The Conflict by Elisabeth Badinter review

Anyone who is currently caught up in the maelstrom of parenting a small child in this country will be well acquainted with the shibboleths of contemporary maternal culture: "natural pregnancy", "natural birth", postpartum bonding fostered by "plenty of skin-to-skin contact", "baby-led weaning", "baby-wearing", "co-sleeping" and, above all, on-demand breast-feeding at least until the age of two, as recommended by the World Health Organisation. It takes a lot of nerve for a new mother to defy these recommentations, propogated as they are by most of the chief sources of healthcare advice, from the National Childbirth Trust and breastfeeding counsellors to the WHO and governments who ban the promotion of formula for small babies.

Aren't breastfeeding, co-sleeping and the like perfectly natural behaviours, and shouldn't they be encouraged? The French historian and philosopher Elisabeth Badinter's The Conflict passionately and angrily unpicks the claim of many aspects of modern maternal culture to be based on "natural" truths and behaviours. Reading it alongside Cordelia Fine's superb Delusions of Gender (2010) was, for me, revelatory: together, these books resoundingly demolish the notion that "nature" dictates the differences between men and women's behaviour.

The Conflict, first published in France in 2010 and now translated into English by Adriana Hunter, shows that naturalism is a philosophy, not an objective truth. Badinter describes how ethological studies (such as those conducted by primatologist Sarah Hrdy) have been driven by an ideological conviction that females, across species, possess an innate "maternal instinct". The naturalist psychologist John Bowlby has tried to show that attachment behaviours in human mothers and children are instinctive and uniquely female. The field of ecology has provided the backdrop for widespread mistrust of infantile exposure to "unnatural" substances, such as epidurals in childbirth, immunisations and chemicals in baby bottles.

But there are problems. First, this research has failed to produce a clear, incontrovertible picture of what, if anything, constitutes innate or "natural" mothering behaviour. Second, it is not a given that, because something is "natural", we should submit to or encourage it (the Enlightenment's achievements were founded on attempts to control and supersede nature). And, third, there is not much evidence that the behaviours celebrated by naturalists create healthier, happier children or parents. Even claims that breastfeeding boosts immunity in industrial nations or raises IQ are not on solid ground.

Badinter's concern is not to discourage the minority of parents for whom such natural parenting methods prove easy, satisfying and convenient, nor to persuade women against having children at all. Her focus is the woman in the middle, who finds herself subject to the "conflict" of the title: trying to live up to the standards of a culture of "overzealous motherhood" that can require obsessive levels of immersion and self-sacrifice, while simultaneously preserving her own "personal pursuits" – her career, her sex life, her identity as an independent adult woman.

Because natural parenting is not just a harmless folly: it can be detrimental. Having a cuddle with a newborn baby is lovely, but the weighty ideological importance placed on immediate postpartum skin-to-skin contact in forming a long-term emotional bond between mother and child can be upsetting for parents denied this opportunity by a difficult birth or sick baby. The domination of modern maternal culture by naturalist ideology can generate extreme guilt in those who do not, or cannot, live up to its high standards: the guilt of feeling like a bad or unnatural mother. Naturalism thrives on such guilt (Badinter quotes a La Leche League member's call for the shaming of women who do not breastfeed), and encourages women to equate the extent of their self-sacrifice to their success as mothers. This is painfully clear when Badinter quotes the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's cynical approach to her own earlier work, Mother Love, which challenged the existence of "maternal instinct". "There is no maternal instinct," he admitted. "Of course there isn't … [But your book] will only serve to free … women from their feelings of guilt, the only restraint that means some children are saved from destruction, suicide, anorexia, etc." Even if unfounded or untrue, even if it is the source of guilt and self-loathing, overzealous motherhood must be encouraged, according to Bettelheim, because it cements the family unit.

But what does such a family look like? Badinter shows how the claim that "natural is best" is used to justify a raft of regressive parenting behaviours, which unite in their attempts to persuade women to shoulder the primary burden of child-rearing and domestic responsibility. Chief among them is the promotion of exclusive breastfeeding, which, like "baby-wearing" (carrying an infant in a sling for extended periods to mimic mothers on the savannah) ties a woman to her child for hours every day, excludes the father and, if continued until to the WHO's recommended age of two, makes returning to work difficult. (La Leche League and the NCT are traditionally opposed to expressing and bottle-feeding, citing the chemical content of bottles and the child's potential for "nipple confusion", not to mention the hysterical revulsion that surrounds formula.)

Parenting manuals based on Bowlby's attachment theory prioritise the bond between mother and child, sideline the father and keep women away from work. Co-sleeping (sharing a bed with a small child) restricts a couple's sex life. Naturalism promotes the view that women are emotionally and physiologically constructed to be their children's primary carers in a way that men are not, and that mothering is the most significant of a woman's capabilities. Badinter is brave in her admission that this view has been bolstered by a wave of essentialist feminism that located female power in women's physiology and held up maternal instinct as the basis of a revolutionary new matriarchal society.

But overwhelmingly, the popularity of the naturalist ideology waxes and wanes according to socioeconomic context. Badinter traces the rise of the trend for "natural" motherhood to a combination of economic crisis and limited progress in workplace equality. After the achievements of feminists in the 1970s, she suggests, there was a period of profound disillusionment. Disappointed by continuing inequalities in pay and career progression, the next generation of women retreated into the home. And in periods of widespread unemployment, women's willing rejection of the world of work is extremely useful to the state.

Enthusiasm for natural mothering, or "overzealous motherhood", is at fever pitch in Britain just now, and The Conflict is an important and refreshing challenge to the dominant ideology.

Rachel Hewitt's Map of a Nation is published by Granta.

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