This was supposed to be ladies’ night at the RNC, and it was no time for subtext. “I love you, women!”  blurted out Ann Romney, in a departure from her prepared remarks.

These women, she said, were chiefly the “moms who always have to work a little harder, to make everything right.” Ann Romney has had to work a little harder to persuade people that her husband is who she says he is, never more so than tonight, but her speech kept inexorably pointing at her husband and his party’s indifference to doing anything about that disparity.

She made it so easy: “If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It’s how it is, isn’t it?” Yes, it’s how it still will be in a Mitt Romney presidency. An election cycle in which her husband has declared birth control coverage to be a threat to religious liberty is an inconvenient time for her to talk about “that couple who would like to have another child, but wonder how will they afford it.” A convention for a party that opposes any legislation around equal pay for women is an inopportune moment to discuss the “working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but that’s just out of the question with this economy.”

A campaign that has stubbornly declared that there is no such thing as women’s issues, that women care about jobs and gas prices, is forced to make an appeal relying both on gender essentialism and the explicit admission that women face structural challenges. Or as Ann put it, “I’m not sure if men really understand this, but I don’t think there’s a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy. In our own ways, we all know better!” No one expects it to be easy. Some people work for it to be better.

She was warm and winning, if occasionally sped-up and nervous. She was glowingly beautiful, and if you were so disposed, you could find her nervous laughter and tacked-on Oprah cadence awkwardly charming. But her pitch for her husband once again boiled down to the fact that because she loves him, we should too, and because she has struggled with MS and cancer and once lived in a basement apartment, she and her husband understand America’s pain.