the turbulence of the new social and psychoanalytical ideas of the 1970s did, somehow, lead to the astonishing injunction: ‘Do as you wish but do become parents.’” Women are particularly vulnerable to this paradoxical “injunction to want a child.” And they are all the more sensitive to it because, as one (voluntarily childless) woman remarked to Debest, they have a tendency “not to distinguish between what they want and what is asked of them.
