Mommygate and the Gender Gap 2012

Many have heard about the flap over CNN commentator Hilary Rosen’s remark, uttered about Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, “…his wife has actually never worked a day in her life.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to surmise that Mrs. Romney worked very hard raising five sons and was probably often frazzled and exhausted in her early parenting years. I am sure that the teenage years were no picnic, either.

However, the sound bite the criss-crossed the airwaves thousands of times last week was not the full sentence in context. Hilary was discussing Mitt Romney’s reliance on his wife for advice on women’s economic issues and actually said, “Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. 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 do we worry about their future.”

But, alas, a truncated “gotcha phrase” became a matchstick to a pile of culture wars dry firewood. It’s a little bit like reality TV: the media loves to make hay out of a stereo-typical cat fight. Most women I talked to were quite startled by the brouhaha as they thought the Mommy Wars had dissipated since the days of Hillary Clinton’s Tammy Wynette-not-baking-cookies  line.

In fact, much of the follow-up twitter tit-for-tat came from male politicians attempting to either deflect (Democrats) or make hay (Republicans) out of the dumb comment. That’s when the dust up got my attention, as the statements talking about Motherhood as the hardest job in the world felt both true and a little bit patronizing at the same time.

It was an instant militarization of a social issue with the accompanying arms build-up. It seemed ground in creating publicity rather than tackling real problems. Hence, the collective yawn by those “outside the beltway” in the rest of the country.

We all know there are multiple realities for moms. Our own small community is a microcosm of the country.  We have every variety of working and household configuration imaginable. We have moms who work full and part-time, SAHMs (stay-at-home-moms), families with “his, hers and ours” children, single moms and gay moms and dads. I have not heard any culture wars other than the occasional and universal plea of burnout and exhaustion. It all depends on capacity, needs and priorities.

To read more about the Mommy War go to, http://permissionslips.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/mommy-wars/