French Feminist Warns Green Movement Forcing Women to Stay at Home
THE TELEGRAPH: Elisabeth Badinter, a leading French feminist, has warned the green movement is threatening decades of improvements in gender equality by forcing women to give up their jobs and become earth mothers.

Elisabeth Badinter: Mrs Badinter contends that this politically correct cabal is burdening mothers with intolerable guilt unless they stay at home and breast-feed for as long as possible. Photo: The Telegraph
Mrs Badinter claims a "holy reactionary alliance" of green politicians, breast-feeding militants, "back to nature" feminists and child psychologists is turning Frenchwomen into slaves to green "fads" like re-usable nappies and organic food.

In her new book, Conflit, la Femme et la Mere (Conflict, the Woman and the Mother), Mrs Badinter contends that this politically correct cabal is burdening mothers with intolerable guilt unless they stay at home and breast-feed for as long as possible.

Their perfect French mother, she writes, "breastfeeds for six months and doesn't put her baby in a crèche or not too early, because baby needs to be with mum and not in a nest of germs; she is wary of all things artificial and is ecologically-minded. The jar of baby food has become a sign of selfishness; we're back to the purée mashed by mum."

Women in childbirth are even made to feel that epidurals are wrong, she goes on, adding: "We don't need to bow down to nature."

Those who choose to stay at work or to not have children are ostracised.

"It's as if we were all female chimpanzees," says Mrs Badinter, 65, who is widely admired in France for her outspoken views. >>> Henry Samuel in Paris | Thursday, February 11, 2010

leJDD.fr: "J'accuse un certain féminisme réactionnaire" : Elisabeth Badinter dénonce, dans un livre à paraître cette semaine, la tyrannie de la maternité et les nouvelles contraintes qui pèsent sur les femmes d'aujourd'hui. >>> Marie-Christine Tabet | Dimanche 07 Février 2010

Brown Betrays Stay-at-Home Mums!
This government is about as inept as any government could be! Children need mothers at home. It makes a huge difference to their development. Children do not, cannot, raise themselves! Hence, our government should enable and encourage mothers to stay at home to care for their children. Apart from children benefiting from stay-at-home mums – we can see the results of decades of the neglect of the rôle of conventional motherhood everywhere around us – the country benefits from them, too. Mothers who stay at home are far more likely to have more children. And the fact is that the United Kingdom needs children, children called Jack, Timothy, or Christian! The demographics are turning against the indigenous population. If things go on as they are, it won’t be long before an Islamic flag, depicting the ‘sword of Allah’, will be hoisted above Downing Street. What are our politicians thinking about? How idiotic it is for any government to to demean the rôle of motherhood! – ©Mark

DAILY MAIL: More than eight million women who took time out of work to care for their children have lost their chance of a full state pension after a Christmas u-turn by the Government.

Ministers have dropped plans to give women with a partial pension entitlement the chance to make up the shortfall before they retire, it emerged last night.

The decision was slipped out in the Lords as Parliament adjourned for the holiday break, to the astonishment of peers who had been promised action earlier this year.

The Government had offered to back an amendment to the Pensions Bill that would have allowed women to make up shortfalls in their state pension entitlement by paying in extra cash.

But in what the Tories claimed last night was a 'betrayal of stay at home mums', ministers said they have now decided not to back the scheme. Betrayal of stay-at-home mothers: 8m women lose state pensions after Government u-turn >>> By Benedict Brogan

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