Pregnancy or the weight of the species

Dear reader,

I’m slow. I’m heavy. I start panting when I take the stairs. My prominent belly precedes me. Who am I? I’m the pregnant woman, of course! At the office, colleagues congratulate me. Some dare to ask questions, others don’t – the men especially compete in modesty in the face of the unknown, though this gestation is most noticeable in its effects. But how can I describe this state? “A stomach flu that lasts nine months,” one French comedian, Florence Foresti called it: whether it’s desired or not, pregnancy does feel like a chronic illness. From the start, I was struck by the way my body came to dominate my mind. Unspeakable fatigue, delirious anxieties, not to mention the time when I fainted in the middle of a meeting!

What am I supposed to do, I thought yesterday while taking a “pregnancy yoga” class. We alternate between the position of the “cow” and that of the “pigeon”, two existential postures which, I believe, nicely sum up the condition of the mother in the world of work.

The cow, first: I have never felt so close to this animal. Not for the wisdom that Nietzsche saw in this brave ruminant, but for its “mammalian” side, if I may call it that. When you see your belly being measured by midwives and your breasts producing milk, you feel more part of an agricultural salon than the circle of dead poets: a cruel vexation for anyone who likes to think of themselves as a pure mind. For Simone de Beauvoir, pregnancy is pure alienation: “inhabited by another who feeds on her substance,” the pregnant woman is reduced to the rank of a “female” who “abdicates for the benefit of the species.” (The Second Sex, 1949). Somewhere between Alien and Planet of the Apes – except that there’s no natural instinct to help us to take the shock: I feel about as comfortable as the hero of Junior, that stinker in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a pregnant man.

Next, the pigeon: motherhood remains the worst moment in a woman’s career. This is what causes her salary to drop, either because she’s discriminated against by her management, or because she ends up renouncing demanding positions or working part-time. According to France Strategy, motherhood explains nearly 60% of the income gap between men and women.

‘The onset of pregnancy, the perfect case of a bodily event, plunges me into unprecedented disarray: for the first time in my life, I am brought back to my condition as a female’

For my part, I’m lucky to have so far suffered little sex-related discrimination in the workplace; on the contrary, being a woman has sometimes led me to be pushed into the limelight, sometimes to the point of being reduced to a mere quota – “come to our TV show,” I’ve been told, “we’re short of women…” This is why the onset of pregnancy, the perfect case of a bodily event, plunges me into unprecedented disarray: for the first time in my life, I am brought back to my condition as a female.

This revives an old debate among feminists: should the specificities of the female body be taken into account in the fight against inequalities, or should they be ignored? For a long time, feminism preferred to ignore them: to avoid being reduced to their animality, women had to refrain from talking about their physiological experience. In her essay The Woman’s Body (in French, 2021), philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie explains how feminist studies seem marked by “a curious disappearance, that of the female subject in its genital dimension.” “Nowhere or almost nowhere was there any question of these bodily problems that women experience on a daily basis,” she writes. “Worse still, it has become almost impossible to take an interest in these subjects without falling prey to the infamous accusation of differentialism.”

Nowadays, companies recoil before the notion of sex, preferring that of gender: after all, it costs less to organise a workshop on inclusive language than an in-depth review of career management or funding paternity leave. So do many feminist activists – to the extent that a section of them are now calling themselves “femalelist”, to defend the consideration of sexual difference in the fight for women’s rights. Which brings us back to the old debate between universalism and differentialism. What should we do with these controversies in the workplace? There, the main forms of discrimination suffered by women have to do with a characteristic not related to gender, but to the female sex itself: it’s not so much because of their feminine clothes that employers keep them in the lower positions, but because of their ability to procreate.

We still need to ensure that a natural difference is compensated by a desired equality: by extending paternity leave, for example; or by adding mandatory pre-natal leave for fathers – because no, I don’t want to be the only one who has to go shopping for baby clothes or read The Baby Owner’s Manual! Not to mention the opening of company crèches, demanded by mothers who find themselves having to neglect their professional activity to make up for insufficient public policies. “In a properly organised society, where the child would be largely taken care of by the community, the mother cared for and helped, motherhood would not be absolutely incompatible with female work,” Beauvoir argued. Why don’t we listen to her?

Anne-Sophie Moreau

Picture © Ukususha / iStockphoto