Stay at home mothers leaped to the top of the news when Hilary Rosen criticized Ann Romney for "never working a day in her life." Rosen's comment angered many women, especially those women who choose to stay home with their children. Numerous professional women have written in support of Mrs. Romney, and their essays can be found here, here, and here. For an interesting look at the war on women from a man who wants to sit out the war, click here. This author wants to make love not war - and he doesn't mean sex.
Many people think that Rosen - a woman who handles public relations professionally - made a giant mistake when she criticized mothers, and I was one of the foolish ones who believed she goofed. Even though Rosen made "inappropriate, insensitive, politically incorrect comments," I now believe that she made a "calculated" strike in the war on women.
Margaret Pearson wrote a blog entry entitled "Hilary Rosen's Class WarfareTactic" that enlarges on this idea. Pearson suggested that Rosen might have "volunteered to become a scapegoat or villain so that Obama could rush to the defense of stay at home moms" in an effort to further divide working women from stay-at-home moms. She suggested that we ask the question: "why was this planted?"
"Behind all this talk … is the simple fact that most women work outside the home now. Regardless of circumstances … more women are earning paychecks … than ever before.
"In fact, the more educated you are and the more affluent you are, as a woman, the more likely you are to have a `career.'"
Pearson suggests that politicians know they can win votes from women in poverty simply by "assuring continued and increasing benefits" but they may not know "how to appeal to all those working women." She believes that the Obama campaign is appealing to the working women by appealing "to their true, yet unspoken, opinions."
Pearson claims that "Mothers that stay home and forego careers to raise their children have long been disdained by working women. Working women are often simmering with disdain for the women that opt out. As any stay-at-home mom can attest, there is a thin veil of superiority working women wield as they inquire, `just what exactly do you do all day?'"
According to Pearson, we should not jump to the conclusion that a mistake was made but assume that it was a calculated move to divide women and bring the larger portion of women to vote for Obama.
Even though I know many stay-at-home mothers, facts seem to prove that there is a larger percentage of working mothers than those who stay at home. Rose M. Kreider and Diana B. Elliott of the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch of the US Census Bureau, presented a report entitled "Historical Changes in Stay-at-Home Mothers: 1969 to 2009" at the American Sociological Association 2010 annual meetings in Atlanta , Georgia
"For decades, the `stay-at-home mother' has been a recognized phenomenon. The stay-at-home mother has often been held up as the epitome of motherhood - staying out of the formal labor force to raise her children while her husband worked full time to support the family. As women with children joined the formal labor force in greater numbers throughout the mid 20th century, the proportion of mothers who were out of the labor force caring for their children while their husbands were in the labor force decreased. As this behavior became less normative, did the composition of this group change? In this paper, we explore the decrease in the proportion of married mothers with children under 15 in married couple households who stayed home, and whether the demographic characteristics of this increasingly select group of women also changed."
The report explains how the amount of education and pay for working influences whether or not women have careers. Women without a high school diploma are more likely to stay home than women with a diploma; more women with college degrees are in the work force than women with just a high school diploma. Some people have wondered why black women are not standing up in defense of Ann Romney and other stay-at-home mothers, and I believe the answer can be found in this report.
"This is not to say, however, that the stay-at-home mother of the 1950s and early 1960s was a universal experience. There is evidence that married black women have always been employed outside of the home in large numbers (Landry 2000). Even black mothers with young children were in the work force following World War II (Thistle 2006), when many of their white counterparts had withdrawn from the labor force. The post-World War II boom in stay-at-home mothers may have also been a class-based phenomenon, because not all families had the luxury of having a mother who was able to stay at home (Thistle 2006). Regardless of class background, the mass-marketing of household appliances following World War II enabled more women to enter the work force because less time had to be devoted to housework (Thistle 2006). Such evidence suggests that even during the apparent apex of stay-at-home motherhood, it was not as universal an experience as historical anecdotes suggest."
Knowing that most black mothers are in the working class as well as well-educated women, I can see better that Rosen's criticism of Ann Romney was a calculated move to divide women. Even though conservative, stay-at-home mothers will probably vote for Romney, black women and "affluent" women will probably vote for Obama.
It is becoming more and more obvious that Obama is using class warfare to divide our nation. He has worked since day one to divide the races, and now he is trying to start a war between groups of women. I hope that my sisters will see through the mists of darkness being thrown up by liberals and progressives and that they will understand the damage that is being done to our nation by Obama and his minions. I want my sisters to set their emotions aside and consider seriously the following questions. Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Is our country better off than it was four years ago? Do you really want to continue down the path that our government leaders are taking us?
Rosen's attack on Ann Romney was an attack on all women. Are you willing to excuse the attack or will you join me in ousting this President and his hordes?
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