EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Lack of Income and Education Make for Harried Moms
I came to this motherhood business late, after my friends' children were all off to college. My energy, heaven knows, is limited but my resources more plentiful than they would have been had I adopted a child 20 years ago rather than three years ago.
Hilary Rosen and family
After a long career in the newspaper business -- and months into my second career as a college professor -- I'm able to afford in-home child care, a blessed relief. My life is less harried than that of many mothers.
So I know what Democratic operative Hilary Rosen meant when she commented, dismissively, on Ann Romney's role as a stay-at-home mother. The wife of the likely GOP presidential nominee "has actually never worked a day in her life," Rosen said last week on CNN.
That was a dumb remark. Of course Ann Romney has worked. She's the mother of five sons.
(Rosen later apologized for her "poorly chosen" words, but not before her remarks had provoked a backlash that revealed more about the nation's continuing cultural divide than anything Rosen, who is openly gay and a mother of two, said. Catholic League president Bill Donohue, for example, tweeted dismissively about Rosen's status as an adoptive mother. I would demand his apology, but I'm too busy trying to finish this column before my 3-year-old storms into the room.)
But Romney nevertheless had a huge advantage over mothers with less money: She could hire help. She could engage baby sitters, nannies, cooks and housecleaners.
That doesn't mean she didn't find her days filled with managing schedules, overseeing homework, buying new sneakers and, yes, even wiping snotty noses. With five kids, she probably never had enough help around to avoid that duty.
Still, Romney's experience of motherhood is significantly different from that of moms around the country whose family incomes hover at the median of $50,000 a year. My resources don't compare to those of the Romney family; I'm merely a comfortable member of the middle class, not a rich 1-percenter. And even I understand that my status as a longtime salaried professional has enabled me to escape the harried life of moms who rouse their children early for the ride to the day care center; who can't attend PTA meetings unless they can pay for a baby sitter; who do all the cooking, housecleaning and shopping in addition to wiping dirty noses.
However clumsily and contemptuously Rosen brought up that divide, that's clearly what she intended, as the rest of her commentary makes clear: "(Ann Romney) has never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future."
But that was lost in the pitched debate over the merits of stay-at-home motherhood, as if that's still a deep cultural fissure. First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted, "Every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected." Barbara Bush weighed in with, "I'm sorry she took a knock at us who chose -- or were able to -- stay home and take care of our children."
At least Bush tempered her comments with "were able to." Most women with school-age children work these days because they have little choice. As wages stagnated over the last 30 years, women entered the workplace in huge numbers so that family income didn't drop precipitously.
That's especially true for workers without college degrees. Of those women I know who've chosen to stay at home with their children, all were college-educated professionals whose husbands were also well-educated and well-compensated. Even Rosen, who has long plied Washington's power corridors, was being a bit disingenuous when she spoke of herself as among those mothers who worry about "how we feed our kids." Unlikely.
The real divide is between those mothers with college degrees and those without, those who pay for pricey schools and tutors and camps and those who can't -- whether they work at home or on Wall Street. Neither the shrill nor the silly rhetoric of the political season will change that.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
22 Comments so far
Show AllWorking mom's know exactly how different their lives are from wealthy moms whether or not the wealthy mom works or not. There's really no controversy for them. They don't have the time worry about it. The only people really talking about this are people that have the wealth and the time for idle pursuits.
I agree, the difference is obvious. Had Rosen chosen her words more carefully, this flap would not even have occurred.
Anyone who thinks that Ann Romney has ever "worked," should read Barbara Erenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed." With Mitt's salary, Ann Romney could have raised 15 children (instead of 5) and still never lifted a finger.
Apologoists for Rosen or those that try to defend her position are no better than she is.
She said what she thought, what obviously is common talk within the White House and is utter trash talk. Utter Crap. She and her fellow travelers deserve nothing but contempt.
Bigotry can only be attractive to another bigot. A limbaugh by another name is still a Limbaugh.
“I came to this motherhood business late,”
“The real divide is between those mothers with college degrees and those without, those who pay for pricey schools and tutors and camps and those who can't”
The real divide that I see personally, is that the sky-rise has too many windows and floors. Having raised three children my narrative is of the first person; it’s all it can be. Having taken the elevator to the top floor I refused to put money into the electronic binoculars to see from where I came; that view was free to me. There was no need to get caught up in the cinematic production that points to the present with ifs and more ifs and other variables.
