‘There is an accumulation of new moral duties weighing on women.’

PARIS - Elisabeth Badinter, a doyenne of French intellectual thought, loves to cut against the grain of her times. Over the last 30 years she has questioned the notion of maternal instinct and blamed feminists for inventing the concept of the “victimization” of women.

Her most recent battle cry: to defend women from the impossibility of being “the perfect mother,” and even from the pressure to be a mother at all.

“Women’s lives have grown more difficult in the last 20 years,” Ms. Badinter said in an interview. “Professional life is ever harder, ever more stressful and unattractive, and on the other hand, there is an accumulation of new moral duties weighing on women.”

Her new book, published in France, has created a stir among environmentalists, politicians, academics and mothers. In it, Ms. Badinter argues that the idealism of “green” politics and a romanticized notion of naturalism are steering women away from careers and back into the home.

“A revolution has taken place in our conception of maternity, almost without our realizing it,” she writes. And that revolution, in Ms. Badinter’s view, has reduced women’s freedom and damaged their professional prospects.

In “Le Conflit: la femme et la mere” (“Conflict: The Woman and the Mother”), she contends that the politics of the last 40 years have produced three trends that have affected the concept of motherhood, and, consequently, women’s independence.

First is what she sums up as “ecology” and the desire to return to simpler times; second, a behavioral science based on ethology, the study of animal behavior; and last, an “essentialist” feminism, which praises breast-feeding and the experience of natural childbirth, while disparaging drugs and artificial hormones, like epidurals and birth control pills.

All three trends, Ms. Badinter says, create enormous guilt in a woman who can’t live up to a false ideal.

Ms. Badinter, 66, a professor at the elite Ecole Polytechnique, says that the baby has now become “the best ally of masculine domination.”

Because Ms. Badinter is the country’s most prominent voice on feminist topics, her works produce sometimes heated responses. Edwige Antier, a pediatrician, author and government legislator, called Ms. Badinter an “archeofeminist who knows very little about the hopes of today’s young mothers” and who is “in denial of motherhood.”

Chantal Delsol , writing in “Valeurs Actuelles,” a business magazine, practically shouted: “At last, let’s stop victimizing women! They have a conscience and an opinion as others do, and they can choose whether to submit or not to intimidation.”

But Ms. Badinter thinks that new social pressures are hard for many women to resist.

Ms. Badinter is the mother of three. “I’m a mediocre mother like the vast majority of women, because I’m human, I’m not a she-cat,” she said. And did she breast-feed her children? A little annoyed, she declined to answer.


By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA de la BAUME