How many jobs are they supposed to work?
by digby
I'm not sure I fully understand Mitt's position on this, but it sounds as though he believes that being a wealthy stay at home mom is a full time career while being apoor stay at home mom is undignified and lazy:
Republicans have spent the last week attacking President Barack Obama after a Democratic CNN contributor said that Ann Romney, who is the mother of five, had "never worked," but it turns out that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has also said mothers on welfare "need to go to work."
"I wanted to increase the work requirement," Romney told an audience in New Hampshire in January. "I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work."
"And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'"
Perhaps he should have them take up dressage. I hear it's very dignified.
This is actually revealing. For years, conservatives and centrists have argued that welfare makes women lazy and dependent. They needed to get out into the workforce and learn the value of a hard day's work. But at the same time, they fetishize the stay-at-home mother as a very difficult full-time job which must be considered a career equal to any work outside the home.
This nicely illustrates that their loathing of welfare is not about dependence or dignity. It's about preserving their own privilege. And in their mind it's always a zero sum game. Any time the government gives a dollar to help a poor person it's a dollar they don't have. That's what's unacceptable.
And their position on being a stay at home mom is that it's a full time job as long as you don't need wages, which is a very neat trick. "Ladies, we'd prefer that you choose a traditional lifestyle as long as you don't need any money."
In the end, it's all basically just conservative boilerplate: a poor mother should work two full-time jobs, a middle class mother should also work two full-time jobs (or agree to sacrifice a middle class living to stay home) but a wealthy full time mother should get the same credit they do because she's a respected member of the "job creator" class and is therefore naturally superior. It's nice work if you can get it.
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