Motherhood (or parenting) is not a business of putting books away on the shelf. The real [divide] that really matters is Love which slipped your radar (probably from peeking through windows). It is so easy to get caught up with "this is not a Toyota, it's a Lexus.
I would love to be privy to commentaries from mothers from Haiti, Iraq, The Marshall Islands to name a few to give plurality to the [real divide].
There was a time when mothers could stay at home with their children, if they chose to, but that time ended after the Dems joined the Repubs in their contempt for working Americans, and began outsourcing lower middle-class jobs and destroying the labor unions, so that it became impossible for a working class family to live on one earner's income.
As someone who was lucky enough to stay at home with my kids until the youngest was six years old, I know that most stay-at-home moms (the ones who don't have a household staff to do the cooking, cleaning, gardening, home repair, shopping, and errand-running) work very hard.
Women like Ann Romney, as well as working women with incomes that allow them to have household help, DO NOT even begin to understand the desperate grind of mothers who have to work at low-paying jobs AND try to keep it together at home for their kids.
Michelle Obama, someone you'd think would at least pretend to have a clue about this, is just like her husband: she never fails to come down heavily on the side of bullshit.
Michele Obama's comment was part of the White House's damage control for Rosen's comments. They knew that Obama would be blamed for the comment, as part of the standard Republican "they are committing class warfare" line of crap. So Michele (or one of her flacks) issued the statement.
Don't blame her. Blame the Republican spin machine that seized upon Rosen's comment to blame Obama for something he had nothing to do with.
Sheepherder, I blame Michele Obama for her stupid remarks and lack of integrity because, as always, she is betraying the people who actually believed in her husband: the "folks," as Obama likes to say, who fell for Obama's "hope and change" scam. I am ashamed to admit that I was one of them.
The Obamas are not stupid; they know that rich mothers with lots of help, and poor moms who struggle alone to keep their kids fed and housed, have almost nothing in common. There IS a "class war," and Obama has spent his first term making sure that the upper class wins.
As far as "damage control" goes, the Obamas have not missed one chance to "damage" and adversely "control" the lives and hopes of everyone who is not part of the economic elite that they so willingly and obsequiously serve.
The best I can say about the Obamas is that they are consistent: they have not failed to disappoint and disgust ever since they took office.
Thank you, Petrkrop, for a sensitive, truthful post. I noticed amid the comments following Jennifer Brody's piece yesterday (on celebrating Mothers), that some sought to portray feminists in a negative light. Others pushed the class divide by suggesting that women are contemptuous of other women who act as at-home Mothers.
In those cases where women judge women by narrow standards, rather than make the message one of blaming women... how about considering the social conditioning mechanisms like capitalism's worship of the career pinnacle or Christian Fundamentalism's need to force women into obedience, before striking out to portray women in such a damaging way. Are there not enough attacks aimed at women these days from those that would steal their right to biological sovereignty? To those that routinely underpay them in the workplace? Added to the huge numbers that use pornography to entertain demeaning images of female sexuality, etc?
Sisterhood IS powerful. Try giving it a shot, ladies who wish to blame other ladies for the distorted messaging inherited from long-established systems that worship hierarchy, class privilege, and other "rankings." The conditioning mechanisms run deep! And they ARE in place to divide, so that narow elites can conquer or otherwise maintain a status quo that's damaging to most.
Great post petrkrop. A woman who does not have an outside job, who has family money, and who employs household help, is not in the same position as someone who works outside the home. (Including BTW her own household help!). She has no idea of the conflicts, the juggling of time and money, the always needing to be in two places at one time that face the doubly employed working woman who has little money. She does not have to face the heartbreak of having to choose between good attendance at the job and dealing with children's illnesses, teacher conferences, school performances. An economy that favors the rights of landlords, employers, lenders, and private medical education and medical care forces more and more families to require two incomes.
But I have one qualifying statement about glorifying the good old days for the working class family. In the post WW II era in the US, if there was an employed male in the household, the mother could devote full time to home and children. The rent and food could be paid. That was a brief period in time and place in which many, not all, families had that nuclear family Ozzie and Harriet existence. In the past, all over the world, and in the US, many women have worked outside the home, by necessity. Civilized countries have child care, free contraception, and many benefits for working mothers so that the stress is lessened.
Meanwhile, let me take the heat. Anne Romney does not know the meaning of work.
"Lack of Income and Education Make for Harried Moms"
Is not lack of income also responsible for the lact of education? Are we now blaming the victims for being victims? Or are we pretending poor people like being under educated? I don't think many poor would make that claim.
The 'real divide' in our culture is between those who are 'papered' and those who are not. We must end this discrimination in the workplace for men and women. Workers should be judged on their ability - not whether or not they have a degree. This form of discrimination continues because people make big money on it. The president of UVM has an annual salary of $447,000.
Sometimes a degree just means that you spent 4 years having keg parties and 'dress to get laid' parties. It has never been easier to become self-educated than it is now. We have the Internet... and should also have apprentice programs for some professions.
Your second paragraph is largely correct, but the Internet has little, if anything, to do with education. Very little on the Internet has been read by anyone other than its author, so there ususally is no way to determine how accurate the postings are.
A public Library would be more appropriate for an autodidact.
sheepherder...not where I live. Here the public tax supported library censors and bans some political/history books (in violation of the First Amendment).
I have learned more from the Internet and C-Span book TV than I did in all my years in school. Becoming self-educated will be a trend of the future as a blowback to the excessive cost of higher education - that cannont be justified.
lf you can't take the heat in the kitchen don't put one in the oven.
Maybe you could get The Yes Men to hang this statement up, banner-style, right outside the Vatican (since access to safe, reliable birth control plays a major role in what's "baking" in that oven).
Here is a another banner or bumper sticker " lf you want to stick your nose in my uterus you know what you can kiss while you are down there ! "
There are so many variables when it comes to women and work. The richest man's wife and mother of his children could of shown her support for women who are single mothers, who have disabled children, who are sick or disabled, who are in dire poverty or working poor, the women who are forced to work by husbands who sit at home and do nothing. Women who have no transportation to get to work unlike Romney 's wife, Ann, who has two cadillacs that are lifted up from below ground level on an elevator for her convince. Women who don't know where the food for her family's next meal will come from. I could go on and on . What is important is that women get equal pay for equal work.
I've seen first-hand the agony of a mother of one child who commutes 1.5 hours each way to a poor-paying job and lives in an apartment in which rats have died behind the oven--when I was there tutoring her kid! She is doing her best, but knows that her kid faces long odds, despite a pittance of federal money paying for me to help her kid overcome racist school systems with a couple dozen hours of free tutoring. For one thing, it is hard for her to commit to a time for the tutoring. Her schedule isn't set by her boss until the last minute and may not coincide with mine. Her landlord had to replace her entire kitchen in order to plug the ratholes--which will reappear during the next earthquake or if heavy traffic changes the street structure outside.
It's all too easy to cite the very few success stories ( probably one in a billion) that make up the US mythology: that all you need is hard work in order to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, find the right product, and make a million dollars. The strength of myths such as that and the myth that people with brown skin are inferior are overcome only after thousands of years and millions or more desperate lives lived out--if at all--on a frayed shoe string.
Thank you for a truthful and compassionate view, Steve.
Rather interesting article! But we do live in a capitlist society. "Surprise!" Interested in reform or maybe transformation! We have to do it. Ann Romney isn't the problem. She's
simply doing what any of the rest would do in her shoes. The system is what we need to look at not personalities.
Hey Cynthia! Good to see you back in the saddle. . .we miss you at the old ajc.com. Your article is a good take on the "mommy wars" which aren't really aggression for the sake of agression. Just a clumsy attempt to divide women, one against the other. I do not think most women are buying this hoopla.
The real culprit is Mitt Romney and his sad and desperate attempt to connect to people via his wife. He should not have done that to her. She isn't the candidate and she will not have much if any say about policy, assuming Romney is elected. After all, the Romneys are Mormon and women have little say in the much accept the children and the family home. Women are not fooled with this ruse.
The more education a women has, the better life she will have for herself and her children. That's the real story, not this madeup trivia the media has hyped.