Elisabeth Badinter: Nutty French Grandma
Does she look like she's a chain smoker or what?
Elisabeth Badinter’s new book, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother), is an argument against the resurgence of earth mother domesticity including cloth diapers, homemade baby purees and breastfeeding. Check out this article about her in UK Times. Instead, she advocates smoking and drinking, formula and boarding schools. What makes me angry about her is that she has three children who she raised in the 60′s and 70′s, before we knew smoking was bad or knew about global warming or environmental toxins. It was a different world. Also, if having children is such a burden, why have one? And once you have one and realize the extent of the burden, why have two more?Instead of telling women that having children takes away from their identity as a free wheelin’ woman and so they should not have kids, she says to have kids and keep the free wheelin’ identity, putting their own feminine liberation, to have it all, ahead of the environment. I would rather people didn’t have kids, decreasing the world population. If they want to have kids, then yes, try to do cloth diapers and buy less plastic and support organic local farmers, etc.
She claims that young mothers have given up the feminism of the 80′s that we earned to be housewives again. Today, women have a choice. We can have careers and stick our kids in daycare or have stay-at-home dads take care of them, or we can stay at home. That’s feminism, the choice. She also says men enjoy watching women do all the work while they sit back and watch football. That is an antiquated feminism. Men don’t have it any easier than women. They feel obligated to work harder to support the family and then return home and need to help watch the kids to give mommy a break.
Not sure why anyone would listen to this women who seems to just be stirring up controversy for book sales. I know she did a good job pissing me off…
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Books I Love & Hate, In Related News | admin March 23, 2010
