Making babies for France
William Pfaff
SATURDAY, JULY 30, 2005
PARIS France's women have always enjoyed a reputation for bold and
seductive elegance, and for intelligence, but now they have added to that
evidence of a new willingness to combine work and motherhood, and a currently
unparalleled ability to do so.
Their envied ability to eat what they want and stay slim thus is not the
only paradox they present to their contemporaries in a Europe that, overall,
confronts a grave demographic decline. Frenchwomen are now having as many
babies, proportionately, as mothers in Catholic Ireland. Both countries have
the highest birthrate in the European Union: 1.9 children per woman, as against
an EU 25-nation average of 1.4 (a figure implying sharp population decline). At
this rate, France would become the most populous country in the EU by
midcentury.
France at the same time has the EU's highest female employment and
professional activity.
Eighty percent of Frenchwomen between 24 and 49 work, including those
with children under 3. In Europe overall, women stay in the work force by not
having children. Frenchwomen, as a sociologist, François de Singly comments,
"are mothers but also are determined to maintain their professional and
educational accomplishments as well as their 'capital de séduction."'
Theirs is a model of feminine independence increasingly imitated
elsewhere in Europe.
This determination is supported by a system of state assistance that
makes it possible for working women to have that second or third child without
damaging the family budget.
It began in the 1970s, in a typical French government technocratic
concern for developing the service sector, for which women seemed a prime labor
source. Therefore free, full-time municipal crèches, or nurseries for the very
young, were expanded. Free public pre-kindergartens and canteens were vastly
increased in number, as well as subsidized vacation camps during school
holidays. Competition for places in these institutions remains high, and is
increasingly subject to means tests, but this has simply pushed the development
of cooperative crèches organized by better-off families.
This had an important psychological as well as practical effect,
legitimating the decision of young mothers to go back to work. There are also
state financial incentives - family allowances, support for the volunteer
crèches formed by groups of mothers, and family tax benefits, many of which
increase significantly with a third child.
The result is that more than in any other European country, French
families now have three or more children. Germany and Switzerland also give
generous family benefits, and in Sweden 77 percent of the children under 6 are
in crèches, but birth rates stay well under that in France.
While the birthrate of immigrants in Europe is nearly everywhere higher
than for women of nonimmigrant origin, the French phenomenon of enlarging
families is particularly noticeable in the middle and professional classes.
After the 1968 social revolution, the rate of births outside marriage
increased dramatically, even though the parents often either stayed together or
formed new but relatively stable relationships. Today nearly half of French
children are born outside marriage, but increasingly in "recomposed" families,
largely free from social disapproval, and continuing to receive state benefits.
France's population actually remained stagnant at some 40 million during
the century between 1840 and 1940, and in the 1930s even began to decline. Then
a sharp upswing coincided with the Second World War. Between 1940 and 2000, the
French population increased to 60 million, the largest increase in Europe.
The United Nations now estimates a population of 63.4 million by 2025.
Frenchwomen now have the second-longest life expectancy in the developed world:
84, next to that of Japanese women.
The reasons for change in national birthrates remain obscure, and
population projections are notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, it is not hard
to find political and social correlations. The former Soviet Union has suffered
a collapse of birthrates since the failure of the Soviet system demoralized
millions of people, throwing them into social and economic distress or
uncertainty. Suddenly there seemed no reliable future. France, on the other
hand, is a high-morale society today, sure of itself and of the ultimate
validity of its model of society, despite the chronic pessimism with which the
French public responds to public opinion polls.
In French society, to be pessimistic is to be intellectually serious. To
have babies now is à la mode.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/29/opinion/edpfaff.php
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