THE BABY'S DOMINION
The irony of this history is that it was precisely at the point that Western women finally rid themselves of patriarchy that they acquired a new master in the home. Women had achieved financial independence as well as control over whether they had children or not: they had no reason, it seemed, to continue to confront men's power.
Yet, thirty years later, there is no denying that male domination persists. Men's general resistance to the model of equality is indisputable, but this alone does not explain women's situation today. Their increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace. A woman might be able to turn her back on her boss or her husband, but she can hardly walk a way from her baby.
The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status. We have agreed to this regression in the name of moral superiority, the love we bear for our children, and some ideal notion of child rearing, all of which are proving far more effective than external constraints. As everyone knows, there is nothing quite like voluntary servitude. And men have not had to lift a finger to accomplish this fall. The best allies of men's dominance have been, quite unwittingly, innocent infants.
It seems a long time ago that we were grateful for baby bottles because they promised that men and women could share parenting from birth. In France, where 40 percent of couples use bottles from birth, there is still significant resistance to the new orthodoxy. We should be thankful to Laurence Pernoud, the queen of French parenting guides, for championing the right to choose between breast- and bottle-feeding.
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Bottles, she said, give fathers the opportunity for additional contact with the baby and offer mothers some relief. This approval will seem heretical to the ayatollahs of breast-feeding, whose concept of parents' roles is very traditional, even with their patina of modernity. The La Leche
League claims: “The father should support and encourage the mother to breastfeed her baby completely.” The league does also urge the father to “give more time to family life than professional success, spend more time with his child, and take on his fair share of domestic tasks.”
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The idea was repeated almost verbatim by such media-friendly pediatricians as T. Berry Brazelton in the United States and Edwige Antier in Paris.
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to bottle-feeding, young couples experimented with sharing roles, which was more conducive to the mother's freedom, allowing her to leave the house, sleep through the night, perhaps even go back to her work without anxiety. Feeding fathers, whom the French sometimes called “father hens,” played a not insignificant role in women's liberation by helping mothers juggle family and work life.
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There might not have been legions of them, they might have come in for plenty of teasing, and the media might have exaggerated their prevalence, but they managed to change the image of the traditional father. Giving the baby a bottle and bath, changing diapersâall these “women's” jobs could be done by men, without undermining their virility or the mothers' commitment to their children. But interchangeable roles were incompatible with the tenets of breast-feeding and the notion of maternal instinct.
From the middle of the 1990s, when breast-feeding returned to prominence in France, new fathers were shot down and their role redefined.
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From Edwige Antier:
While the ideology that favors “new fathers” quite rightly emphasizes how important fathers are in caring for the baby, I am keen to point out that a father's role is far from that of a second mother ⦠. A baby does not dream of having two mothers, but to curl up in his mother's arms and feel that his father is wrapping both of them in his protective presence. We must, at all costs, stop trying to convert fathers into mothering fathers. This
current trend
is utterly
ridiculous and laughable. A father's role is to protect the mother, to increase her standing
as a mother and as a woman. Both must have their own place. For a child, the best sort of daddy is one who loves and protects ⦠Mommy!
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The father should be present in the first months to free the mother from domestic chores, to play with the baby, to “reintroduce the mother to her femininity” by “giving her flowers, babysitting while she goes to the hairdresser, telling her how lovely she looks.”
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Breast-feeding exclusively for the first six months essentially excludes the father from the mother-child couple. He is only in the way. He has no place interfering in this intense relationship. If the father wants to bottle-feed his baby, he should be told that it is unnecessary. Its only effect is to “soothe ⦠the father.”
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The mother who breast-feeds on demand day and night, Antier says, has to be “completely available.” She therefore concludes, positively, that in “the early months, a mother is
a slave to her baby.”
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As supplemental breast-feeding is recommended until the age of two, it will be quite a while before the ideal mother recovers her freedom. And so the model of the patriarchal couple is restored. After twenty years of militant feminism, fathers have now been given justification for not being totally fascinated by their newborn babies. With the baby back to being exclusively the mother's concern, the father is once again free to attend to his own affairs with a clear conscience.
If we add to this the fact that Antier, like devotees of the La Leche League, strongly recommends that mothers stay at home with their children until the age of three, they can bid farewell to their professional ambitions. If, in the process, a woman has another child, we can safely say that Mommy has come home for good.
Scandinavian countries are fiercely militant about breast-feeding but more sensitive than anywhere else about sexual equality. They have launched unprecedented family policies that aim to prevent mothers of young children being penalized in the job market.
As early as 1974, Olof Palme's government in Sweden replaced maternity leave with parental leave to be shared between the mother and father. Now parental leave can be spread over a total of sixteen months for a couple, thirteen of which are indemnified at 80 percent salary, and three months at a flat rate, with a ceiling of around $3,500 a month. The father must take at least two months of the
leave, otherwise this time is deducted from the total period allocated. Additional paternity leave was added in 1980, giving fathers the right to an extra ten days paid at 80 percent salary.
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This bold policy to integrate parents equally in their children's upbringing did not prompt huge upheavals. Nearly 80 percent of fathers use all or part of their paternity leave, but they take only about 22 percent of the total compensated parental leave days in the country.”
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If we look more closely, therefore, it seems far from certain that Swedish policies, which are held up as a model to the rest of the world, have managed to reconcile motherhood and sexual equality, or even to contain the salary gap between men and women.
Whether she is married or in a relationship, a mother is expected to put her baby before the father.
