Dinner won’t cook itself

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said during the presidential debate last Tuesday, “I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance said, ‘I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school.’ So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.”

Romney implicitly characterizes women in the workforce as comparatively burdensome — though he, personally, is willing to look past it and accommodate generously for them because he just loves them so darn much.

He promotes the archaic understanding of motherhood as one that requires she be the only one in the kitchen as well as the primary caretaker while dad works late.

Placing this requisite on women, while ignoring the obligation to the family that fathers share, highlights women as less appealing contributors to the workforce, serving only to perpetuate a disproved view of women.

If you don’t believe me, just look at Lorraine, the gorgeous woman sitting in the crowd right behind Romney. Lorraine is not pleased.

If you don’t believe Lorraine’s stoic expression either, then look to Romney’s description of the “economy he would bring to play” in the United States as president.

He proudly calls it one in which employers “are going to be so anxious to get good workers, they’re going to be anxious to hire women.”

The way Romney chooses to frame this characterization supports the implications of his previously expressed view on women.

Employers would be so desperate for workers in this illusory economy that they would hire women left and right.

Though this supposed economy, which Romney has released no details about insofar as it is, you know, a feasible reality in this universe, would not exist if Obama was reelected president, and Romney might not actually attempt enact policies that negatively affect women, such as barriers to contraceptive access and abortion.

The fact is that this rhetoric alone should not be tolerated in this country.
That these ideas are being proudly presented by a serious presidential candidate is simply embarrassing.

This candidate represents an understanding of American hierarchy in which the rich male is at the top, and should stay there — even though he apparently has an obligation to help the lesser social groups out, as long as they’re not poor.

Romney attempts to suggest that Obama has “failed women” during the last four years by listing issues that affect the American public, but not exclusively women, such as poverty and unemployment.

Obama isolates women only to recognize the social and economic barriers they uniquely face as a result to the type of thinking Romney showcased Tuesday night.

Romney continues to explicitly isolate women as carrying economic barriers with their ladyhood, and in doing so, rhetorically damages them.

­— gcherney@indiana.edu