We have to go back several centuries to understand the behavior of contemporary French women. Since the seventeenth century, and especially the eighteenth, the model of the ideal woman has not been limited to motherhood. Quite the opposite, in fact: motherhood was held at a distance. For the ideal woman, being a mother was a duty necessarily performed to pass on a husband's name and inheritance but was insufficient to define her. Indeed, the job of mothering was deemed incompatible with the duties of a distinguished woman and wife.
Aristocratic French women, free of material concerns, were the first to practice the art of child-free living. In fact, the first wet nurse agency opened in Paris as early as the thirteenth century. In the seventeenth century, upper-class women handed their children over to wet nurses from the moment of birth. But in the 1700s, this phenomenon spread to urban society.
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From the very poorest to the richest, in large and small towns, it became general practice to send children away to wet nurses, often very far from their home. The least fortunate mothers, who were forced to work away from home in order to survive, might not have had any choice. But this was not the case for women in more comfortable circumstances, the same women who sought to conform to the accomplished ideal.
In order of importance, that ideal meant being first a wife, then a figure in society, and finally a mother. Breast-feeding and caring for children were clearly obstacles to the first two priorities. Women (and their families) who considered themselves above the common people considered breast-feeding as ridiculous as it was disgusting.
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Husbands and fathers were also responsible for this rejection of breast-feeding and of child care. Children were a hindrance to pleasure. Not only did some men complain that their wives smelled strongly of milk, but doctors at the time forbade sexual activity for the duration of breast-feeding (as well as during pregnancy). Since it was thought that sperm spoiled the milk by curdling it, fathers were forced into a long period of abstinence, during which they might be lured away from the marital bed to commit adultery.
Families, in-laws, doctors, and moralists, believing that family cohesion was threatened by the arrival of a baby, encouraged new mothers to place their children with wet nurses. All of society approved of this practice, and women themselves did not seem to complain about it. Quite the opposite, as we see in a number of contemporary accounts in which the women seem to delight in the fact of sending their children away. As well as being an obstacle to her sex life, a young child got in the way of a woman's social life. When a child came home from the wet nurse, he was immediately entrusted to another paid caregiver, the governess
(followed by a private tutor for boys), before being sent away at the age of eight or nine to boarding schools or convents.
In the Age of Enlightenment, it seems, a woman's duties as a mother were negligible. Looking after a child was not considered sufficiently gratifying, nor were day-to-day chores. Women who put their ease and pleasure first respected the view articulated by historian Fustel de Coulanges:
Was there ever a less charming bother
Than a gaggle of infants who wail?
One cries father, one cries mother,
The other calls both without fail.
And all that this pleasure will incur
Is being called no better than a cur.
Women from the privileged classes found their fulfillment in social life: receiving guests and paying visits, showing off new clothes, going for walks, attending the theater. A socialite would be out gambling every night until the early hours. Then she would “enjoy peaceful sleep, or at least only interrupted by pleasure.”
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And “noon found her in bed.”
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She was untroubled by pangs of conscience toward her children because her community agreed that social life was a necessity, a fact confirmed by doctors themselves. Physician Moreau de Saint-Ãlier, for example, said, in the mid-eighteenth century, that looking after children “was an
embarrassing responsibility ⦠in society.” Off-loading them gradually became a mark of social distinction.
The lower middle class, the wives of tradesmen or local judges, were eager to imitate their more fortunate sisters. For want of a dazzling social life, they might adopt the trappings of an enviable status by consigning their own maternal duties to paid help. It was better to do nothing at all than to appear preoccupied with something so undistinguished.
The result was that at a time when there was no substitute for breast milk and when standards of hygiene were abysmal, babies died like flies. During the Ancien Régime, mortality in children under one year was over 25 percent and nearly one child in two did not reach the age of ten.
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These statistics were changeable, according to how babies were fed and cared for. As a general rule, half as many children kept and fed by their own mothers died as those sent to wet nurses: between 11 and 19 percent, depending on the location and the conditions.
This fact, which remains shocking to scholars of the family and especially in public opinion, did not derive solely from the fact that children had not yet been granted their present protected status. It was also rooted in women's desire to define a broader role for themselves and emancipate their lives from exclusive motherhood, which brought them no appreciation. Liberated from the burdens common elsewhere, eighteenth-century French women (and English)
from the highest ranks of society enjoyed the greatest freedom of any women in the world.
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Unlike their peers in Mediterranean Europe, they were at liberty to come and go as they pleased as participating members of society. Indeed, their presence and wit were considered necessary ingredients for refined society. In the cities, they held salons and worked to surround themselves with men and women of consequence. To be successful, it was not enough to dispense the odd well-chosen word: they were required to perfect the subtle art of conversation and keep up-to-date with current affairs. Some achieved a degree of local notoriety and others a level of historic glory. Women who embodied female distinction and left their names inscribed in eighteenth-century history were cultured and knowledgeable and sometimes childless, or they performed the basic maternal duty to have children and arrange for them the best possible marriages.
This unusual model of emancipation is the heritage of modern French women: their identity is not restricted to the role of mother. Despite the more demanding role for mothers that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century
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and held until the advent of feminism, French society still has a singular approach to the status of women.