Day and night, on-demand breast-feeding, as recommended, has two consequences that are far from conducive to a good relationship. The mother's breasts belong to the baby for months on end, and so does her bed. Among its other campaigns, the La Leche League launched a crusade for co-sleeping, which is deemed beneficial to the baby. It is not just that “co-sleeping and breastfeeding go well together,”
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but co-sleeping offers many advantages for the child. He is less wakeful or restless, Antier tells us, when he sleeps in his
parents' bed: “He needs to hear his mother moving and his father snoring: it stimulates his attention span and improves his breathing pattern. To deprive your child of the reassurance offered by co-sleeping will damage his psychological development. To leave a baby crying when he is going to sleep or waking up is an extremely cruel practice, at least until the age of four.”
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Apart from the psychological benefits, co-sleeping is claimed to prevent other problems: “The baby sleeps better, the mother and baby no longer wake each other up, the frequency and duration of nursing during the night increases. As well as greater physical contact between mother and baby, there is greater vigilance on the part of the mother. Without her realizing it or even fully waking up, she checks that her child is all right, is not too cold or hot, puts on or takes off a blanket, etc.”
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Co-sleeping proponents like to cite a 1996 study in New Zealand that showed a 25 percent reduced risk of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) in babies who slept in their parents' bedroom up to the age of six months.
But sleeping in the parents' room does not mean sleeping in their bed, a practice that, according to an article in the
Lancet
in 2004, actually increases the risk of SIDSâa conclusion that is contested by the champions of co-sleeping.
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Even if we accept the advantages of co-sleeping for the mother, who is spared having to get up several times in the night to breast-feed, the benefits for a child of three or four are uncertain. Child psychologists are divided. Some claim
that it is common practice in many civilizations and entails no negative consequences. French child psychologist Marcel Rufo, originally hostile to the idea, eventually supported it as a short-term soothing practice for the baby. Others strongly oppose it. Claude Halmos, for example, thinks the baby needs the proximity of his mother's gentleness and the sound of her voice more than intense physical contact.
Rufo and Halmos both point out the dangers co-sleeping poses to the couple's relationship. Rufo worries that it drives the father out of the conjugal bed, exiling him to the living room, while Halmos argues that a child who sleeps next to his mother is “part of a system where the notion of his parents as a couple, separate from him, does not feature. He is, therefore, not in his rightful place.”
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These reservations leave co-sleeping advocates unmoved. In the words of Edwige Antier: “Plenty of fathers do not mind the baby sleeping in their double bed. As for sexual desire, it is often slower to return in the mother, who is so wrapped up in her child. But it will return all the stronger if she feels she is understood by her husband, who helps her gain confidence in her abilities as a mother, reassures her about her powers of seduction, helps her regain her figure, gives her flowers ⦠and continues to take her in his arms, baby included, to help her sleep.” She concluded: “It is a difficult period in life, but a short one. If fathers are told that the more their baby nurses on demand, the more likely he is to be bright, this will give them the strength to bide their time.”
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Bide their time: For how long? As we know, giving birth causes great changes in a woman's body, which, for physiological and psychological reasons, distance her from her sexuality. The physiological factors disappear with time, but the psychological barriers can sometimes be more difficult to overcome.
A child can turn the parents' connection completely upside down. There is no greater antithesis to the couple as lovers than the couple as parents. Even if they do not sleep with their child, it is hard to switch from one role to the other. If the woman breast-feeds for months, even years, how are the couple to retain intimacy and sexuality? The challenge is that much greater with the difficulty of distinguishing the breast-feeding breast from the sexual breast. A breast-feeding mother experiences pleasure, but she is not necessarily an object of desire for the father watching her. And there are plenty of young mothers who admit that their relationship with their baby is enough, that they have no desire to resume sexual activity. So the woman-as-mother may well obliterate the woman-as-lover and endanger the couple.
This theme appears several times in Ãliette Abécassis's novel, most notably during a La Leche League group meeting:
“My baby sleeps with me. Actually, I've even asked my partner to sleep in the living room because there isn't enough room for the three of us.”
“About time too!” [the other members reply in unison]. “Would you like to share your experience with us?”
“My experience. Since having a baby, I've stopped having a relationship, I've stopped sleeping, I've stopped washing my hair, I've stopped reading and I've stopped seeing my friends. I've become a mother, okay. But I didn't know that a mother was just a mother. I didn't realize you had to give up all the other parts you play, give up on sexuality, seduction, work, sports, your own body, your own mind. I didn't know you had to give up on life.”
All eyes turn to me as if I am a murderer, or worse, a bad mother.
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The heroine goes back to La Leche League meetings several times and changes, becoming a good mother who plans her life around breast-feeding:
It gave me so much satisfaction, the pleasure in giving was so intense, so intimate, so complete, that I didn't need anything else. I didn't need to make love with my partner anymore ⦠. I lived off those moments of peace when what I wanted and what the baby wanted were the same thing, and I ended up giving him the breast because I wanted to, giving it to him the way you make love, and finding I felt whole again, like I had before, a very long time ago.
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The couple in this novel never recovers, ultimately splitting up. The extremity of this experience is not the rule, far from it. Some might say that this fictional couple must have been fairly unstable anyway, if they were unable to rekindle their desire. But even in real life, the patience of the father is not the answer to a mother's immersion in her child: a mother cannot allow herself to be consumed by her baby to the point of destroying her desires as a woman. The devotees of extreme mothering have nothing to say on this score. Only the mother exists because only the child matters. The couple's stability and the importance of the sexuality that cements it go unmentioned.
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There is in this dynamic more than a whiff of centuries past, when the couple's relationship was based not on love, and come what may, marriages did not end. This ideal of family life profoundly contradicts the aspirations of most men and women in the twenty-first century.