Last month, Democratic
strategist Hilary Rosen claimed stay-at-home-mom Ann Romney “never worked a day
in her life.” Controversy ensued. But instead of fighting a phony mommy war, we
should face the fact that most families these days cannot afford to have one
parent stay home with the kids. This is not about “lifestyle” or “values.” This
is an economic struggle highlighting yet again the social costs arising from
decades of stagnating or declining wages and growing income inequality.
There is a profound class
bias in our discussion of what mothers should or should not do. The public
debate seems premised on the idea that all two-parent families have a choice as
to whether one or both parents work. That’s still true for the better-off. But
this choice is denied to most American families. They have had to send two
people into the workforce whether they wanted to or not.
Thus the importance of a
study recently released by the Center for American Progress that deserves wide
attention. The report demonstrates conclusively that the ruckus over Ann
Romney’s decisions is thirty years out of date. Its core conclusion:
“Most children today are growing up in families without a full-time,
stay-at-home caregiver.”
“In 2010, among families
with children,” the study notes, “nearly half (44.8 percent) were headed by two
working parents and another one in four (26.1 percent) were headed by a single
parent. As a result, fewer than one in three (28.7 percent) children now have a
stay-at-home parent, compared to more than half (52.6 percent) in 1975, only a
generation ago.”
And these changes are driven
more by economics than by any of the mommy war issues that provide so much
fodder for television and radio brawls. “Breadwinning wives are even more
common in families with lower incomes,” according to the CAP report. “Seven in
10 (69.7 percent) working wives earn as much or more than their husbands in the
bottom 20 percent of income distribution for all families. And about half (45.3
percent) of working wives are breadwinners in families in the middle of the
income distribution, up from four in 10 (39.1 percent) in 2007 and only 15.2
percent in 1967.”
So if you want more
households in which one parent can stay home with the kids, you need to boost
the incomes of average American families—and especially of poorer families. For
millions of American moms and dads, debates about “feminism” or “social
conservatism” are irrelevant. It’s about money.
The timing of the report was
not driven by the Romney-Rosen kerfuffle. Written by Sarah Jane Glynn, it was
an update of an earlier study by CAP senior economist Heather Boushey that was
part of a project on working women organized by Maria Shriver. April 17 was
“Equal Pay Day,” and Boushey said the new study sought to underscore that equal
pay “isn’t just about women, it’s about their families, because women are the
breadwinner or co-breadwinner.”
We need to look at both
sides of the work-family equation. There are, indeed, as Boushey notes, many
families in which “women are working because they want to.” That decision
should be respected no less than the one Ann Romney made. But there are many
others where the woman “is a single parent, or her husband is unemployed, or
her husband isn’t seeing the kind of wage growth that his father did and can’t
afford to support the family on his own.”
This points to a
contradiction that few conservatives want to confront. When trying to win votes
from religious and social traditionalists, conservatives speak as if they want
to restore what they see as the glory days of the 1950s family. But they are
reluctant to acknowledge that it was the high wages of (often unionized)
workers that underwrote these arrangements.
Yet on the right, economic
conservatism almost always trumps social conservatism, and market imperatives
almost always get priority over family imperatives. As a result, the United
States has the weakest family-leave laws in the industrialized world. We have
done far less than other well-off countries to accommodate the difficult
work-family dilemmas that most moms and dads deal with in the new economy.
It’s good that Ann
Romney had choices. She made them honorably and raised a great family. Now
let’s debate what should matter in a presidential campaign: which policies will
relieve the economic pressures on millions of parents who are equally
determined to do right by their kids but have far less room for maneuver. Profamily rhetoric doesn’t pay the bills.
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