Some Mothers Are More Special Than Others

Conservatives are up in arms regarding Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's statement that housewife Ann Romney never worked a day in her life. Dana Loesch said:

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  39.4%* (and a population rate of 13.6%), and an unemployment/population ratio of 53.2% for African-American men, African-American women are told to get married and be supported by their husbands if they want to be mothers. Obviously staying home with your children is fine if you are white but if you are not, staying home with your children is a sign of laziness and immorality.

*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.