Could there be anything more French than this workout?
Weeks after giving birth, French women are offered a state-paid, extended course of vaginal gymnastics, complete with personal trainer, electric stimulation devices and computer games that reward particularly nimble squeezing. The aim, said Agnes de Marsac, a physiotherapist who runs such sessions: “Making love again soon and making more babies.”
Perineal therapy is as ubiquitous in France as free nursery schools, generous family allowances, tax deductions for each child, discounts for large families on high-speed trains, and the expectation that after a paid, four-month maternity leave mothers are back at work — and back in shape.
Courtesy of the state, French women seem to have it all: multiple children, a job and, often, a figure to die for.
What they do not have is equality. France ranks 46th in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2010, trailing the US and most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica.
Eighty-two percent of French women aged 25 to 49 work, many of them full time, according to the national statistics office INSEE, but 82 percent of seats in the National Assembly are occupied by men. French women earn 26 percent less than men, but spend twice as much time on domestic tasks, according to INSEE; few make it to the top of business or politics.
They have the most babies in Europe, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, but are also the biggest consumers of antidepressants, various studies show.
A recent 22-country survey by the Pew Research Center summed it up: Three in four French people say they believe that men have a better life than women, by far the highest share in any country polled.
“French women are exhausted,” said Valerie Toranian, editor in chief of Elle magazine in France. “We have the right to do what men do — as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman.”
In the birthplace of Simone de Beauvoir and Brigitte Bardot, women appear more worried about being feminine, not feminist, and men often display a form of gallantry predating the French Revolution.
Indeed, the liberation of French women can seem almost accidental — a byproduct of a paternalist state that takes children under its republican wings from a young age and an obsession with birth rates rooted in three devastating wars with Germany.
“At the origin, family policy wasn’t about women, it was about Germany,” said Genevieve Fraisse, the author of several books on gender history. “French mothers have conditions women elsewhere can only dream of, but stereotypes remain very much intact.”
Or, as the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy put it: “France is an old Gallic macho country.”
Women spend on average five hours and one minute per day on child care and domestic tasks, while men spend two hours and seven minutes, according to INSEE.
At 31, Fleur Cohen has four children and works full time as a doctor at a Left Bank hospital. As she drops her youngest at the nursery in stilettos and a pencil skirt, it does not seem that she gave birth only three months ago.
Child No. 4 was not “planned,” Cohen said, but it does not change her life all that much: Instead of three children, she now takes four on the Metro in the morning and drops them at the public school and subsidized hospital nursery.
She joked that children are probably the best way to reduce your tax bill. Regardless of income, parents get a monthly allowance of about US$170 for two children, nearly US$400 for three children and an additional US$220 for every child after that. Add to that tax deductions and other benefits, and the Cohens pretty much stopped paying tax after baby No. 3.
Last year, France spent US$135 billion, or 5.1 percent of its GDP — twice the EU average — on family, child care and maternity benefits. In return, French women now have on average about two babies, compared with 1.5 in the EU overall.
In addition to tax benefits and allowances, French families have the advantage of ecoles maternelles, free all-day nursery schools set up a century after the French Revolution, in part, said Michelle Perrot, a historian, to stamp out the lingering influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
La Fleche, a town in central France, houses the oldest ecoles maternelles in the country. At 8:30am, parents drop off children as young as two. Classes end at 4:30pm, but a free municipal service offers optional child care until 6:30pm. Children are guaranteed a place in a maternelle, which translates as “maternal” or “motherly,” from the ages of three to five, and 99 percent of them attend.
Katy de Bresson, a single mother of two, called the enrollment of her son Arthur a “mini revolution.” Free of all child care costs, she could return to work full time.
“I am a lot happier and a lot more self-confident since then,” she said.
However, ask any mother here whether those schools had changed the life of her husband and the answer is no.
“The school is called ‘maternelle’ for a reason,” said Anne Leguen, the principal of the school in La Fleche. “In France, children are still considered to be the responsibility of mothers.”
In Paris, Cohen’s husband is a doctor, too. However, she bathes all four children, cooks and does the Saturday shopping — largely, she insists, by choice.
“If I didn’t prepare food for my children, I would feel less like a mother,” she said.
At work, meanwhile, she plays down motherhood. She sneaks down to the hospital nursery to nurse her child, and she tries to stay longer than her male colleagues in the evenings. Otherwise, “everyone will just assume that I’m leaving because of my children and that I am not committed to the job.”
A majority of medical school graduates in France are female. Yet all 11 department heads in her hospital are men.
The French Republic made equality a founding principle, but it gave women the right to vote in 1944. While a 1998 law obliged political parties to have an equal number of male and female candidates on their party lists, parties have tended to pay fines rather than comply.
Female leaders also come under close scrutiny. French Secretary of State for Family Nadine Morano recalled being mocked on television for wearing the same jacket several times. Four pieces of equal pay legislation have passed since 1972. However, last year, even childless women in their 40s still earned 17 percent less than men.
“A patriarchal corporate culture” is the main barrier facing women in French companies, according to Brigitte Gresy, author of a report last year on gender equality in the workplace.
The disproportional weight of a small number of male-dominated engineering schools in grooming the elites has done its part in excluding women from power, as well. General Xavier Michel, president of Ecole Polytechnique, a top engineering school, said the number of female students has risen from seven since he graduated in 1972 to 70 today — but that leaves it at just 14 percent of the student body.
Simone Veil was 18 when women first voted and 28 when she was allowed to open her own bank account. At 38, as health minister, she pushed through the legalization of abortion.
“A lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t,” she said.
More comfort to her than many of the laws in recent years is the fact that more fathers push strollers through her neighborhood.
Fraisse said that more than two centuries after France got rid of the king as the father of the nation, it needs to get rid of the father as the king of the family.
“We had one revolution,” she said. “Now we need another one —- in the family.”
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