Get a grip, ladies! Don’t allow Sarah Palin’s candidacy to reheat the “mommy wars,” to pit working moms against those who stay at home. Here’s what we find distressing: One set of women telling reporters they passionately agree with Palin’s decision that she can raise children and serve as vice president; another, equally passionate set of women decreeing that she’s bound to give short shrift to her family or her job, or both. It’s time to put this fight to rest.
“Is it sexist for people to ask how can somebody manage a family of seven and the vice presidency?” Cokie’s colleague at ABC News, Charlie Gibson, carefully asked the Alaska governor. Her response: “That question is kind of irrelevant because it’s accepted of course (that) you can be the vice president and you can raise a family.” As long as you’re a man.
When his question was posted on the ABC Web site, Gibson revealed, it drew 15,000 responses: “Every woman with young children struggles with this question, Should I, how can I, will I be able to?” Palin said she understands that. She also said she stayed home with her first child: “I had that choice then, and I’ve had choices, of course, along the way.”
But, the candidate elaborated, not all women have those choices, and she’s certainly right about that. Let us be clear on this: The question of whether a mother should work outside the home or not is one that can only be asked by upper-income women. Most women work for the same reason most men do – because they have to; they have no other option.
A mother who once might have collected welfare now must go to work. The welfare reform touted by the Clinton administration required mothers to get jobs, not only to relieve society from the burden of supporting them but also because mothers bringing in paychecks were deemed beneficial for the children. You don’t hear the battlers in the mommy wars talking about how terrible it is for those women to go to work and leave their children.
If this country wants to have a serious conversation about who’s taking care of the children, let’s do it. Let’s talk about the children who go to bed hungry every night in the richest nation on earth. Let’s talk about the children who are denied a decent education because of rotten public schools. Let’s talk about the children who are shoved from foster home to foster home. Let’s talk about the children who are incarcerated. Let’s talk about the children who are used as pawns in divorce.
Those children need our attention and the attention of public policymakers – not the children of upper-income women who are making the decision about whether to spend a few years of their lives in the paid workforce. But you’d never know that listening to the argument swirling around Sarah Palin.
