Rachida Dati, the French Justice Minister, has not won many friends among women this week, at least, not among right-thinking women. Not only did she return to work five days after having a baby - by Caesarean section - she was characteristically svelte for her Cabinet meeting: dark, manicured nails, spindly black heels, a jacket with leopard-print lining, the works.

The newspaper Le Figaro, ungallantly pointed out that she has a bit of a tummy, but it's hardly noticeable. Miss Dati has declared that she has no ambitions to be a role model for women. Just as well.

She is a controversial figure in many ways but quite her most revolutionary decision has been to reject the universal pieties about giving birth. Certainly, the dusty response of the French press suggests that she has, in a country with famously generous maternity rights, undermined every other mother.

Instead of bonding with her baby for at least six months, perhaps reading ministerial papers between breastfeeds, she has run counter to the mummy-fascism in both the women's movement and among traditionalists, which holds that it is every mother's human right and natural desire to have at least a year off after birth. Miss Dati is plainly not intimidated by the received wisdom that the mystical process of bonding requires a mother to be with her baby most of the time.

The second received wisdom is that you must breastfeed every two or three hours; anything else undermines the infant's immune system. Miss Dati won't be feeding on demand. The third is that giving birth is physically debilitating - especially via a Caesarean, regarded by medics as a near-immoral act unless strictly justified on health grounds. Rachida is an iconoclast.

I'm all for it, although, since she has the reputation of being the boss from hell, it's rough luck on her civil servants. I took rather less than three weeks off in maternity leave, and now realise that I was simply loafing around. My colleagues were kind, but one woman remarked that I had let the side down.

And that's the trouble. We have one template for maternity leave, with the underlying premise that the longer it is - the more like Sweden - the better. But real women are infinitely various, their circumstances even more so. I am all for legal maternity rights, but there's precious little weightlifting in journalism. My husband minded the babies, liberating me for the peace and quiet of the workplace. Miss Dati, who no doubt has a nanny, has demonstrated that women with means need not be constrained by maternity, nor by maternal stereotypes. Now that's feminism.

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