"This 'Nonchalant Approach to Motherhood'"

"Badinter doesn’t point fingers across the Atlantic to blame us Américaines for this very un-French new threat to women’s progress (except to note that the 'ayatollahs of breast-feeding' associated with La Leche League first began their 'ideological crusade' here), but no one who has lived through or witnessed Ameri­can motherhood over the past couple of decades can read her depiction of a new generation of postfeminist mothers losing their sexuality, abandoning their adult identities and shelving their professional purpose in the pursuit of 'some ideal notion of child rearing' without an uncomfortable shudder of self-­recognition. As we know, Badinter’s warnings about the dangers of excessive child-­centeredness are in many ways well founded; it was, after all, a general exasperation with our hyper­ventilating mode of motherhood that led us, in the past Tiger Mother-­dominated year or so, to start casting our eyes abroad for inspiration."

In The New York Times, Judith Warner reviews Elisabeth Badinter's The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women and Madeleine M. Kunin's The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and Family.