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Kudos to the Up With Chris Hayes team for unearthing this video of Mitt Romney, at a New Hampshire rally in January, lauding his record of requiring mothers of children as young as 2 to experience the “dignity of work” as a condition of receiving public benefits. So, apparently, raising children is only work if you look like Ann Romney.
But this type of double standard is nothing new. Our political and public discourse around the family—to our great detriment—often behaves as though history began in the 1950s. But the idea that there are two types of women—White, married, virtuous, affluent “true women” and then pretty much everyone else—is an old one, dating back at least to the Victorian Era Cult of Domesticity. While “true women,” by confining themselves to the domestic sphere and womanly arts of childbearing, rearing, and making a harmonious family home, both required and deserved men’s protection from the slights of the harsh world, it was tough cookies for the majority of women who didn’t fit that model (from white working class women, to widows and single mothers, to women of color, like Sojourner Truth in her famous speech)—not to mention their kids.
And that’s pretty much exactly the attitude on display here, as well. Interestingly, the Cult of Domesticity, by placing the creation of a harmonious and virtuous home environment as a true woman’s primary objective in life, and the protection of that environment as her husband’s, actually provided a justification for huge inequalities of wealth and income and abuses of workers by these same virtuous husbands during the Victorian and Gilded Eras—and we may be seeing something of a similar dynamic today in conservative positions on economic inequality and the labor market.
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berttheclock on April 15, 2012 9:48 AM:
This morning on his excellent program, Hayes had guests who discussed the problems with policy makers being out of touch with the present economic world. Yes, the mantra was poor women should work. However, those same policy makers never understood the effect this would have on children. Many of the jobs, the poor women would take were minimum wage with no benefits. If the women received raises, they often lost assistance for their children. They lost assistance for day care and, in many states, health care for their children due to block grants to states being diverted into other programs. If the worker had to take time off from work to care for a sick child, there would be no pay for that time off. Poverty has increased, but, assistance to the poor has plummeted. Due to this disconnect between the well intentioned work for poor women and the real world of having no help to pay for the needs of their children has hurt the children of those women dramatically. Stop aiding and caring for the early development of children and the resulting cost to society will be huge.
Mudge on April 15, 2012 9:53 AM:
They are never bothered by contradictory policy, largely because the 27% cannot even understand that it is contradictory. There are the worthy (the job creators with wives at home slaving away) and the unworthy (working mothers who also raise children) and it is never contradictory for the worthy to have a different set of rules than the unworthy. They consider it appropriate.
So how many banksters went to jail? Is Conine still free? What about that working mom who embezzled $3000 to help feed her kids..5 years and full resitution?
Still Fighting the Same Ole Battles on April 15, 2012 10:08 AM:
I have no issue with Ann Romney and the choices she made, I assume, for her life. Women who choose to fulfill themselves by marriage and children have their own sets of problems and blessings. I don't believe it's an easy choice, an easy path, thus it is a choice deserving of the respect of other women.
Yet, I cannot be given the same respect for my choices? I have chosen not to have children for various reasons and not to attach myself to another human being to be free to travel and advance my career, aka: concentrating on the "dignity of work". How does that make me any less virtuous or any more of a feminist renegade simply because I exist outside an easy pigeon-hole?
I have been for years firmly of the opinion that the population of the world does not need to be expanded by such practices as bringing unwanted pregnancies to term, age-old Catholic anti-contraception stance, or the myth that a woman must bear offspring to be fulfilled. We've already dire issues with resources not being available for all peoples, except the rich of course, and now US leadership wants to add more resource requirements with these antiquated romantic ideals? Why cannot the women who choose NOT to add to the global population be lauded with the same [faux?] esteem as those women who do?
Where is Mitt Romney's head? He is just one more man who's angling into a position of leadership where he will damage principles bought with sacrifice. He is just one of too many current leaders making vastly wrong decisions for vastly wrong reasons for a vastly ill world, for nothing other than to create their personal Utopia.
Has wealth failed these people so badly, that they've turned to power over others as their last bastion of making themselves "happy"?
Kathryn on April 15, 2012 10:10 AM:
Nothing says dignity like a minimum wage job without benefits.
MelanieN on April 15, 2012 10:26 AM:
RE "we may be seeing something of a similar dynamic today in conservative positions on economic inequality and the labor market": We are seeing EXACTLY that dynamic now - and some of the men are even making it explicit. Wisconsin Republican state senator Glenn Grothman justified Wisconsin's recent repeal of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act by explaining that men need money more than women do, because men have families to support. "You could argue that money is more important for men." This is not just harking back to the 1950s, it's back to the 1920s-1930s. In those days a woman could be fired for being married, since she "had a husband to support her" and she was "taking a job away from someone who needs it." My own mother had to keep her marriage a secret so she could keep her job.
