Mrs. Romney

There has been some controversy and dialogue since a Democrat criticized Ann Romney, wife of likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, as having "never worked a day in her life." This outraged Mrs. Romney and doubtless a number of other women whose "careers" have been as wife and mother.

Mrs. Romney replied that as mother of five sons, her life has been one of hard work. I have two comments on that: First, Mrs. Romney and her husband are very wealthy, reporting a recent year's income as 25 million dollars. People of means such as that can employ people to do the housework and to help with raising the children, so I doubt that Mrs. Romney personally had to it all herself. Quite possibly the most she had to do was to tuck her kids in at night.

I don't want to minimize the role of wife-and-mother, but I do have to say that probably a majority of mothers in present-day America have fewer than five children (at least I hope so!). There are no doubt those who do have a hard life raising their children—but it is not as in the time of our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers), who had to churn butter, bake bread, make the family's clothes and manually wash them—etc., etc. The modern woman has things much easier: We have had "labor-saving appliances" since the middle of the 20th century, and it's the rare American household which hasn't got at least some of them.

So I doubt that very many "stay-at-home moms" have things that hard. In the case of those who have few and/or quite young children, I see them at the mall, having lunch with their woman friends, with possibly one or two very young children along in a stroller. And they come to the mall in an expensive car which Hubby is at that very moment working hard to pay for.

Going somewhat into another issue: The life of the stay-at-home mom may satisfy and gratify some women but it is not satisfying for all. A woman of my acquaintance, who is very intelligent, confided to me that she found it stultifying to have only the conversation of the other mothers sitting around the sandbox.

Update, April 28, 2012
I've been told that Charlie Rose (host of a talk show on PBS, the public television network) has researched the issue and found out that Mitt and Ann Romney, in the period in question, did indeed have several domestic employees such as a nanny. Thus my surmise or speculation evidently was correct.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein