“Just three months before [Mitt Romney] said all stay at home Moms are working moms, he said he wants to make parents of kids as young as two ‘go to work’ so that they could ‘have the dignity of work.’ This genuinely angers me… It seems to me that there’s a double standard about what we call work: that when it’s a very poor mother with three kids at home, it is not work. She needs to learn the dignity of work. But when it is an extremely wealthy woman with five kids at home, that is work…. I just find the double standard that has crept into this conversation and not been identified really maddening.”
welfare
Showing 2 posts tagged welfare
Raising Kids Is Work? Tell That to Women on Welfare
Laura Flanders delivers a much-needed reality check:
Do we need to state the obvious? Women of different classes are beaten with different rhetorical bats. For the college-educated and upwardly aspiring, there’s the “danger” of career ambitions. Ever since women started aspiring to have men’s jobs, backlashers have told those women that they’re enjoying their careers at the expense of their kids’ well being. They really can’t have it all. They’ll raise monsters, or worse, they’ll grow old on the shelf.
…
If the Democratic politicians now pandering to the Romneys had any spunk, they’d have backed Hilary Rosen 100 percent. If either party legislated as if parenting was work, things for poor women and their kids would be very different. Next time welfare reform is up for reauthorization, I hope they all—and their pet pundits—come in for no end of grief. They deserve it.
