Paris, Where American Writers Go to Escape their Puritan Legacy

Pamela Druckerman’s book-length story of parenting in France has been, by any book-author standards, a wild success. It spent ten weeks on NPR’s Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list. It was reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes. The reviewers did not love it, but it sold well nonetheless.

If you’re looking to criticise the book, you don’t need to dig very deep. It’s got all the problems of amateur social science. First, Druckerman treats her own observations of French moms at the playground as representative of a ‘French’ culture—she enviously sees moms having conversations while their children play and concludes that French mothers have a talent for keeping their children under control at the playground that Anglophone mothers lack. (The ‘Anglophone’ category is as suspect as the ‘French’, of course—I think Americans and Brits would be amused to know that they are the same ‘culture’ in Paris). 

Second, Druckerman lumps everything happening in France (media, policy, and anecdotal experiences) under the heading of ‘culture’. One can imagine the reasons for this: French culture is cool and desirable and American readers will buy a book that tells them how to be more like French people. (See: French Women Do Not Get Fat [https://frenchwomendontgetfat.com/ ]). If I were a publisher I would do nothing to undermine the idea that French culture can be emulated by you, dear reader, in your own home. This decision to emphasise American fetishism of French culture over intellectual rigor means that policy victories in France, like the crèche system providing high-quality care to children between three months and three years of age, get treated as something that the French just do because they have good taste. Of course, it also means that the book is a charming read rather than a treatise on policy, which you don’t see very often on NPR’s bestseller lists.

These critiques are really beside the point, though. The book nowhere claims profound knowledge of France, and I doubt its readers care very much about the nuances of French society in all its diversity. Instead, Druckerman’s journalistic memoir offers a fantasy. In this fantasy, children are gourmet eaters who sleep through the night and quietly entertain themselves while you sip coffee with friends. Women lose all pregnancy weight after three months and resume wearing fine fabrics and high heels without missing a beat. In short, the fantasy is of a motherhood that is sexy, attractive, and above all easy.

Druckerman’s rendering of the French fantasy is all the more attractive because, in her account, it’s easy to achieve all of it with a few simple tricks. Druckerman has a list of these tricks at the end of the book, pithily summarised with headings like  ‘Baby Formula Isn’t Poison’ and ‘Stay Sexual’. (Again, the significant structures in place behind the simple solutions are backgrounded). The solutions are essentially attitude tweaks meant to shift a neurotic, overwrought Anglophone mother into a self-assured, relaxed French one. They range from reasonable (‘Eat for One, and a Bit’) to aspirational (‘It’s Me Who Decides’), and all share a lack of interest in nuance that is probably liberating for anxious people in search of guidance and infuriating for people reading a book with an eye toward critique.

The most interesting part of the fantasy, though, is its total dispensation with the dream of gender equality. The entire project relies on a leaning in to femininity. Under her tip that, ’50/50 Isn’t the Gold Standard’, Druckerman advises women ‘try tempering (their) feminist theory with some old-fashioned French pragmatism’. (Of course, much excellent and influential feminist theory is French … but again, not the point at all). French pragmatism, she explains, involves women trading off their desire for help from their husbands with their desire for their husbands to be in a good mood (which housework doesn’t put them in). If women let go of this obsession with equality and followed the tip to ‘Treat Men Like a Separate Species’, then things would be easier.

Again, it’s easy to criticise this framing of gender relations. But what’s so appealing about it? Why did this advice speak to so many American women?

I have my own experience of reading the book to help answer this question. I picked it up not because I wanted to analyse its advantages and faults but because I, as a new mom growing in to what felt like a lot of responsibility, I wanted a bit of guidance. Enough of my mom-friends had gleaned helpful insights from the book that I figured it was worth picking up. And the constant reminder voice in my head saying, YOU COULD BE FUCKING THIS UP, made me amenable (vulnerable?) to outside influences. Reading Druckerman’s trajectory from an anxious woman convinced that she’d be a bad mother if she was anything less than slavishly devoted to her child, to cool, collected Parisian fashion plate made me think, it’s possible to make this feel, and look, easy.

What’s easy about this approach is that it eschews moral righteousness. Everything about it suggests pragmatism and normalcy come first: keep families constructed the way we like them, with men and women conjugally happy and children benignly subordinated. Just eat what’s in front of you, the way that everyone else does. Stop thinking you are going to catch food borne illnesses all the time, because you probably won’t.  The ease comes from not having to do anything in a Puritan way, and just being able to muddle along doing more or less what everyone else is doing and feeling fine about that. Which sounds appealing, doesn’t it? And is why it’s a bit troubling to look at the principles it is built on up close: on an acquiescence to conceptions of gender roles and women’s sexuality that’s hardly progressive. 

Clearly I am in the anxious Anglophone category, reading so much in to such a mild text. But it really speaks to how influential popular literature can be, in ways expected and unexpected.