In a speech last night in Stamford, Connecticut, which is overshadowing today’s G.O.P. primaries in the Northeast, Ann Romney waded into the Hilary Rosen flap, talking about how she stayed at home to raise five kids, her struggles with serious illness, and how her “extraordinary husband” stood by her side, but left most of the domestic chores to her. She also sought to head off suggestions that, as the wife of an extremely wealthy chief executive, she had little understanding for the career choices that less well off Americans have to make, saying, according to Politico’s transcript:

My hats off to the men in this room too that are raising kids—I love that, and I love the fact that there are also women out there that don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.

During her remarks, Mrs. Romney was interrupted several times by cheering supporters. At the same time, though, the speech raises some dangers for the Romneys. Now that Ann is using the details of her domestic life for political purposes, journalists and Obama supporters are sure to focus on parts of that existence that might reflect less well on her and her husband. For example, she has said that when Mitt was in college, the two of them were so financially strapped that they had to liquidate some of their stock portfolio to get by. At the time Mrs. Romney said that she was engaged in a “struggle” to bring up her children, the family was living in a seven bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom mock-Colonial mansion in Belmont, Massachusetts, while spending summers at their five-thousand-square-foot vacation home, which sits on eleven lakefront acres in New Hampshire.

Clearly revelling in the opportunity to exploit an issue that the Obama campaign would love to put to rest, Ann Romney, without naming Rosen, refuted at length the accusation that she had never, as Rosen put it, “worked a day in her life.”

“I know what it’s like to finish the laundry and look in the basket five minutes later, and it’s full again,” she said to eight hundred G.O.P. supporters, who had gathered at the annual Prescott Bush Awards Dinner. “I know what it’s like to pull all the groceries in and see the teenagers run through and then all of the sudden all of the groceries you bought a few hours ago were gone. And I know what it’s like to get up early in the morning to get them off to school and I know what it’s like to get up in the middle of the night when they’re sick and I know what it’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have.”

The speech, which is all over the Internet this morning, came as the White House was seeking to shore up support for President Obama among women voters, which is key to his prospects of being reëlected. In addition to distancing itself from Rosen’s remarks, the White House has organized a forum on women and the economy and put out a lengthy report detailling its record on women’s issues. But the Obama campaign hadn’t budgeted for Mrs. Romney’s latest intervention, which came laced with details of how, after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, in 1998, and later with breast cancer, she continued to do the housework: