Editorial

The real war on women: Rosen’s attack on motherhood

Thomas Grier Attorney, The Law Office of Thomas Grier
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Every Mother’s Day, Salary.com releases a survey about the “market value” of motherhood. According to this year’s results, stay-at-home moms’ salaries topped $112,940.45 in 2012. Salary.com’s 8,000-mom survey reveals that “stay-at-home moms work a total of 94.7 hours a week, with a 40-hour base and 54.7 hours of overtime on their mom duties.”

That’s a lot of work, right? Apparently not everyone sees it that way.

During a television broadcast on Wednesday night, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen insulted Ann Romney, my wife and moms everywhere by suggesting the 64-year-old wife of Mitt Romney, mother of five and grandmother of 16 has “never worked a day in her life.” Rosen, a DNC adviser, is a frequent visitor to the White House.

The full quote is here:

“What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues’ and, ‘When I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing,’” she said. “Guess what? His wife has never actually 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 we worry about their future.’”

Democrats are aggressively pushing the narrative that Republicans are at war with women, but Rosen has revealed why a lot of women, particularly stay-at-home moms, feel marginalized by Democrats, who routinely seem to suggest that women who stay at home to look after their children are demeaning themselves. Tellingly, Rosen has refused to back down from her comments, even as Obama strategists have distanced themselves from her. Have we traveled so far in American politics that we’ve abandoned Abraham Lincoln’s belief that “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother”?

The denigration of motherhood is part of the real war on women, which extends all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. President Obama, for all his insulting rhetoric about how a woman can only feel safe within the embrace of the Democratic Party, still pays women on his staff less than men. Earlier in the year, reports surfaced that women felt marginalized or worse in Obama’s White House.

More importantly, President Obama’s economic policies are inflicting pain on women and their families. On Tuesday, Bay Buchanan, a Romney supporter who served as U.S. treasurer under President Reagan, said “Nearly 1 million [women] have become unemployed as a result of Obama’s policies. … That’s 92 percent of the jobs lost while Barack Obama has been president are jobs that women have lost.”

So it’s not surprising that Ann Romney quickly responded to Rosen’s insult. In her debut on Twitter, Romney wrote simply, “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”

Not only do we believe you, Ann, it is a measurably accurate statement.

Thomas Grier is a third-year law student at The Ohio State University. A graduate of Arizona State University, Grier writes on constitutional law, politics and pro-growth policy.