French Women Today
The triumph of Rousseauian naturalist philosophy, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the pro-birth ideology of the late nineteenth century, and the later psychoanalytic revolution all radically changed the status of children. A precious, unequaled asset to society and his parents, a child warranted assiduous maternal care. Women were required to be attentive, responsible mothers who breast-fed and kept their children in the home. As historian Edward Shorter put it, women took “the sacrifice test.”
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But it was not done without reticence and resistance in wealthier circles where mothers continued to bring wet nurses from the countryside into their homesâa practice that lasted until Pasteur discovered sterilization and opened the way for the widespread use of bottle-feeding.
The striking thing, however, about French mothers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that, despite an evolving ideology of the good mother devoted to her children, nonchalant and indifferent mothers succeeded in slipping through the net of social opprobrium. A woman had to be genuinely cruel, like the mother in
Carrot Top
,
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to incur disgrace. Right until the end of the Second World War, in spite of doctors' solemn warnings against the bottle and their promotion of breast-feeding,
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many mothers turned a deaf ear, and with the father's approval.
Bottle-feeding, which thrived after the war, was considered a compromise aimed at reconciling a woman's personal
pursuits with her duties as a mother. Bottle-feeding meant a woman had freedom of movement and could be replaced as her child's caregiver, therefore restoring the ability to be both mother and woman. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most French women pursue a triple role: wife, mother, and professional. Motherhood represents only one factor in a woman's fulfillment, necessary but not sufficient in itself. Women do not intend to give up any aspect of their lives, neither motherhood, which they come to later and later,
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nor their other ambitions.
French women thus present a special case because, unlike most Europeans, they have the benefit of historic recognition of their identities beyond motherhood. Just as eighteenth-century society readily accepted sending babies to wet nurses, so twenty-first-century society considers bottle-feeding and child care perfectly legitimate. The existence of child-care facilities and nursery schools for very young children shows that society supports a model of part-time mothering. Grandmothers, mothers-in-law, and fathers do not complain. It is understood that only the mother can choose how to manage her life in her and her children's best interests. There is no moral or social pressure bearing on a woman to be a full-time mother, not even in the first year after birth. French society acknowledged a long time ago that the mother need not be the only party responsible for her child.
Although they are constantly admonished to take on their fair share of parental and household chores,
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French
fathers continue to contribute very little in this area. But in their place, the state shares responsibility for the baby's well-being and upbringing. And because the state's duty toward the mother and the child is universally accepted, that public opinion tends to be far more scathing about the state's shortcomings than about any failure on the part of the mother or, especially, the father.
Tolerant and blame-free, this collective attitude plays a positive role in women's decision to have children. The lighter the burden on the mother and the greater the respect given to her choices as a woman, the more likely she is to want the whole experience of child raising, and even to repeat it. Supporting part-time motherhood is the key to increased fertility. Conversely, insisting that the mother sacrifice the woman seems to delay her decision to have a child and possibly discourages her from having one at all.
For How Long?
For nearly three decades, a subterranean ideological war has been fought for a wholesale return to nature. We cannot yet assess its consequences for women. The reverence for all things natural glorifies an old concept of the maternal instinct and applauds masochism and sacrifice, constituting a supreme threat to women's emancipation and sexual equality.
The advocates of this philosophy have an extraordinary weapon on their side: a mother's guilt. Naturalism has been
with us for thousands of years. History provided dazzling example of the efficiency of such guilt when Rousseau succeeded in convincing women and society to recommit to the exclusive role of the mother through guilt.
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Women everywhere heard the moralizing heaped on Sophie, the future wife of Ãmile in Rousseau's eponymous book, loudly and clearly, particularly those who had nothing to give up. Respect for mothers: there at last was an improvement in women's status.
Women are no longer in the same position. They play a significant role in society, and if they all began to stay at home for two or three years after the birth of each child, the economy would feel the effect. But the fact that we can even entertain the notion of a wholesale return to the home shows that playing on women's guilt eventually works on their minds. If women are subjected to the relentless message that a mother must give her child everythingâmilk, time, energyâor pay for it later, inevitably more and more of them will give in.
The greatest enemy of naturalism is individualism and its hedonistic promise. Although some women are fulfilled by the rewards of naturalism, everyone else sooner or later works out the advantages and disadvantages of all-embracing motherhood. It is an incomparable experience of giving life and receiving love; it is also a daily diet of frustration and stress, self-sacrifice and conflict, along with feelings of failure and guilt. Contrary to the claims of naturalism, love is
not a given, not a mother's for a child, nor the child's for its parents, who might find themselves enfeebled and alone in old age, with no recompense for their sacrifice.
Hedonistic individualism wants the pleasures without the pains, or at least prefers the pleasures. If almost one-third of German women choose childlessness, it must be because they feel that becoming mothers is not worth the cost. If 38.5 percent of the most highly qualified women decide against having children, it must mean that they are fulfilling their potential through something other than the kind of motherhood imposed on them. The proponents of ideal motherhood as they see it had better heed the message before it is too late.
For now, French women have avoided the dilemma of all-or-nothing motherhood. They have successfully resisted the decrees of pediatricians. But can they hold out against the naturalists, who have such solid support from institutions around the world? Can they stand firm against the doctors and nurses in charge in the maternity ward? Against the escalating rhetoric of guilt? Although financial crisis and economic instability are hardly conducive to social resistance, it seems that young women in France are still doing exactly as they please.
But for how long?