How Conservative Women Politicians Make Life Harder for Working Moms

[Joanne98]

Conservative women politicians are profiting from the feminist movement while promoting policies that make the lives of everyday women much harder.

June 20, 2010 |

First, let's swallow hard and be fair. There is something to cheer in the so-called Year of the Woman. You don't have to credit the Republican Party, which did next to nothing to bring on the wave that swept Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sharron Angle and Nikki Haley to victory in June's primary elections. Indeed, before the RNC began heralding its Mama Grizzlies, in Sarah Palin's typically catchy but grating phrase, it was brushing off complaints about how its roster of 104 rising "Young Guns," lavished with party attention and resources, included only seven women. Fiorina and Whitman bought their gleaming California wins with their own money, while Angle charged to victory in Nevada on sheer Tea Party adrenaline. There's certainly nothing progressive about these women, but their brash, unapologetic and largely unsolicited emergence in Republican politics—in American politics—does represent progress, of a sort.

That being said, it's maddening that a party that has resisted every advance of feminism and undermined women's economic strength at every turn now claims to embody "the overall triumph of the women's movement," as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it. To appreciate the breadth of the chasm between the party's symbolism and its substance, consider the subject of working mothers. Some of today's GOP women, like many more Democratic women before them, have indeed broken barriers by campaigning around the clock with young children at home. But what does it mean to be "comfortable" with the spectacle of a working mother, as Douthat claims Republicans now are, when you oppose the very supports that would make the lives of working mothers comfortable?

http://www.alternet.org/story/147263/how_conservative_women_politicians_make_life_harder_for_working_moms/

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Reads like a Margaret Atwood novel, doesn't it?