Quotes of the Day

Few issues have touched such a raw nerve in France recently as Minister of Justice Rachida Dati's decision to return to work just five days after giving birth. Hours after Dati left the hospital with newborn Zohra on Jan. 7, she bounded into the Elyseé Palace — sans bébé — for the first cabinet meeting of 2009. She was at that moment not a new mother but an embattled politician, fighting for her job as rumors persisted that President Nicolas Sarkozy might move her out because of her regular clashes with judges and magistrates. Surely fatigued, Dati, 43, nonetheless shot the photographers a breezy grin, as if to say: "I'm back."

The mommy wars are back too. In the week since that meeting, the cacophony over whether Dati is an icon or a traitor to working women has dominated call-in shows, newspapers and online news sites here. The polling company IFOP found that of the 56% of people who condemned Dati's decision, most were women. Maya Surduts of the National Collective for the Rights of Women called Dati's decision a "scandal," arguing that employers could use it to "put intolerable pressure on women" to cut short their maternity leave — enshrined in French law as 16 weeks' paid leave. Florence Montreynaud of the feminist organization Chiennes de Garde (Guard Dogs) likened Dati to women in the 1920s who gave birth on the factory floor for fear of being fired. The hundreds of readers who ranted on the website of the magazine Femme Actuelle the day after Dati's return saw a different problem: many accused the Minister of near-criminal mothering.

Dati is no stranger to media scrutiny. During her 20-month tenure her image has morphed in countless magazine articles from ethnic success story to fashion plate to domineering boss to alleged seductress. "THE SUPER 'BLING BLING,' THAT'S HER!" screamed one reader on the Journal du Dimanche website last Sunday.

But the latest storm is the silliest yet. Dati's climb to power has hardly been easy. One of 12 children — her illiterate Algerian mother died young and her Moroccan father raised the family in a housing project on his modest earnings as a construction worker — Dati began working at 16, studying at night, and later earned economics and law degrees. As the first person of North-African descent to run a major French Ministry she has proved to be an ambitious fighter. But post-birth, she faced an unenviable decision, says Gwendoline Michaelis, editor in chief of Femme Actuelle's website. "If she had not come back to work, people would say she is a good mother but no good for politics. Now she's seen as not a good mom."

But the critics have it wrong. The point, surely, should not be the choice Dati made, but the fact that she was able to make a choice. Decades after Western feminists won the battle for maternity rights, we've reached a point where plenty of women are voluntarily forgoing those rights. Sometimes it's because they feel they have to, and it's true that laws designed to protect women have failed to end certain problems. Women's status is eroded by long absences from work, for instance; women still earn less than men — about 20% in Germany, Britain and the U.S. Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, mother of four, told the Journal du Dimanche that she took only two weeks' maternity leave while she was Minister of the Environment in 1992, because she "feared being sidelined."

But there are other reasons women keep working — and in all the furore over Dati, the possibility that she may have wanted to get back to work has been discounted altogether. Like Dati I came to motherhood late, in 2006, with little idea of how to manage a career while nurturing a new baby. Some friends, and even my own mother, questioned my choices — including my decision to resume heading off on far-flung assignments when my son was three months old, leaving him with his more-than-capable father. Yet the choice was mine — as it is for many friends and millions of other women who raise their children full-time at home. I never considered any other: not only did I need an income, but I find my career as compelling as mothering.

The ability to make those choices is what separates us — and Dati — from past eras and from the millions of women in the developing world. Ironically, Dati's choice might help working mothers. On Jan. 12 the French government proposed a new law to offer cabinet ministers temporary replacements during four-month maternity leaves. Great. But it doesn't mean Dati would have stayed away from her job any longer. And nor should it.

• Vivienne Walt
• Critics of Rachida Dati's swift return to work forget that working life can be as compelling as motherhood