Rosen apparently subscribes to the Linda Hirschman worldview, one that posits women are only as valuable as their contributions outside the home, unrelated to children and family. Rearing up the next generation that will someday run the world is woefully under appreciated.
From an overflow of the heart the mouth speaks and Rosen makes it clear that her prejudice against women who stay home stems from a lack of respect and appreciation for what those women do. If the goal of feminism is choice, Rosen betrays the mutual respect amongst members of the female sex by degrading the choices of other women.
At National Review (your home for racists for over 50 years!), Katrina Trinko quoted Ann Romney's response.
“She should have come to my house when those five boys were causing so much trouble,” Romney chuckled. “It wasn’t easy.”
“My career choice was to be a mother,” she added. “We need to respect choices that women make. Other women make other choices to have a career and raise a family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that. That’s wonderful.” She also gave a shout-out to “dads at home raising kids.”
Romney indicated she had no intention of backing down on speaking for women.
“I want to tell you what women are telling me,” she said. “And Hilary needs to know this, because I’ve been on the campaign trail for one year. And guess what women are talking about, and I don’t care if they’re stay at home moms or they’re working mothers or they’re grandmothers . . . they’re talking about jobs, and they’re talking about the legacy of debt that we’re leaving our children.”
And Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez said:
Raising your eyebrows at stay-at-home mothers of many children may be the sexual revolution’s most acceptable bias.
It is extremely gratifying to hear all this praise for women who choose to stay home with their children, as I did. Maybe conservatives aren't as bad as I thought. They think that women should stay home to do the hard work of caring for their children, and it is very hard work. I work from 6:30 am to approximately 8:00 pm and often have great difficulty finding two or three free hours a day to work on this blog. Conservatives are very, very concerned that without supervision and constant attention, children will not grow up to be good citizens. Religious conservatives, especially, think that mothers should be home with their many, many children, as they think that all women are driven by innate urges to procreate and nurture.
Well, maybe not all women. If you are African-American, suddenly staying home with your children is a bad thing. In a nation that has an incarceration rate of
*In comments, Downpuppy points out that the incarceration rate for black males is 4.3; the New York Times says 1 in 9 black males are incarcerated. More data:
¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
12 comments:
Ha ha! I see what you did there! You wrote that it's gratifying that Republicans finally seem to connect to women but that's actually a subtle use of sarcasm.
Oh you!
What is most disgusting is Ann Romney's millions of dollars sure made her Pro-Choice position a lot less difficult than if she was facing the ramifications of the Republican onslaught on the Middle Class and Working Class which has necessitated the two-income family model.
Crap! I knew I was asking for trouble by trying to use math.
Susan, that's no way to make editor at the Atlantic. You're supposed to say that it was a hypothetical, or else that you had gastritis, so there weren't enough digits on your calculator.
Unfortunately I have to admit that I was careless.
No, no, claim the math error is central to your point.
Oh how I admire Mrs. Rmoney, wife of a cut-throat multi-millionaire, for "staying at home" with her servants and luxury cars and servants and horses and servants and swimming pools and servants and 5 kids (probably attending expensive private schools).
Did she drive them to their school all by herself? Did she pack their lunches and help them with homework? After they left the house for school did she clean their rooms, launder the clothes, and fold & put those clothes away? Did she shop for dinner and cook that dinner and serve that dinner and then clean up the mess afterwards? When her kids all caught the flu at the same time did she take care of all 5 of them by herself (hubby busy looting) even tho she was just as sick as they were?
How did she explain to the youngest 2 or 3 kids that they only ever got to wear hand-me-down cloths when the older ones got new clothes. Did she buy her and her kid's clothes at garage sales or Goodwill?
She has no idea what being a mother, stay-at-home or "working" entails. She and her horrible husband are... well... horrible.
Ann Romney claims to represent the ideas and the plight of women with whom she has nothing in common. It's as if I were to presume to speak out about the plight of, and to claim commonality with, Nepalese sherpas.
If an actual sherpa were to protest that, along would come Dana Loesch, this season's lying propagandist bonus baby, to sniff, "It's too bad Mr. Tenzing subscribes to the theory that the only way to speak knowledgeably about mountain-climbing is to climb a mountain. Apparently the well-informed opinions of people who have taken the time to page through big coffee-table books on The Himalayas are beneath his notice."
You're supposed to say, "I don't have time to do the math here, maybe one of my readers could help out?"
~
It's the schools' fault. Privitize them at once!
“I want to tell you what women are telling me . . . they’re talking about jobs . . ."
Translation: My friends at the country club want more tax cuts.
Susan, as a stay at home Dad, you pretty much sum up my day as well! It's damn hard work and I get paid for it is great sex and access to whiskey...;)
Seriously, my biggest beef here is that the response to Rosen's piece in the centrist-right media has completely missed the real point, that Mrs. Thrurston Romney, being incredibly wealthy, probably should not go on about how "hard" she had to work to raise 5 boys. Especially when it's obviously a naked attempt to cover for her husbands political failings. It came off as tin eared and should becalled out as such.
And amidst all the hollering, the protests, the speeches, the lectures, after all the uproar over the accusation that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life, there's still one question no one has answered . . .
What jobs has she worked at?
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