The “back-to-nature” movement for mothers is an ideological effort to “reawaken the slumbering mammal inside women” and turn them into “chimpanzees,” argues French feminist Elisabeth Badinter in this interview with Spiegel. The success of this movement, she suggests, is partly a matter of generational backlash:

The current generation of young women is made up of the daughters of the feminists of the 1970s. They don’t want to be like their mothers — torn between their job and their family, constantly stressed, constantly tired. They think it must be much more satisfying to devote themselves entirely to their children.