Romney Republicans suddenly insist that raising children is "work".
by Laura Flanders
For all the shameful sucking up to multimillionaire mom Ann Romney after Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen accused her of never having worked "a day in her life," the reality is neither Republicans nor Democrats treat most parenting as work, and thousands of poor women are living in poverty today as living proof of that fact.
Do we need to state the obvious? Women of different classes are beaten with different rhetorical bats. For the college-educated and upwardly aspiring, there's the "danger" of career ambitions. Ever since women started aspiring to have men's jobs, backlashers have told those women that they're enjoying their careers at the expense of their kids' well being. They really can't have it all.
They'll raise monsters, or worse, they'll grow old on the shelf. Remember the Harvard/Yale mob that made headlines with a "study" showing that unmarried women over thirty had a slimmer chance of matrimony than they had of being taken out by a terrorist? Susan Faludi took them apart in Backlash! But the evil spawn of that story still circulate. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and professional women are still punished for wanting to succeed. For the poor, though, it's very different.
Following Rosen's remark, Ann Romney tweeted her first tweet: "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work." Her husband's campaign hoisted that cudgel high and they have been beating Rosen and the Democrats with it for almost a week.
It was a relief, then, to see this gotcha clip from Mitt Romney at a campaign event in January, in which he said mothers on welfare should be forced to get a job outside the home or lose their government benefits…
Video: Mitt Romney explains to a crowd why he wants welfare single mothers "to have the dignity of work".
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