The dis­tort­ed fram­ing of the debate is cap­tured in Mitt Romney’s con­tra­dic­to­ry com­ments about forc­ing moth­ers receiv­ing pub­lic assis­tance into the labor force — in order to instill in them the ​“dig­ni­ty of work.” This myopic bina­ry between women of pover­ty and women of priv­i­lege reflects the evo­lu­tion of the fed­er­al wel­fare state through­out the 20 th century.

But the par­ti­san proxy war waged over the mom­my ques­tion only under­scores the country’s lack­ing vocab­u­lary when it comes to dis­cussing the total­i­ty of social and eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers fac­ing women. Pay dis­crim­i­na­tion, domes­tic vio­lence, attacks on repro­duc­tive rights , over­lap­ping oppres­sions fac­ing women of col­or —it’s mis­lead­ing to try to lump all these issues togeth­er into a blan­ket term like ​“woman prob­lem,” but there is one per­sis­tent theme: society’s fear of women con­trol­ling their own lives.

It’s almost poet­ic that this year’s Equal Pay Day —the one day of the year when Amer­i­cans are sup­posed to reflect on the val­ue (and under­valu­ing) of women’s work — coin­cides with the media firestorm sur­round­ing the Amer­i­can stay-at-home-mom. The ​“con­tro­ver­sy” over Ann Romney’s deci­sion to stay home rather than work a ​“reg­u­lar” job should high­light some of the con­tin­u­ing strug­gles of women to be val­ued and respect­ed for their work, in and out of the home.

Poor women, who evi­dent­ly lack dig­ni­ty, must redeem them­selves through work, while the appar­ent­ly inborn dig­ni­ty of their afflu­ent coun­ter­parts allows them to embody fem­i­nine virtue by stay­ing with­in the domes­tic sphere. And if they vol­un­teer to climb the career lad­der, they’re vaunt­ed as supermoms.

Part of this men­tal­i­ty stems from a reac­tionary, often racial­ized con­struc­tion of the ​“deserv­ing” ver­sus the ​“unde­serv­ing” poor. The argu­ment is also steeped in the cor­ro­sive cul­tur­al assump­tion that poor women’s social val­ue derives from their labor or repro­duc­tive capac­i­ty, not their human­i­ty, intel­lect or relationships.

The coun­ter­point to Ann Romney’s domes­tic saint­hood is the right’s fic­tion­al ​“wel­fare queen,” the unwed moth­er who sup­pos­ed­ly leech­es off the state with aban­don and embod­ies cor­rupt, uncon­trol­lable fertility.

And that’s where the ​“dig­ni­ty of work” comes in, to dis­ci­pline the unruly woman and keep her in her place, safe­ly below the pover­ty line. Neolib­er­als like Newt Gin­grich have sought to broad­en the attack on poor women by advo­cat­ing for the use of the child wel­fare as a puni­tive tool, sweep­ing kids into state cus­tody to ​“res­cue” them from dis­ad­van­taged moth­ers and their com­mu­ni­ties. So much for fam­i­ly values.

Zer­li­na Maxwell remarks on the racial and class inflec­tion of terms like ​“stay at home mom” at Feministing:

While a cer­tain lev­el of eco­nom­ic suc­cess allows for these women to stay at home with their kids instead of also bring­ing in mon­ey to sup­port their fam­i­lies and put food on the table, I would be very hard pressed to find any­one, par­tic­u­lar­ly on the right, prais­ing a woman of col­or for being a ​“stay at home” mom. I hear a lot of ​“wel­fare queen” lan­guage or that our cur­rent pres­i­dent is a ​“food stamp” pres­i­dent but noth­ing about how won­der­ful it is that so many women of col­or are choos­ing to stay home and raise their kids. More like­ly women of col­or who are ​“stay at home” moms would be viewed as ​“lazy” or ​“poor role mod­els” for their children.

But the extreme­ly poor don’t have fam­i­lies — not the way the afflu­ent do. The moth­er of col­or rais­ing her kids alone, in a dilap­i­dat­ed pub­lic hous­ing com­plex, won’t be shar­ing the spot­light with mom­my-in-chief Ann Rom­ney any­time soon.

Poor moth­ers don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want pub­lic acco­lades; they’re just try­ing to sur­vive and earn a mean­ing­ful liv­ing. But soci­ety doesn’t rec­og­nize the incred­i­ble dig­ni­ty they dis­play every day as they brave eco­nom­ic dis­en­fran­chise­ment, liv­ing a real­i­ty that’s prob­a­bly not inti­mate­ly famil­iar either to Ann Rom­ney or Hilary Rosen.

And some of the hard­est-work­ing women don’t even get prop­er recog­ni­tion under the law, much less the polit­i­cal are­na. In sec­tors like domes­tic work and home-based health care, women, many of them poor women of col­or, lack basic pro­tec­tions against labor abus­es. These include women who actu­al­ly serve dual roles of wage work and home work: as they strug­gle to sup­port their own fam­i­lies, they labor for rel­a­tive­ly priv­i­leged par­ents, who can pay for ser­vices that ​“lib­er­ate” them to pur­sue out-of-home careers.

The ques­tion we should be ask­ing is not whether domes­tic care­giv­ing is more or less impor­tant than wage work—they’re both cru­cial, and cru­cial­ly dif­fer­ent. The ques­tion is which women have the priv­i­lege of choice, because too often, deci­sions of work and home are made for them, with­out their con­sent. That gen­der gap in per­son­al auton­o­my and free­dom may be more detri­men­tal to fem­i­nist strug­gles than eco­nom­ic or employ­ment disparities.

The deficit in oppor­tu­ni­ties for women isn’t so much about who’s work­ing and where, as it is about who has the pow­er to be heard — in the kitchen, in the office, on the unem­ploy­ment line or on Capi­tol Hill.