Mittens and the welfare moms

By Susie
I thought this was pretty funny. I don’t think the Romneys are all that familiar with the intertubes and how there’s a record of every public thing they’ve said:

When Ann Romney’s status as a stay-at-home mom became a political football in the last week, she went on Fox News and emphasized that it was all about choices, saying “We need to respect the choices that women make.” But at a 1994 campaign event, Ann Romney told low-income women in no uncertain terms that they should stay at home with their kids, according to Judith Dushku, a prominent Mormon feminist who knew the Romneys over several decades and attended the forum. It was also a contrast from Mitt Romney’s position at the time — and as recently as this January — which favored bringing low-income mothers into the workforce in exchange for welfare benefits.

The topic of that 1994 event, headlined by Ann Romney and the Children’s Defense Fund’s Marian Wright Edelman and held during Romney’s Senate race against Ted Kennedy, was women and children’s safety and rights, according to Dushku. The audience, she recalls, was predominately African-American and Latina women with young children in tow. They asked about welfare benefits, as reform and “welfare-to-work” were hot topics at the time. Ann Romney’s position, according to Dushku, was to be a stay-at-home mom at all costs — consistent with Mormon doctrine, if off-message for the campaign. When one audience member asked about community service, Ann Romney said, “I would just say no…You have no business going around in your community when your children are young,” Dushku remembers. She says now, “People almost booed and hissed.”

Dushku is a professor at Suffolk University who for many years was a member of the suburban Boston congregation where Mitt Romney became bishop, occasionally butting heads with him over issues of women in the church. Though in previous campaigns she has voiced her concerns to the press, in an interview with Salon Wednesday, Dushku said she has been ambivalent about granting more interviews about Romney. Mormons are “harmony-seeking,” she said. But she described herself as “irritated” by last week’s “war on moms” rhetoric, and in the conversation, Dushku expressed stinging criticism of Mitt Romney’s attitudes toward women.

But she also zeroed in on Ann Romney’s position from her husband’s first Massachusetts campaign. It was Romney’s attitude that really struck Dushku: “She acted like it was such an easy question to answer. She didn’t understand [staying at home] was a luxury that only a few people can afford.” Dushku says she and a friend who attended actually felt sorry for Romney, coming away thinking, “Ann just does not understand these issues.”

[…] Of course, Ann Romney was essentially repeating what the Mormon church still proscribes for women, though that script has been challenged by Dushku and others. As the women’s movement blossomed throughout the 1970s, Dushku and fellow Massachusetts Mormons began questioning gender roles within the church. They even founded a Mormon feminist journal, Exponent II, that is still published. Ann Romney stayed on the sidelines during those debates, though Dushku couldn’t recall her explicitly commenting on their aims.

Mitt Romney was clearer in his reactions. “Mitt had an attitude of, ‘Why do you have to stir things up? It has nothing to do with the church and women should be satisfied with what they have,’” Duskhu says. When Dushku was a divorced mother of four, she says Romney “just thought that anybody that wasn’t married to someone who can support them was just almost too unusual to consider in any collegial way.”