The debate over policies surrounding women and mothers is worth having, the author writes. | REUTERS For most moms, work is not a choice

My grandmother worked in the home of a wealthy Massachusetts family, where she cleaned, cooked and mothered other people’s children before returning home at the end of the day to look after her own. It was 1942 and this work wasn’t a lifestyle choice, it was how our family — like other families — got by.

Flash forward 40 years, when my mom held down three full-time jobs: as a mom, a professor and a graduate student. She was one of the 52 percent of working-age women in the labor force. In 1980, slightly more than 40 million American women were in working.


Perhaps the popularity of “Mad Men,” has political operatives confused about what matters to Americans today. Despite Republicans best efforts to make it so, 2012 is not like the 1980s and definitely not the 1940s. Debates about contraception and made-up mommy wars are strikingly out of step with modern life.

Roughly 73 percent of American moms are now working. It’s not only how our families work, it is how our economy works. Two-thirds of American families rely on women as breadwinners or co-breadwinners. In fact, most American kids’ economic survival depends on a woman in the work force.

Perhaps that is why the Romney campaign’s latest effort to divide the country into working moms and stay-at-home moms seems as resonant as a casual $10,000 bet. This latest cable-news-firestorm even featured Ann Romney saying “We need to respect choices that women make.” But, this ignores the fact that many families don’t have a choice here.

Let’s get this straight: Being a mother is work – important and very hard work. Helping mothers (and fathers) contribute to building a strong country through their child raising should be at the center of our nation’s policy priorities. Unfortunately, today they aren’t.

Policies like paid sick leave and flexible work hours are treated as sideshow “women’s issues.” But some employers — like the federal government and Deloitte LLP, a financial advisory and consulting corporation — are leading the way in better work place productivity and more family friendly policies. What Deloitte has proved, in study after study, is that productivity and the health and soul of our country can be improved by work place policies that value families.

The United States, as my colleague Heather Boushey has written, is slow to create policies that support mothers and fathers navigating parenting and the need for economic survival. Right now, it’s far too hard for many mothers, particularly single mothers, to take even one day off to care for themselves, a sick kid, or a sick parent.

The lack of paid sick and medical leave threatens the employment security of millions of workers and results in a ripple effect of lost jobs, bankruptcies, and economic insecurity.

A federal paid sick and medical leave program, building on the success of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, could increase employment stability and lifetime earnings, help close the gender pay gap and improve the lives of millions of Americans – many of them women.

Lost in this retro war of words is the fact that most mothers today work hard to take care of their children and at the same time, they have to work hard to earn a living elsewhere. Conservatives and progressives can debate the merits of whether that is a good idea — but it’s the reality in which most American families live.

Unequal policies hurt families. Unequal wages for women add up to huge hits on families. For example, the typical woman loses a whopping $431,000 in pay over a 40-year career.

Women still earn just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same work, despite the passage of the Pay Equity Act more than 50 years ago. Even the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first bill President Barack Obama signed, was still opposed almost unanimously by Republicans — including many now involved with the Romney campaign.

I agree with Ann Romney that “we need to respect choices that women make.” But for many moms, the economic reality of their lives doesn’t leave a lot of “choices.” It leaves a lot of hard decisions about how many hours a day they can spend with their children and how many hours of sleep they can miss to provide for them.

It’s time for our country to focus on policies that can make our families — and our economy – strong. There are lots of ideas out there about how to do that. –

That is a debate worth having.

Tara McGuinness is the senior vice president of communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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