Okay, I don't have any statistics to support me, but anyway, I'm mad, so I'm going to write about this, about Hilary Rosen's so-called "swipe" at poor Ann Romney (oh yeah! poor poor Ann Romeny) who you just know had nannys and maids and all sorts of child-elevator creatures helping her raise her five mighty Mormon boys) while Ann stayed home and - - and what? - - oh yeah - - and worked - - and has become a metaphor for all those other women who chose (or is that "who got to") - - stay at home and raise her children without having to at the same time go outside home and work out there.
In today's Sunday Review part of Sunday's New York Time's there's an editorial by a guy named Frank Bruni whose ode to his mother goes, in part, like this: "Mom didn't punch a clock or get a paycheck or any of that. She might have endured less stress and finagled more sleep if she had. But her arrangement with Dad was traditional: he sweated the income, she sweated the rest. Actually, it wasn't so traditonal, because the rest included the bill paying, the checkbook balancing, the wrangling with the roofer, the wrangling with the electrician, the car selection, the school selection, you name it."
IS THIS GUY KIDDING? "The wrangling with the roofer? The wrangling with the electrician? The car selection? The school selection? The "you name it"s? Oh, gee! What planet are these people who detest what Hilary Rosen said about Ann Romney coming from? Don't they realize that women with children who have gone to work outside the home have HAD to go to work outside the home and that activities like wrangling with roofers and electricians and selecting cars and schools are simply what people DO, period? No matter what? Period? Whether they work inside or outside or up in trees?
Period?
I grew up in a small town where most of the women with children did not work outside the home. To my knowledge, none of them were known to be roof-wranglers or electrician-wranglers. My own mother once selected a blue 1953 Plymouth all by herself, but I wouldn't say that it was in any way a tough decision for her to make, nor was it tough on my father, who, by the way, made the actual money to pay for the actual car, no matter how many dinners my mother managed to cook for us. Did she work hard? Not nearly as hard as women who worked inside AND outside their homes. She worked, I'd say, adequately hard enough. She took plenty of breaks, she managed to get back to North Dakota often enough to see her family of origin and the telephone bills she racked up must have been enormous.
Of course, she only had one child, me, and I didn't present that large of a problem. And she was sick with a fatal illness which nearly went undiagnosed, which DID present an enormous problem, so let's say that hers was a highly unusual situation which couldn't be applied to most other mothers in Silverdale-land in the 1950's. Even so, I was in and out of a lot of my friends' houses during the 50's and 60's and not one of my friends' moms worked and they all had at least two or more children and none of them seemed nearly - - not nearly - - as frazzled as the women I have known later in my life, the women who, because of real, actual circumstances, have had to have not one, but two careers simultaneously - - working inside the home as a mother, which IS labor-intensive (although you can modify and make it more or less as labor-intensive as you want, based on how dedicated you are to baking your own bread or driving your kids around to hell and back or hanging your sheets up on the line to dry, or putting together your own granola or you-know-what-I'm-talking-about, etc.) and complicated (see former parentheses) - - anyway, yes, working inside the home as a mother IS labor-intensive, but working as a mother AND, at the same time, working outside, as a whatever-it-is-you-are-working-as - - well, there's just no comparison. I mean, come ON.
Oh. So listen. Bruni's column in the Times goes on to say: "What's most bothersome about Rosen's comment, though, was its betrayal of what the Democratic Party and femininism at their best are supposed to be about: recognizing the full diversity of human experience and empowering everyone along that spectrum to walk successfully down the path of his or her choosing, so long as it poses no clear harm to anyone else."
Well. Isn't that special. Yeah, right, the women I know all chose for the American economy to tank so that suddenly it took two, not one, but two, incomes to forge or create or keep up or whatever the hell verb you want to use to mean keep your family alive and living with food in its belly and a roof over its head - - the women I know all CHOSE, they all took a look at their lives and their husbands or their lack of husbands, as the case may have been, and they took a look at their childrens' faces and they pondered a bit and thought about it a lot and weighed their options (right, sure they did, like they had options) and they thought to themselves, "Gee, I think I will CHOOSE to work double time, I think I will CHOOSE to get up at four or five in the morning and feed the kids and get them to playschool which takes a good chunk of my money but not all my money so that I can make a few more bucks so that I can buy enough food to put in my childrens' mouths because I love my children and I am responsible for my children and it isn't that I can't imagine life without work, it isn't that I go cold with fear if I think about life without work outside my home, it isn't that I am just compulsively drawn to enter the workplace, the jobplace, that shitty place out there with the glass ceiling that happens to be so low that my forehead has been bleeding for the past two, four, six, eight years in my life just from having my head having been crashed into that damn thick block of glass - - - it's really more a matter of other people, mostly male politicians who have mothers (whom they say they love and they get all wistful about when they think of them), who have made it so damn hard for me to have children AND keep my house going that I don't GET to make the nice cool choices that Annie Romney has been able to make....."
Choices. Uh-huh. The political savagery of this country has certainly allowed females in America plenty of choices. Thank you, guys. Things were different in the fifties. And things are different for the rich. And that's the way it was and that's the way it is. That's how the parity in this country crumbles. Don't talk to me about choices. And now you big-fat-political Republican Yay-hoos want to mess around with contraception so that poor women can have less choices than ever, except that women like your mothers and women like your wives will ALWAYS have choices, because that's one of the savage secrets we don't talk about in America.
The rage, the fury, the despair, the raw fear, the panic, the gauging of female's choices in America goes on and on and on and you're doing it again.
GOOD FOR YOUR, HILARY ROSEN! YOU WERE RIGHT, ALL THE TIME! And go stuff it, Frank Bruni, whoever you are. So your mother had to wrangle with the roofer. And you even feel badly about that, because you say you fear,"she didn't really choose it, inasmuch as she and Dad were products of a different generation, when too many women were prodded in too preordained a direction."
Well, well. But what a direction it was, Frank. What a direction it was.
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