Frank Furedi

Wonder Woman or traitor to her sex?
The battle lines are confused in the reaction to the five-day maternity leave of Rachida Dati, the French justice minister.

Dressed in a tight black velvet jacket, matching skirt and stiletto heels, Rachida Dati, the French minister of justice, looked her usual elegant self as she embarked on a busy working day last Wednesday.

Breakfast at the interior ministry was followed by the first cabinet meeting of the year with President Nicolas Sarkozy. In the afternoon she was with her boss again for a new year’s ceremony at the supreme court. That night she waved away, with impeccably manicured nails, a glass of champagne during a reception at the Spanish embassy.

If they had not known, few could have guessed that Dati, 43, had given birth, by caesarean section no less, to a daughter, Zohra, only five days before.

With the child cocooned in blankets at her breast, Dati had emerged only that morning from a private clinic to howls of outrage from French and British feminists who saw her as a traitor to her sex. Her early return to work, they said, was an example that could be used to undermine hard-won maternity rights, putting women back into the dark ages.

Or was she a wonder woman? Her decision to forgo the standard four-month French maternity leave was an example of the grit and determination that had propelled her from a childhood on the immigrant housing estates to one of the most important jobs in France.

Once considered the star of the “Sarko-zettes”, as the president’s female ministers are known, Dati is used to being the centre of attention. Nor is it the first time that her fame at home has resonated on the other side of the Channel. She is remembered in Britain for having appeared at a royal banquet at Windsor Castle last year in a daringly low-cut dress. Having been admonished then for exhibiting her femininity, she now finds herself the scourge of British feminists for suppressing her maternal side, a crime that one writer in The Guardian referred to as “machismo”.

Even so, the battle lines were curiously blurred in this debate about motherhood and maternity rights.

Some put her in the same bracket as Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, who boasted of having been back in the office just days after giving birth to her fifth child. Women like that, went the argument, were undermining rights that had taken centuries to achieve.

“Dati has no excuses,” wrote one commentator. “A woman of her standing should have the confidence to take leave and make it clear to other women that it is acceptable to take time off if they want to.”

Yet some saw her, and Palin, as having made an informed choice about what to do with their lives - exactly what the trailblazing feminists wanted for women. For others it was more a question of being a “bad mother”: Dati was missing out on the most important period of parent-child bonding, as well as depriving her daughter of the benefits of breastfeeding. She was also putting her own health at risk by returning to work just days after a serious operation.

So what are we to make of Dati? Is she a trailblazer to be lionised, or a traitor who is setting back the cause of women? By rights, Dati should be a feminist icon. On one level, at least, she was a symbol of emancipation, one of 12 children of Algeri-an-Moroccan parents who escaped from an impoverished childhood – and an arranged marriage - to become the star of the Sarkozy constellation, the so-called “Cinderella of the suburbs”.

Sarkozy called her appointment to the justice ministry “a message to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible”; and Dati, whose father was a builder and whose mother died when she was young, seemed to blossom under the spotlight.

She fuelled the public’s fascination by posing for fashion shoots, once in fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots, but disgusted judges who complained of a “frivolous” act at a time when the minister was cutting jobs in her ministry. Many women saw this as the symptom of deep-rooted male chauvinism.

With the birth of Zohra, she also became a high-achieving single mother, a woman who was proving that you didn’t need a man to have a child and be happy. As her stomach has gently swollen in recent months, she has become the focus of a feverish guessing game about the father, whose identity she has steadfastly refused to reveal, saying only that “my private life is complicated and I am keeping it off limits to the media”.

And that she has done, resolutely refusing to comment on the succession of men - the latest of whom is François Sarkozy, the president’s brother - who have been alleged to be the father.

Yet for all her positive personal attributes, some women detected a sinister reason for her return to work. It has been widely rumoured that Sarkozy plans to replace her in a reshuffle this year.

“She didn’t have a choice,” said Marie-Pierre Martinez, head of the French movement for family planning. In a society, she added, in which “the norms remain very masculine” Dati had to return to work quickly to preserve her career.

Florence Montreynaud, president of a feminist group and mother of four children, said that Dati’s behaviour risked creating two classes of mothers: “super women and wimps”. Dati, she said, was “doped on the adrenaline of power” and compared her with women who gave birth in their factories in the 1920s. Behind all the outrage were French fears about how far Sarkozy, who has pledged widespread reforms, will go in trimming a generous welfare system. “Instead of developing the French model - or taking the example of the Nordic countries which have more just and equitable systems - Sarkozy is turning France into a violent, inhuman society, one that will fail just like the Anglo-Saxon countries,” wrote one internet blogger about Dati.

It sounded like a dig atles rosbifs. The irony is that Britain offers more generous maternity leave than France, with women able to take up to a year off work to care for their children. Indeed, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, Dati would have been breaking the law in Britain by returning so quickly. It is illegal for a woman to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, or four weeks if she works in a factory.

The tide in Britain is also moving towards more, not less, generous parental leave, despite the opposition of business groups. Labour has steadily increased the amount of time off mothers can take after the birth of their children and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and an expectant father, proposed last week that men should be entitled to take a year off work when they become fathers.

Despite the protection by law of maternity rights, women fear that high-profile examples such as Dati will be used to pressure them back quickly into the male-domi-nated workplace. Even here the issue is clouded. “I’m a bit torn when I see those pictures of Dati,” admitted Amy Jenkins, the novelist. “On the one hand I want men to know that giving birth isn’t an illness or a disability. On the other hand I don’t want women to be so like men that one day they’ll find a way of giving birth at their desks.”

Of course, that will remain a choice for individuals. “There is this incredible desire to judge and criticise women who take these decisions,” said Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting. “Why should that call into question her capacity as a mother? In the last few years, a women’s right to choose has been redefined into a woman’s right to choose from a few narrow options.”

He added: “I admire women like Sarah Palin and Rachida Dati because they know they will be censored and criticised. But they have decided to carry on anyway and they are sufficiently confident in themselves to know what they are doing is right for them.”

Linda Hirshman, a lawyer and author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, agreed. “[Dati] will know if she is in pain or falling asleep at her desk and she is obviously a very intelligent woman, able to assess that for herself. And she is the only one who is able to assess that. The experience of childbirth is not a disabling one,” she said.

The feminist author Natasha Walter agreed that “we shine the spotlight on women’s choices with their babies and their families. We are very quick to condemn them, very quick to judge them personally”. She added that the real problem was “the men who never have to think about why they can go on working all hours, all days, because their wives are at home looking after the family”.

Still confused? The truth is that large numbers of women have been in positions of power for a relatively short time so their actions will come under more scrutiny than their male counterparts, whether justified or not.

Last year there was uproar in Spain when Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, appointed a heavily pregnant Car-me Chacon defence minister. After he insisted that she take six weeks’ maternity leave, the debate has moved on. Last week the generals were outraged that the black Yves Saint Laurent jacket and trousers Chacon wore at a military ceremony last week were in breach of protocol - she was supposed to have worn a long dress.

As for Dati, on Friday night, in her capacity as mayor of the seventh arrondissement of Paris, she presided over a new year’s party for workers and thanked them for their gifts. “You’ve dressed Zohra not just for the winter but for spring and the summer as well - and next winter,” she said. “She’s a girl. She’ll love it.”

She seemed to respond to accusations that she had rushed back to work when she said: “I am dedicating a lot of time to what is dear to me - my daughter . . . I’ve adapted my timetable.” She apologised that she could not stay longer: “I am really in a hurry to get back to my daughter.”

First published by Sunday Times, 11 January 2009