PARIS – French feminists are taking aim at Justice Minister Rachida Dati who went back to work this week just five days after giving birth to a baby girl, saying she is setting a bad example.

Smiling in a black suit and high heels, the 43-year-old minister attended a cabinet meeting on Wednesday at the Elysee presidential palace on the same day that she walked out of a Paris clinic clutching Zohra, her new daughter.

Zohra was delivered by caesarean birth on 2 January and Dati insisted on her first day back at work that she was feeling fine.

"Pregnancy is not an illness," said Georges-Fabrice Blum, the vice president of the French gynaecologists' association, and there are no ill effects from a quick return to work.

But woman's groups in France disagreed.

"This is scandalous," said Maya Sturduts from the National Collective for the Rights of Women.

"Employers can now use this to put pressure on women", she said, especially during the current tough economic times when employers may be looking for excuses to cut staff.

Women in France are guaranteed by law 16 weeks of paid maternity leave of which 10 weeks are usually taken after the baby's birth.

But the French labour code does not apply to ministers like Dati.

Woman's rights activist Florence Montreynaud, a mother of four, said she was "shocked" by Dati's decision to go back to work so quickly and stressed that women do need to rest after delivery.

Montreynaud compared Dati to working women in the 1920s who "gave birth in the factories" and lamented that her decision would exacerbate the divide between "superwomen and wimps" in the workforce.

The gynaecologist Blum said caesarean sections "are a lot less debilitating nowadays in terms of returning to work" and that much of the pain and discomfort can subside the day after the operation.

 1 2 Next >