Alpha Mummy: Are public figures' maternity leaves fair game for comment?

Women beware women. It does not reflect well on us that the subject that roused us last week almost as much as the Gaza invasion or the Brown recession was Rachida Dati, France’s glamorous justice minister. Pictures of her striding back to work in high heels only five days after giving birth by caesarean section at the age of 43, looking slim and beautiful, have whipped up an astonishing flurry of reaction; the blogosphere is humming with anger.

It is almost funny, especially as, for all the misguided fury, the reaction ignores some awkward truths that won’t go away and the one thing for which Dati can truly be blamed and shamed.

I suspect that what really lies under most of the attacks on Dati is envy. It doesn’t seem fair that she should be so beautiful and successful and have a baby so late in life with such apparent ease; women seem to be enraged by any female who has the unusual good luck to find her figure goes back to normal straight after birth, not to mention round-the-clock help so she can sleep all night and find time to do her exercises. A YouTube clip of Dati’s introduction to her sumptuous official apartments showed her being introduced to her personal chefs – not one but two. We must hope that one of them will condescend to preparing a bottle of formula milk, should the need arise.

Nonetheless, envy is not much mentioned in the fuss about Dati.

Serious arguments are brought to bear and angry feminists are saying Dati has betrayed the cause by ignoring her hard-won right to maternity leave. In going straight back to work she is sending the wrong messages to employers and employees; she’s suggesting that work cannot wait and (or) that women don’t need time off after childbirth. Feminists, they cry, did not struggle for decades to win maternity rights only for a public figure to abandon them.

This response expresses to me what is wrong with feminism and has been since the 1970s. It is authoritarian – much more interested in conformity and solidarity than in freedom. Just because women now have hard-won rights, for which I am grateful, that surely does not mean we must always exercise them. We may not want all of them. Real liberation – and feminism used to be called women’s lib until it stopped being that – means the freedom to choose what to do. Women’s liberation is not the obligation to behave as female activists think you ought.

Central to the anger against Dati is the assumption that she has a duty to be a role model. Particularly perhaps because she is of north African descent and from a poor background, she ought to be a shining light to other girls and women, which in this case means taking her maternity leave in full. This seems rather harsh. Why should anyone, just because she is born female or black or brilliant at swimming, be obliged to be a public role model?

Who is to tell her so? Who is to say that the poor woman actually approves of the role she is supposed to be modelling? And who is to decide the role?

Dati has dared to ignore the feminist ideal of a woman having a few weeks or months of maternity leave to bond with her child. That’s the conventional feminist aspiration for women, recommended all over the media, not least the bonding bit. But many, including me, rebel against it. Where does all this conventional wisdom about bonding come from?

It’s true that Dati is cutting hers exceptionally short, to the point where one feels almost no bonding can have gone on with her poor little baby. Sarah Palin took even less time off – three days – after the birth of her son Trig in April last year. But what makes it significantly better to cut off this precious process at three weeks, or three months, or even a year, and return to work at that standard approved point? The conventional view seems to be that this is enough, but how could it possibly be so? A baby is for life and its needs and ties become more intense, not less, as it gets older.

One might even say that if a mother is going to be constantly absent, in a demanding top job with lots of chefs to keep busy, the baby might as well bond with someone else from the beginning. After all, that is what commonly happened for centuries in rich families. Perhaps Dati, with her huge extended family and her immense ambition, has taken this view. Perhaps she’s not really cut out for motherhood.

And even if she is, a mother’s need and desire for work will always be tragically at odds with her child’s need and desire for her. It is an insoluble problem. Shrieking at Dati for taking an old-fashioned route around these difficulties is lazy thinking; it is merely to express one’s own frustration at her expense.

Personally I wouldn’t want a woman just out of major surgery and the hormonal maelstrom that is childbirth doing any serious government job; she will be in pain, drugged, emotionally volatile, tired and unlikely to make good decisions. But then perhaps Dati’s job isn’t serious. Perhaps she isn’t really the person who does it. There have been unkind hints about tokenism and recently 500 magistrates and judges signed a letter to Dati attacking her “incoherent policies”.

However, in this country we don’t know much about her alleged incompetence in office, because we seem to be much more concerned about her figure postsurgery.

I would be inclined to ignore this vain and overweeningly ambitious woman completely, except for one thing. She has done something that is truly wrong. It’s not just that she has brought a baby into the world without providing her with much of a mother. It’s that she has deliberately denied her baby a father.

Not to have a father is a bad thing, for countless well known reasons. It’s also bad to deny a child the right to know who her father was. Family secrets fester and suppurate; that ought to be obvious to a person of any maturity.

I have argued that none of us is under an obligation to be a role model, but I was thinking of positive role models chosen by some activist or other. We do all have a duty, especially those in public office, to avoid being a negative role model. Dati has displayed herself publicly as the sort of self-centred, self-indulgent, neglectful, wilfully single mother, too dysfunctional to name the baby’s father, to be found on every sink estate. That’s about as bad as it gets, both as a public role model and as a private example to one’s own daughter.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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