Friday, October 26, 2012

A Feminist View of Ann Romney


If feminists had their druthers women like Ann Romney would no longer exist.

They see her as a relic, a vestige of a past that is long gone and forgotten.

At a time when women have been indoctrinated into believing that she should not marry young and should not to be housewives, homemakers and helpmates to their husbands, along comes Ann Romney to present an alternative.

Noreen Malone expresses the feminist chagrin:

What is more powerful about Mrs. Romney is how she seems to encapsulate a bygone way of life, the old America that seems to have slipped away, an America in which people are prosperous enough to raise five children on one salary, and fill their garage with “a couple of Cadillacs.” An America where the wife has time to make Welsh skillet cakes and volunteer for equine therapy programs and wears pink dresses with nipped waists because that’s how her husband prefers her to look, where her favorite movie, after all these years, is the one she saw on their first date, where she and her husband look at each other adoringly and hold hands in public like they’ve been doing since they were teenagers, because they have. 

Ann Romney came of age at the onset of second wave feminism. Second wave feminists had passed beyond issues like suffrage and property rights and arrogated to themselves the right to dictate how women lived their lives.

It was nothing if not audacious. Second wave feminists passed withering judgments on any woman who dared to live her life as she saw fit. They despised and shunned women who refused to sacrifice their lives to the feminist cause.

They did not approve of Ann Romney.

For those who do not remember those times, Ashley Parker reports on Ann Romney’s struggles with her peers:

She married young and started a family over the protests of her parents. She chose to become a homemaker, even though the newly emboldened career women of her era in Boston would, as she put it, “turn their noses down at me.” 

And also:

Mrs. Romney found herself a young mother — she had one son, with a second on the way — in a world where women were immersed in the feminist movement. Friends and family members say Mrs. Romney felt disparaged for her choice to stay home with her boys.

Defy feminist precepts and you found yourself criticized and shunned.

Dripping with her own special contempt, Amanda Marcotte declares that Ann Romney’s life cannot possibly be real:

It would have never occurred to me that a lot of Americans still romanticize the idea of marrying your high school sweetheart or that people still think there's honor in marriages that subsume the individuals into the concept of "us." In part, that's because no one I know, liberal or conservative, actually lives like that. But as Noreen writes, Ann Romney captures a "simmering wistfulness" for an era when women knew their place and love means being attached at the hip. That fantasy must be pretty widespread, as Romney's approval ratings are close to Michelle Obama's at this point. Knowing this helps me understand, for instance, why so many conservatives become unhinged with anger at the very existence of a Sandra Fluke or a Stephanie Cutter. They're comparing them to women like Romney, imagining that these women would have ended up as cookie-baking political spouses in an alternate universe where second wave feminism didn't happen, and that perceived loss creates anger.

Doubtless this says more about Marcotte’s circle of friends than about reality. Keep in mind, as reported on this blog, that 84% of working mothers would rather stay at home with their children.

Like other feminist zealots Marcotte offers no respect for a woman who has chosen to be a wife and a homemaker, who defines herself as a companion to her husband, who cooperates with him and who sees them as one marital unit.

For Marcotte a women who would make such a choice would be sacrificing her individuality. She disapproves of all women who do not make their lives and their marriages into battlegrounds in the class struggle between men and women.

Unfortunately, for Marcotte, the Romney marriage seems, by all appearances, to work very well for both parties.

Thus, Malone and Marcotte are obliged to pronounce it as unreal.

When she begins to offer something like an analysis Marcotte explains that the popularity of this or that First Lady is a barometric indicator of how the culture sees women.

I suspect that she also fears that Romney marriage might liberate young women from the pressure to live the feminist nightmare.

For Marcotte, the ideal marriage might resemble the Obama marriage, because Michelle Obama did have a career. Better yet, the feminist ideal might be like the Clinton marriage.

All of us, except Marcotte, know how well that has worked out.

Marcotte describes the Clinton marriage, thusly:

The nerdy feminist draws the cutest boy in school!

Marcotte ignores the salient fact that the cutest boy in school has spent his marriage cheating on the nerdy feminist. Calling it a sign of a loving marriage would be a stretch.

For her feminist purposes Marcotte drops this salient detail. Apparently, she cannot tell the difference between reality and an ideal?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I'm a woman who is fed up with the pushy opinions of feminism. I have LOVED being a mother who is "tied" at the hip of my high school sweetheart. (I've been married 25 yrs.) At the end of my laugh, I would rather know that I lived for those I love and served them to have spent my life serving myself. Go, Mrs. Romney! I'd be proud to have you as our First Lady!

Sam L. said...

Amanda Marcotte, a feminist of the oh-so-tolerant left.

It is difficult to observe much of life when looking thru a one-inch tube. Tunnel vision impairs. One's circle of friends becomes small enough to fit into a closet, the better to exclude those who don't meet their specifications.

Anonymous said...

This piece makes me almost want to support Romney. I loathe Marcotte so.

Dennis said...

It would seem that Pro Choice is not really Pro Choice. One can make their own decisions as long as it agrees with what the radical feminists say is the proper decision. Any thing that does not meet those criteria means one is not a real woman and actually hates women. And who said women don't make good dictators?
Ah to be so special that only those things that concern me are important. To be so special that my needs should be paid for by everyone else. To be so special that my life is so much more important than those who defend this country, that I should be able to dictate other's choices and only I should have rights protected by the legal system. You know of course those people who were defaced and injured by IED and other problems that exist volunteered and are just low hanging fruit anyway. Children with cancer should not be on the same level as the cancers that affect me. I am so special.
I am a feminist, hear me roar and others don't deserve to to have opposing opinions any more.

Dennis said...

It is interesting how good idea always seem to turn into something bad when inevitably taken over by radicals. As I have stated before I liked and agreed with the early feminists. Why shouldn't every person become the best they can be if they are willing to work for it. Why shouldn't their choice be respected.
If the women in my life are happy then my life is that much the better for it. It is to my betterment to see them succeed.
The sad part is that a good idea has turned so radically wrong and makes a shambles of what society needed to accomplish. What we see is selfishness writ large, the creation of a dislike for each other as human beings and a dictatorial desire to control how people live their lives and think. Feminism has become anti woman in very many ways.
Why is the modern woman so unhappy given the feminism of today? Why does getting "free stuff" not enrich one's life?
Could it be that almost all of us want to feel that we have the wherewithal to accomplish great things on our own? That we worked to become what we are as a successful individual. Anything less than that makes us feel that we have not lived up to our potential. The free stuff makes us less of the person we wanted to be.
For most of us it is important to feel that we have given of ourselves as well. That life is not just about us. It is in the joy we feel when we see our children and grand children into capable and successful adults despite the many mistakes we made as parents.
It is in the knowledge that one's service to country has been of value and has kept us a free nation. It is in the small things that giving charity and aid to those personally and knowing we had the desire to do it ourselves. That we cared and did not allow a government to make that decision for us.
A good idea has now become the handmaiden of an increasingly intrusive government not for the betterment or freedom of mankind, but for free stuff, power and for their own benefit. It has now become the enemy of life. Women deserve better. In fact we all deserve better than this perversion of what was a good idea whose time had come and should have made every body's life better.

Dennis said...

For your edification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAkdHzpXXo0&feature=player_embedded

It further demonstrates Obama's view, and that of his handmaidens of women.