the declining birth rate in France and the risk for women’s rights. “What pushed me to write something very quickly was that I felt a real danger for the freedoms of women, for the control of their bodies,” warns the historian invited on France Inter, this Thursday April 25. “If the birth rate continues to decline at the rate we saw between 2010 and today, I think we would end up putting pressure on them.”
Questioned by Léa Salamé and Nicolas Demorand, Élisabeth Badinter then describes “the possible conflict between two legitimacies”: on the one hand, women’s rights; on the other, the duties of the State. The 80-year-old philosopher and woman of letters explains: “The first legitimacy in my eyes is to protect women’s freedoms at all costs, to absolutely respect the desires concerning birth rate or not; and at the same time recognize the duties of a State to maintain a certain form of growth.”
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“When the child appears, everything changes for women”
According to Élisabeth Badinter, women still encounter a major problem: despite their liberation and the feminist revolution of recent years with the advent of the MeToo movement, mothers remain very constrained. “There remains an inequality between men and women that we have not overcome and this inequality is difficult to combat because it concerns the intimacy of the couple, of the family,” assures the essayist. In particular, she points out the difficult daily life of women who have children while working full time. “When the child appears, everything changes for women because they continue to take on the biggest burden, the biggest responsibility, the biggest guilt.”
“Since you can not have a child – with contraception and the possibility of abortion – this means that you choose to be a mother, to give birth to a child and therefore you are mentally in the idea that you owe it everything, analyzes the philosopher with her usual acuity. And so, when you choose to have a child, the idea is born little by little that you have to be the perfect mother. We owe him everything.” Pointing out positive education, the philosopher also denounces the injunctions that have become too intense during pregnancy (“The embryo becomes the boss”), but also that of breastfeeding. “Women today find themselves in a contradiction: they must be perfect mothers and at the same time, we are in a new phase of our morals which means that we are in an era where the priority is “personal development,” she insists.
Throughout the interview, Élisabeth Badinter finally shares her concerns about women’s rights in the world. In particular, the difficulty of access to abortion in the United States or Italy. “In southern Italy, 80% of doctors refuse to perform abortions, it’s a path of the cross for Italian women.”
