Property Purgatory

«Le maternalisme tant prôné n'a pour l'heure engendré ni matriarcat, ni égalité des sexes, mais plutôt une régression de la condition des femmes. Régression consentie au nom de l'amour que l'on porte à son enfant; du rêve de l'enfant parfait et d'un choix moralement supérieur... Chacun le sait: rien ne vaut la servitude volontaire!... C'est l'innocent bébé - bien malgré lui - qui est devenu le meilleur allié de la domination masculine.»

 Le Conflit: la femme et la mère - Élisabeth Badinter (2006)

[...] In one of our conversations, Badinter spoke of a book, “Les Héritiers,” that was written by Passeron’s father, the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron, and his colleague Pierre Bourdieu. “It’s about the knowledge of the father and mother—the heritage that creates an aristocracy of knowledge,” she said. “We never talk about that heritage. It’s a privilege that some of us have, and we ignore it. Those eighteenth-century women were our mothers. The fact that they emerged was what made me think about young women today, and what they might be giving up, or losing. I thought of Mme. du Châtelet—her comportment, her nerve, the fact that she had kept her children and her intellectual life apart and wrested an independence from the prejudices of her day. I thought of the astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute. She was the one woman astronomer of her time, and we know nothing at all about her. I don’t say these women were geniuses, like Einstein, but they’ve been the black continent of history, and for me it has become almost a sacred duty to give them back their lives.”

The truth is that upper-class women in Europe have traditionally inhabited a world apart from ordinary women. They lived as they chose, they took lovers, they had the freedom to be exceptional and eccentric. When their husbands behaved badly, they did not so much stand by them as ignore them—or make a sunny display of noblesse oblige. In this, Mme. de Sade, dispatching supplies of fresh bed linens and homemade jams to the Marquis, imprisoned in the Bastille, is not so different from Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair, telling L’Express that she was “rather proud” of her husband’s reputation as a “seducer,” and five years later gamely putting up six million dollars for his bail. Even now, not many of those women describe themselves as feminists. When I asked to see the wellborn and famously seductive Carla Bruni-Sarkozy for her thoughts on feminism, one of her handlers dismissed me, saying that “feminism” was not a popular word in France.

Badinter, arguably one of the most privileged women in the country, is also one of the few to declare herself. She makes enemies, but she also takes big risks in a very uneasy climate. She went to court as an expert witness for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in a much publicized trial involving its publication of the Danish “Muhammad” cartoons, because “people today have so much fear of being called intolerant that they say nothing.” She isn’t afraid of making enemies, she says, but to her mind there are “enemies” and there are “opponents.” She showed me a book called “Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection,” by the American evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She doesn’t know Hrdy. They had an “exchange of essays” in Le Nouvel Observateur last year, after Badinter’s book came out, and in most ways disagreed. But the exchange was civilized and respectful—or, you could say, open to enlightenment—and after it they exchanged books. Hrdy’s arrived with the inscription “For Elisabeth Badinter, who shares many of my interests, and who lured me into asking: just what do we mean by ‘maternal instincts,’ With greatest admiration.” It was, as Badinter might say, an eighteenth-century experience.

Jane Kramer - Against Nature in The New Yorker

Published in the print edition of the July 25, 2011, issue