Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby — how can we blame it? —never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct.
And in a somewhat cannibalistic response, their contemporaries have taken offence at those who dare to favour motherhood over career success.
Childbirth and breastfeeding — the only jobs that can still be done exclusively by females — are casualties of these destructive, so-called 'mommy wars', in which liberated women fight among themselves about which is the single best way of being a woman. These magnificent biological functions have spawned the new feminist battlelines: natural versus medicated birth, bottle versus breast, stay-at-home versus childcare.
Much like the educated women of the 18th and 19th centuries, who outsourced the 'distasteful' job of breastfeeding to wet-nurses, modern mothers are being encouraged to regard childcare as some kind of scourge, a shackle designed to hold them back from complete fulfilment.
Simultaneously, they are urged to attend to their appearance so that their visages are pleasing to their male counterparts: Botox, silicone, Brazilian waxes and intensive gym sessions ensure that women remain relevant in an appearance-obsessed world.
It's no wonder they find themselves torn asunder in an oedipal tug-of-war between those who demand their attention most: men and babies.
France's 'foremost feminist thinker', Elisabeth Badinter, claims in her book Conflict: The Woman and the Mother, that the frequent inclusion of babies in the conjugal bed quashes intimacy for the parents and freezes out the father. The act of breastfeeding, she says, has usurped women's sexuality and reduced them to the status of chimpanzees. And the La Leche League's ideological 'fatwas' are responsible for holding women back from professional success.
In short, the pleasure that women might derive from their own bodies, both sexually and in their maternal expression, is excised from this feminist argument; simply, they exist for the enjoyment of men rather than the nourishment of babies.
Badinter, who in an earlier book argued that the maternal instinct doesn't exist, interprets the trend towards long-term breastfeeding and natural parenting as an unfair competition in which the mothers who discard their careers and focus instead on their children are the winners, while those who outsource childcare and climb the corporate ladder are cast as bad