Elisabeth Badinter's Contrarian Feminism
So basically, rape is no big deal, nor is sexual harassment (ladies who take issue with Dominque Strauss-Kahn and the larger culture of sexual harassment are "disgusting", according to the full article, which for some reason I can't find), American feminists are too radical and need to lighten up, and trying to work for gender parity in higher up jobs isn't worth doing, and also women should stop being victims. What IS oppressive to women? Breastfeeding and trying to make one's carbon footprint smaller and moving away from disposables. Also, burqas are oppressive, and only Islamic culture oppresses women. And big corporations like Nestle are beacons of women's liberation. Right.
Mods, I can't find a link to the full article, but holy shit, as I flipped through the thing in Barnes and Noble, my eyes hurt from rolling them so hard. Meanwhile, a source on Badinter's being supportive of DSK here, and here and in the New Yorker article proper, E. Badinter came out and said she DIDN'T think highly of French women fighting back against sexual harassment.
Against Nature
Elisabeth Badinter’s contrarian feminism.
by Jane Kramer
JULY 25, 2011
ABSTRACT: PROFILE of French feminist writer Elisabeth Badinter. According to a telephone poll taken last summer by the French weekly Marianne, Badinter is now the country’s “most influential intellectual.” In France, intellectuals have rock-star status. Marianne is not The New York Review of Books. It’s what the French call a journal populaire of the republican left, which suggests that not all its readers had actually got through Badinter’s three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment, “Les Passions Intellectuelles,” or even knew that she spent the better part of her time in archives.
The Elisabeth Badinter that most of those readers knew was the public Badinter, a woman of fierce propriety and convictions who would emerge from the archives at the first stirrings of dissension within the French feminist ranks and, armed with the precepts of a candlelit past, pronounce on what the proper republican response should be. Enforced male-female parity on electoral lists? Badinter fought against it. The so-called burqa ban? She lobbied for months to see it passed.
Badinter is convinced that young Frenchwomen have been undermining their hard-won claims to equality. She believes that, in the name of “difference,” young women are falling victim to sociobiological fictions that reduce them to the status of female mammals, programmed to the “higher claims” of womb and breast. She has written five blunt, admonitory best-sellers on the subject of those women and their men. They have made her a household name. She calls them “my contrarian feminist polemics.” Her first, “L’Amour en Plus”-a history of the changing notions of mother love-was published in 1980, when she was thirty-five. It dismissed the myth of maternal instinct as a sometime cultural construct. Today, another generation is reading her latest book, “Le Conflit: La Femme et la Mère,” a scathing dissection of what she regards as a spreading cult of “motherhood fundamentalism” in the West.
Badinter is a woman revered by her followers and rebuked by her critics for the same reason: she claims an intellectual’s right to pass judgment on ordinary lives, and she does it from the cool remove of money, family, and uncommon privilege. French Socialists met her as the admiring wife of Robert Badinter, a lawyer of intimidating rectitude, sixteen years her senior, who, as François Mitterrand’s justice minister, abolished the death penalty and began the modernization of the Code Napoleon. French business knows her as the astute daughter of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a legendary entrepreneur, born to a Russian Jewish immigrant family, who founded the advertising and communications giant Publicis. French historians know her as the modest, enthusiastic colleague who drives an old Renault hatchback to the brainstorming sessions.
Discusses Badinter’s opposition to the Parité movement and her arguments in favor of the French ban on headscarves. Tells about her efforts to save a twenty-four-hour-a-day crèche and garderie called Baby Loup, in Chanteloup-les-Vignes.
source: The New Yorker
Mods, I can't find a link to the full article, but holy shit, as I flipped through the thing in Barnes and Noble, my eyes hurt from rolling them so hard. Meanwhile, a source on Badinter's being supportive of DSK here, and here and in the New Yorker article proper, E. Badinter came out and said she DIDN'T think highly of French women fighting back against sexual harassment.
Against Nature
Elisabeth Badinter’s contrarian feminism.
by Jane Kramer
JULY 25, 2011
ABSTRACT: PROFILE of French feminist writer Elisabeth Badinter. According to a telephone poll taken last summer by the French weekly Marianne, Badinter is now the country’s “most influential intellectual.” In France, intellectuals have rock-star status. Marianne is not The New York Review of Books. It’s what the French call a journal populaire of the republican left, which suggests that not all its readers had actually got through Badinter’s three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment, “Les Passions Intellectuelles,” or even knew that she spent the better part of her time in archives.
The Elisabeth Badinter that most of those readers knew was the public Badinter, a woman of fierce propriety and convictions who would emerge from the archives at the first stirrings of dissension within the French feminist ranks and, armed with the precepts of a candlelit past, pronounce on what the proper republican response should be. Enforced male-female parity on electoral lists? Badinter fought against it. The so-called burqa ban? She lobbied for months to see it passed.
Badinter is convinced that young Frenchwomen have been undermining their hard-won claims to equality. She believes that, in the name of “difference,” young women are falling victim to sociobiological fictions that reduce them to the status of female mammals, programmed to the “higher claims” of womb and breast. She has written five blunt, admonitory best-sellers on the subject of those women and their men. They have made her a household name. She calls them “my contrarian feminist polemics.” Her first, “L’Amour en Plus”-a history of the changing notions of mother love-was published in 1980, when she was thirty-five. It dismissed the myth of maternal instinct as a sometime cultural construct. Today, another generation is reading her latest book, “Le Conflit: La Femme et la Mère,” a scathing dissection of what she regards as a spreading cult of “motherhood fundamentalism” in the West.
Badinter is a woman revered by her followers and rebuked by her critics for the same reason: she claims an intellectual’s right to pass judgment on ordinary lives, and she does it from the cool remove of money, family, and uncommon privilege. French Socialists met her as the admiring wife of Robert Badinter, a lawyer of intimidating rectitude, sixteen years her senior, who, as François Mitterrand’s justice minister, abolished the death penalty and began the modernization of the Code Napoleon. French business knows her as the astute daughter of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a legendary entrepreneur, born to a Russian Jewish immigrant family, who founded the advertising and communications giant Publicis. French historians know her as the modest, enthusiastic colleague who drives an old Renault hatchback to the brainstorming sessions.
Discusses Badinter’s opposition to the Parité movement and her arguments in favor of the French ban on headscarves. Tells about her efforts to save a twenty-four-hour-a-day crèche and garderie called Baby Loup, in Chanteloup-les-Vignes.
source: The New Yorker