Ann Romney, Not a Representative Woman

I have been biting my tongue on the Ann Romney-Hillary Rosen dust up, but find it difficult to do so any longer. Sure, raising five children is a lot of work. But far less work when one has relatively unlimited amounts of money and can have hired help to do the menial daily tasks that most stay at home mothers face. Yet the GOP has incredibly decided to transform Ann Romney into the archetype stay at home mother in the apparent hope that the disingenuous argument will counter the party's otherwise severely anti-woman agenda. Yes, Hillary Rosen should have chosen her words more carefully, but her underlying analysis was correct: Ann Romney has no clue what it is to be a typical stay at home mom. In saying this, I don't mean to malign her, but rather merely look at objective reality. A column in The Daily Beast looks at the GOP's ridiculous messaging effort:

[C]onservatives have no business pretending that she represents anything beyond what she in fact is, which is a woman who was born to fantastic privilege and who married into even more fantastic privilege, and who simply hasn’t had to make the hard choices that many women have to make. She turns out not even to represent stay-at-home moms very well at all, and if Republicans think this little fracas is rallying stay-at-home moms to their reactionary cause, they’re deluding themselves.

First, a bit about Ann nee Davies. She grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of American’s wealthiest suburbs. She attended the posh private sister school of the posh private school her future husband attended. Her father was the president of a company that made maritime machinery. While still in college, she married the son of an ex-automobile company CEO. The couple would have to make its own way in the early years, as young couples do, but surely they knew that if a serious crisis hit them, they’d have someone to turn to. They’d never end up on the street or on a relative’s Castro convertible.

I’m plenty aware that I am going to be accused in the comment thread of class envy, but I’m just laying out facts. They shouldn’t be held against her: For all I know Ann Romney is the most generous, empathetic, and self-abnegating woman in the United States. But it’s simply a fact that she’s never had to worry about how she was going to feed her kids, or what she might do if tragedy befell.

But what of the millions of women who share her bad luck health-wise but don’t share her good luck wealth-wise? We don’t know what she thinks, and maybe since she’s not the candidate she is under no obligation to tell us, interesting as it might be to find out. But we do know what her husband, her own presumed insurance provider, thinks. He thinks the hell with them. He used to care about them, when he passed a law giving them a fair shot at buying affordable coverage, but now he wants to repeal the law that does the same thing nationally, and the only reason is political calculation and cowardice.

The interesting thing about all this is that your “typical,” if there is such a thing, stay-at-home mom bears not the remotest resemblance to Ann Romney. The Census Bureau studied this question for the first time (?!) in 2007, and the results were, to me, totally surprising and fascinating. Stay-at-home mothers, you probably think, are more likely to be white, well-off, proper, all-around June Cleaver-ish. Uh, June Cleaver was around 50 years ago and lived on TV. In today’s actual America, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be: younger; Hispanic (Latina, if you prefer); foreign-born; less well educated.

[A] significant number of women who stay at home don’t do so by choice, but because they don’t have marketable skills—or because they can’t get jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of childcare.

[T]hese women are not staying home by “choice,” and they tend to be the women society really forgets about and pays no attention to. I doubt pretty strongly that they identify much with Ann Romney or are rallying to her husband’s cause.

This whole fracas happened simply because conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse liberals of being elitist. There was a whiff of that in Rosen’s wording, but at least Rosen is affiliated with the side in American politics that wants women who didn’t grow up in Bloomfield Hills and marry well to have a chance to receive excellent health care if they ever find themselves in Ann Romney’s position.