As for Ann Romney, there actually is a valid point to be made about her, although Hillary Rosen did not make it well. It is that, because of her affluence, she has the choice whether to work or be a stay-at-home mom. A majority of women in this country do not have that choice; the family NEEDS their salary. Plus, Ann Romney can afford to hire help any time she wants. (I don't know if she does - has anyone ever asked that question?) For these reasons, she is not a good spokesperson for the economic concerns of women.
jjm on April 15, 2012 10:32 AM:
I'm actually being led to wonder if Ann Romney did "choose" her lifestyle as a stay at home mom. After all, she married a Mormon who might have (will we ever know) that she do so? After all, Mormons are notoriously conservative regarding women, who should know their place. Where was Mitt in this 'decision'?
I've also never heard of anything she engages in outside the home, what boards is she on, what charities does she work with? Maybe only the Mormon Church, where all their donations go? How come no reporter has dared to ask her how she spends her time with her children grown?
berttheclock on April 15, 2012 10:40 AM:
@MelanieN, your point about the '20s-'30s "taking jobs away from men who needed to support their families" is well taken. It was prevalent in the teaching industry.
MelanieN on April 15, 2012 10:52 AM:
It was prevalent in nursing also. I once saw a reprint of an article from a Nursing magazine of the 1930s, pro and con on the subject "should married nurses work?" The con side said, no they shouldn't, because they have a husband to support them and are taking a job away from an unmarried woman who needs it. The pro side conceded that married nurses would RATHER not work, but argued that sometimes they have to, because their husband doesn't have a job or isn't making enough. Interestingly, both sides assumed that a nurse who was married would rather not work unless she had to for economic reasons; the idea that nursing might actually be a fulfilling occupation was apparently foreign to their thinking.
Anonymous on April 15, 2012 11:25 AM:
Yep, a stay at home mom is lauded, hard working... unless she's single and poor. Then if she has no job she's leeching off the system, lazy, etc.
Oh, and also a slut because she may want contraception.
exlibra on April 15, 2012 11:26 AM:
Yet, I cannot be given the same respect for my choices? -- Still Fighting the Same Ole Battles, @10:08 AM
The Shylock defense? "Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions . . . ? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?"
It didn't "play" then, it doesn't play now; you're far too different to be granted the same treatment as Queen Anne (R-money). As Romans used to say: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi (what is allowed to Jove, is not allowed to an ox)
Objective Dem on April 15, 2012 12:51 PM:
A great book I read a few years ago was "Living Downtown - The History of Residential Hotels in the US" One of the points in the book was that residential hotels were great places for working women to live. They could get maid service, cooked meals, etc. But many thought it just wasn't right for women to have others do domestic work. So there was a successful movement against the residential hotels which centered on not allowing them in the zoning code.
Anonymous on April 15, 2012 2:53 PM:
Sara noted, "...and we may be seeing something of a similar dynamic today in conservative positions on economic inequality and the labor market."
Long ago in 2004 or so I read a piece postulating that the conservative Republicans are actually people who want a monarchy. More specifically, their beliefs are in line with a society run by royalty. It's an amalgam of capitalism and a plutocracy wherein the wealthy and powerful are almost exempt from laws and social norms that dominate the lives of peasants, or anyone making under 75,000 or so. (Really, where is that line between rich and not-rich -- 250k? A million?)
I think the idea has merit, based on the do-as-I-say, not -as-I-do attitude of the right wing.
One could see Ronald Reagan as a member of that royalty, a hallowed saint of a kind. As much as the Tea Party embraces the ethos of revolution, it seems they'd be more comfortable with a king than an elected president.
Still Fighting the Same Ole Battles on April 15, 2012 3:18 PM:
"what is allowed to Jove, is not allowed to an ox," exlibra @ 11:26
Poignant that, under the Chinese Horoscope I am an ox.
Anonymous on April 15, 2012 5:03 PM:
"How come no reporter has dared to ask her how she spends her time with her children grown?"
Because Mormonism is apparently closer to Christianity than any imagined boogie man of a Kenyan Muslim and so is afforded the same media protections under the tacit GOP rules as other Republicans. Not only does the right decide what constitutes being religious and whose religion is acceptable, but they also get to decide who qualifies as religious and who doesn't. If one has a D on one's voter card, one does not quality as religious nor is one's faith acceptable to the Republicans (and by association, God). As such, since the right decides all matters religious, they can selectively adhere or violate religious doctrines with impunity.