Kellyanne Conway Plunges into the Mommy Wars
WASHINGTON -- As if she didn’t have enough on her hands with the president-elect, Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway has plunged full-force into a topic at least as emotionally charged: the Mommy Wars.
Speaking at a Politico “Women Rule” event Wednesday, Conway cited her four young children as the reason for declining a White House job.
“My children are 12, 12, 8 and 7, which is bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea for mom going inside,” she said. “They have to come first and those are very fraught ages.”
When the possibility of an administration role came up in her talks with senior officials, Conway said, they would say, “’I know you have four kids but ...’ I said, ‘There’s nothing that comes after the “but” that makes any sense to me so don’t even try.’ Like what is the ‘but’? But they’ll eat Cheerios for the rest of the day? Nobody will brush their teeth again until I get home?”
The question for “the male sitting across from me who’s going to take a big job in the White House,” Conway said, “isn’t: ‘Would you take the job?’ ... The question is: ‘Would you want your wife to? Would you want the mother of your children to?’”
OK, this is the wrong question but not necessarily the wrong answer.
It’s the wrong question because the test shouldn’t be whether the men would want their wives to take on the burden of a White House role. It’s whether their wives would want to.
It’s not necessarily the wrong answer because, as much as we should insist that the decision about how to juggle work and family should not be dictated by gender, it would be unrealistic to think that gender does not play a role in many women’s choices.
Is that a matter of biology and inherent difference between the sexes? Is it a consequence of longtime societal arrangements and cultural expectations that are evolving, however slowly? I don’t know and I’m not sure the answer matters to anybody’s -- any mother’s -- individual decision-making.
It didn’t matter to mine. I have half the number of children as Conway and, when they were young, was confronting a job far less all-consuming than one in the White House -- a workplace where, as former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once said, “The only family we’re going to be good for is the first family.”
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