In the Vancouver SUN, June 6, 1998

RE-INVENTING DADDY

Fearing that too many children have no male role models, French feminists are pushing men to reassume their responsibilities toward their offspring. A key reason for the switch is falling standards of living in single-parent families.

SUZANNE LOWRY

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

PARIS - The formidable feminists of France's Socialist Government, having won the highest office for themselves, are to do battle for men's rights, campaigning to put fathers at the centre of family life.

Papa, they insist, must regain his place at the head of the family as a figure of authority and inspiration. Teenage violence, disaffection, lack of discipline and many other social ills could be alleviated by a dose of strong daddying, says a report by Michele Andre, the former women's rights minister.

Her document, The Daily Life of Families, is one of four government reports on aspects of family life commissioned by Martine Aubry, minister for employment, and Elisabeth Guigou, minister of Justice, for French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. They were published in preparation for a conference on the family next month and may lead to changes in laws that penalize fathers unduly.

Andre recommends better support for the educative role of parents and "in particular, help for fathers to fulfil their parental roles, most notably their traditional authority." Too many children have no masculine role model, too many fathers delegate and leave mothers to get on with it," she wrote. "We must begin. by giving back to fathers their proper place in the situations where there is a tendency by teachers, social services, the police and the law to sideline them."

Guigou, taking up the theme in a television interview, blamed bias in divorce settlements for part of the problem. most settlements award custody of the children to the mother. Guigou noted that 80 per cent of these children scarcely see their father again. "That seems tragic to me. I believe we have a society that pushes fathers out," she said.

But French fathers seem unsure about how to respond to their new champions. "I think we're puzzled, terrified or both," said one. "We may also laugh a little at the turn-around. I can't see that it's possible to just tell men to suddenly become like Victorian fathers. Women are too tough."

Even the French prime minister's philosophe wife, Sylviane Agacinski - who hates to be known as Mrs. Jospin - has joined the revisionist fray with a new book, Politics of the Sexes. Once a devotee of Simone de Beauvoir, who glorified the idea of women's freedom in work outside the home, Agacinski blames the author of The Second Sex for belittling the domestic role of women.

"We are moving more and more towards a society where we work less and less," she said. "The problem is going to be for men and women to find an equilibrium between their public and private lives."

Feminism taught women to live like men and feel sorry for women at home with children. Agacinski believes in equality in all things but also that men and women must work together to "reinvest" the difference between the sexes and learn how to share their lives and responsibilities peacefully. Above all, she affirmed, children need two parents, one of each sex, so that they understand the "double origin of humanity, masculine and feminine."

In France, libertarians have staffed the barricades for 30 years crying the right of a woman to be herself, keep herself and most of all keep her children free of paternal interference. Single motherhood is common.

Actresses - Isabelle Adjani and Juliette Binoche among them - have given birth to babies by unnamed, fugitive or absent fathers.

Now there is evidence of a subtle shift in emphasis. Claire Chazal, for example, the country's most famous woman newsreader, has a son by the most famous male newsreader, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, known as PPDA. For a long time, mother and baby were always seen alone, but recently PPDA - who is married to someone else - has been seen playing with the little boy on a day out.

Actress Sophie Marceau has been on the cover of three magazines this month. In each accompanying interview, she has stressed that motherhood is her best role and that going home to Warsaw to be with her son and his father, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, constitute her happiest moment.

Fatherhood gets its biggest media boost almost nightly from the nation's gentle giant' Gerard Depardieu, who appears as an adorable Papa Mia in spaghetti advertisements. He also played a loving, divorced father in the film he made in both English and French versions, Mon Pere Ce Heros - My Father, the Hero.

The political impetus for this change of emphasis in the role of fathers in the French family is socio-economic: About 90 per cent of single parents with children in their care are women, and a quarter live on or below the poverty line. Their average income and standard of living is falling, while the living standards of the "traditional", family is rising,

The image of a sophisticated Frenchman as a suave seducer, married but incorrigibly and charmingly unfaithful' more interested in conquest than his offspring, is seen to be wrong. The modern Frenchman tends. to go home to help bath baby. He fears divorce -- until relatively recently not a threat to erring husbands.

The covet of Paris Match recently showed Marion, a model, naked and pregnant with her lover Christophe Dechavanne, the television presenter, looking pleased with himself.

"I adore pregnant women, their roundness, the symbol of life," he said. Dechavanne has two children by other women.

Was he a caring father? "More than that. I keep my children with me as much as I can and they share everything in my life," he told the magazine.

Mesdames Guigou, Aubry, Andre et al will be pleased to hear it. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Comments:- In our opinion the only thing sad about this is that it was when the true feminists came out and recognised the problem that this happened. What if they had kept silent? Would the men have continued to allow themselves being insulted and having their children taken away from them? Are they just like the men in English speaking countries? Lord help us all if that is true, because the pseudo-feminists in charge there are not going to let go of their grip in a hurry.