Free The Conflict by Elisabeth Badinter

FOREWORD
    THE SILENT REVOLUTION
    Over the last three decades, almost without our noticing, there has been a revolution in our idea of motherhood. This revolution was silent, prompting no outcry or debate, even though its goal was momentous: to put motherhood squarely back at the heart of women’s lives.
    At the end of the 1970s, once women had gained access to birth control, they turned their energies to achieving essential rights, of freedom and equality with men, which they hoped to reconcile with motherhood. Being a mother was no longer the beginning and end of being a woman. Women now could choose from a range of possibilities, choices their mothers never had. They could give priority to personal ambitions, remaining single or as part of a couple, without children,
or else they could satisfy their desire for motherhood whether or not they were also working.
    This new freedom, however, has proved to be a source of contradiction. On the one hand, it has significantly altered the status of motherhood by implicating mothers in a raft of added responsibilities for the children they have chosen to have. On the other hand, by putting an end to age-old notions of biological destiny and necessity, it has brought the concept of personal fulfillment to the fore. Women should have a child, or two children or more, if having children enriches their emotional experience and corresponds to their choices in life. If not, they should abstain. The individualism and hedonism that are hallmarks of our culture have become the primary motivations for having children, but also sometimes the reason not to. For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.
    Thirty years ago, we still hoped we could square the circle by sharing the workplace and home equitably with men. We thought we were well on our way to this goal but the 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of a profound threefold crisis that brought an end (perhaps temporarily) to our earlier ambitions: an economic crisis, coinciding with an identity crisis, prompted a crisis of equality between the sexes, halting all progress. This is evident in the wage salary gap, which has prevailed ever since.
    The economic slump of the early 1990s sent a good many
women back to the home, particularly those with the least education or training who were the most economically vulnerable. In France parents were offered government assistance to stay at home for three years and look after their young children. After all, it was felt, raising a child is as much a job as any other, and often more rewarding—except that it was considered worth half the minimum wage. Massive unemployment affected women far more than it did men, and had the added effect of restoring motherhood to center stage, valued as more reliable and gratifying than a poorly paid job that might disappear overnight. In addition, an unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.
    The economic crisis therefore put paid to our hope that men would change. Their resistance to equality and sharing the work at home remained as strong as ever and the promising beginnings we thought we had seen went no further. Today, just like twenty years ago, women take on three-quarters of the domestic work, and since unequal division of labor in the home is the primary cause of the wage gap, inequality is thriving. But the economic crisis is not the only reason for stalled progress toward equality. Perhaps unprecedented in human history and far harder to resolve, another crisis compounded the economic damage: one of identity.

    Until recently, the world of men and the world of women were sharply differentiated. The complementary nature of their respective roles and responsibilities fostered a