For all the shameful sucking up to multimillionaire mom Ann Romney
after Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen accused her of never having worked
“a day in her life,” the reality is neither Republicans nor Democrats
treat most parenting as work, and thousands of poor women are living in
poverty today as living proof of that fact.
Do we need to state the obvious? Women of different classes are
beaten with different rhetorical bats. For the college-educated and
upwardly aspiring, there’s the “danger” of career ambitions. Ever since
women started aspiring to have men’s jobs, backlashers have told those
women that they’re enjoying their careers at the expense of their kids’
well being. They really can’t have it all. They’ll raise monsters, or
worse, they’ll grow old on the shelf. Remember the Harvard/Yale mob that
made headlines with a “study” showing that unmarried women over thirty
had a slimmer chance of matrimony than they had of being taken out by a
terrorist? Susan Faludi took them apart in Backlash!
But the evil spawn of that story still circulate. The media still love
stories about stay-at-home moms and professional women are still
punished for wanting to succeed. For the poor, though, it’s very
different.
Following Rosen’s remark, Ann Romney tweeted her first tweet: “I made
a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard
work.” Her husband’s campaign hoisted that cudgel high and they have
been beating Rosen and the Democrats with it for almost a week.
It was a relief, then, to see this gotcha clip from Mitt Romney
at a campaign event in January, in which he said mothers on welfare
should be forced to get a job outside the home or lose their government
benefits. Cruel? No: “I want those individuals to have the dignity of
work,” said Romney.
