The War on Women

In the latest skirmish in the War on Women, which began in the 1960s with Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” Democrat Strategist Hilary Rosan attacked Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on Wednesday night.

 “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Rosan sniffed. “She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we . . . why we worry about their future.”

Shortly after the remark, Ann Romney delivered her inaugural tweet. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys.  Believe me, it was hard work.”  Romney appeared on Fox News the next morning, where she addressed the issue.

Rosan discounted Mrs. Romney’s value to her husband as an economic expert.  Maybe Ms. Rosan should read all the Progressive-issued literature that cites women make the purchases in the American family.  Moms are the ones who do all the shopping for the household, in addition to doing the housework, caring for the younger children, feeding, clothing, and tending to them.

Rosan must have opted for the industrial arts class instead of home economics.  No coupon clipping for Ms. Rosan.  The story is that at one point, the Romneys were so far from wealthy, that they lived in a basement apartment with a cement floor.  Ann had to find scraps of rug and sew them together so they’d have some sort of rug on the floor.  Does Ms. Rosan even know how to sew?

Some of us are not cut out for domestic life.  Certainly not myself and definitely not my former sister-in-law.  I’ve tried gardening, cooking, and sewing but living alone required that my energies turn towards keeping my job so I’d have a home, cluttered though it was, until my recent lay-off.  It’s not that I dismiss the domestic arts – in my day, I had a fondness for gardening and for the craft of doll-making.  But when the country is on the brink of disaster, it just seems superfluous to be sewing doll clothes and planting pansies and snapdragons.

My sister-in-law wanted to go to work and my brother wanted her to go out and make money, too.  With neither home very much, my nephew was pretty much raised by his grandparents.  Their marriage paid the price and so did their relationship with their son.  It’s a good thing he’s a forgiving fellow, about to graduate with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

I’m just not a female female.  Yet I wouldn’t dream of criticizing those amazing women who can raise children, flowers, and yeast.   I have less admiration for those women who leave their kids with strangers, or foist them off on family members to do battle in the boardrooms.  We should not judge (according to these female amazons) but I watched too many little tots being dropped off at our neighbor’s daycare center early in the morning and being dragged home in their jammies at 7 at night, while their mothers sallied forth to make a name in the business world.

Let us not confuse the women who must work with those who choose to work.  There are lower middle class women who must leave their children with family members or strangers in order to make ends meet.  Nor are the empty-nest mothers included in this group.

I’ve been out in the business world all my adult life and frankly, I just don’t see the great attraction.  Of course, I’ve never been home with five boys (oh my goodness) and maybe I’d be clawing at the door to get out if I had been.

My mother worked hard all her life until she got married.  Then she had us – two boys and myself.  My father had suffered two heart attacks from being out in the publishing world and was reduced to a minimum wage job as a security guard.  We were very poor.  Our dinner menus consisting of spaghetti and meatballs, hot dogs and beans, and fishsticks and macaroni and cheese, with the occasional chicken or steak.  Mom helped an accountant during tax season for extra cash.

We only had one car, which my father had to use to go to work during the day.  One week, he was on the night shift.  My poor mother stood at the kitchen window watching the squirrels go up and down the trees.  Then she began weeping and I fetched my father.  Our development was on a wooded hill, too far from the main street to walk.  From then on, my father worked the night shift so that we only saw him for an hour at dinner.

Soap operas weren’t for Mom, any more than modern women’s talk shows are for me.  Like Mom, I listen to the radio – Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity.  She was – and is – an active, intelligent woman.  She willingly did her duty when we were little, but once we got into her teens, she decided we were mature enough to leave us on our own.  Mom took a job as a bus driver with a local company.  We started doing better financially and Mom paid off the mortgage on the house ahead of time.

Mom is a fiscal and family Conservative (despite being distantly related to Robert Wagner - she has a weakness for Mother Nature, as do most of us).  But she knew we kids always came first.  My parents never left us with strangers.   Being a stay-at-home mother was a sacrifice for my mother, with her intelligent, active mind.  But she did it.

If anyone has declared a War on Women, it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans.  Mom’s a Republican and she didn’t need any legislation or regulations to go into her boss, when she was 21, and demand the same salary they were paying the male reporters.  “My landlord isn’t going to charge me less for rent and the store isn’t going to charge me less for a loaf of bread just because I’m a woman,” she declared.  “Pay me the same money or I’m leaving.”

She got the raise and then some.

In my speech at the Tea Party rally, I urged women to take charge and not let other people take charge of their children.  It’s not about the money, or the stimulation, or the titles; it’s about the kids.  That is the real War on Women.  The Progressives want to come between you and your children, Mothers of America, and your husbands, too.  If you’re sneering right now at your husbands, that’s a sign that they’re winning.  Stop it.

Get out your rolling pins and frying pans and stand up for your status as wives and mothers.  Sticking together begins with the family.  Throw out your Teflon frying pan attitudes about motherhood and go back to cast iron.

Your employer will never give you a Mother’s Day card.