THE out-sized ego of the American woman, which is like a bobbing inflatable on the political landscape, received major injections of hot air last night at the Republican Convention in Tampa. Ann Romney is beautiful and bright. But her speech — before the bank of hypnotizing, Orwellian screens onstage — was so much sugary pablum. Mrs. Romney’s answer to the hostility so many liberal women feel toward her is to tell them how heroic they are. Imagine a man taking the convention floor and saying, “We love you, men!” or telling the assembled that the hard-working men (in contrast to women) are the “best of America.” All that was needed was a chorus of men to burst into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There Is Nothing Like a Dame.”

When women were denied the vote, they could reside on a higher plane, far from the oily ministrations of politicians. Now, at every convention, we must hear about the first date of the presidential candidate and his wife. We must see them kiss and be told by both how wonderful women are. The governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, and Luce Vela, the wife of the governor of Puerto Rico, also appeared last night and I couldn’t help but feel, given their outfits and grooming, that I was watching a political version of the Miss America contest.

Mrs. Romney stated the following:

Sometimes, I think that, late at night, if we were all silent for just a few moments and listened carefully, we could hear a collective sigh from the moms and dads across America who made it through another day, and know that they will make it through another one tomorrow. But in the end of that day moment,they are just aren’t sure how.

And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It’s how it is, isn’t it? It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right. It’s the mom’s of this nation, single, married, widowed, who really hold the country together. We’re the mothers. We’re the wives. We’re the grandmothers. We’re the big sisters. We’re the little sisters and we are the daughters.

You know it’s true, don’t you?

(APPLAUSE)

I love you, women!

(APPLAUSE)

And I hear your voices. Those are my favorite fans down there.

(APPLAUSE)

You are the ones that have to do a little bit more and you know what it is like to earn a little bit harder earn the respect you deserve at work and then you come home to help with the book report just because it has to be done. You know what those late-night phone calls with an elderly parent are like, and those long weekend drives just to see how they’re doing.

You know the fastest route to the local emergency room and which doctors actually answers the phone call when you call at night, and by the way, I know all about that. You know what it is like to sit in that graduation ceremony and wonder how it was that so many long days turned into years that went by so quickly. You are the best of America.

Thank goodness, America! The First-Lady-To-Be views women as victims too. Mrs. Romney’s comment that women must worker harder to gain respect at their workplaces is a capitulation to her critics, many of whom will like her none the more for it. Mrs. Romney was immediately ripped by MSNBC’s commentators for failing recognize the heroism of all women:

Lawrence O’Donnell seconded Rachel Maddow’s claim that Mrs. Romney “has not had most women’s economic experiences,” and went further: “She began her speech…by talking about women’s struggles in this economy and in life that she, actually, in her life, doesn’t know anything about.” O’Donnell then blasted the Republican presidential candidate’s wife for supposedly disregarding women who have taken government assistance in their lives…

It’s true she didn’t recognize all women. She ignored those who give up all remuneration to bear and raise the next generation.

— Comments —-

John E. writes:

Do you think that Ann Romney’s speech last night is a reflection of the American woman’s inflated ego, or that the latter is constantly trying to assert herself in spheres alien to her nature with predictably disastrous results? I suppose it could be a little of both. [Laura writes: I’d say, the latter inevitably leads to the former in a society that goes along with the assertion of female power in spheres alien to their nature.]

I am having a hard time concluding anything except that, in most cases, a woman cannot be a public figure (expected to give public speeches, take public positions, etc.) without bringing attention to the fact that she is doing all she is doing while also being a woman. Thus she is drawing significant attention to what should be considered insignificant – after all women make up roughly half of the population, and they all do what they do while at the same time being women. But it seems that a woman in politics just can’t help herself from insisting that her public ponders the fact, and so it seems reasonable to conclude that women are out of place as public figures. The effect of the widespread acceptance of it has been affected and unquestioning applause for insignificance, and a default appeasing posture from male public figures, who naturally have no desire to draw attention to their maleness as though it is significant, though the fact of their being men is definitely being attacked by the significance placed on female politicians’ being women.

In all of this, I have to ask the question, how do the men (such as Mitt Romney) who are close to these public women look at themselves in the mirror knowing they are encouraging such destructive self-indulgence? It lends credence to something I have read recently, that the great sin of women in our day is ingratitude, while the great sin of men is cowardice.

Laura writes:

I agree. The fact that women feel compelled to call attention to themselves as politicians is in itself evidence that they are out of their natural element. This tendency does not abate the more power women accrue.

Also women as a group are perfectly comfortable thinking of their votes in a self-centered way. This is a perversion of their innate empathy.

Terry Morris writes:

I pretty much gave up on the Republicans as a viable force to oppose liberalism before the ’08 convention. But the ’08 convention was instrumental in solidifying what I knew to be the truth already. They paraded career woman after career woman onto the stage, extolling the virtues of career womanhood, and career motherhood (which I guess are essentially the same things) announcing to the world, in no uncertain terms, that the Republican party had finally “arrived.” Some were military women mangled in battle in Iraq, some were CEOs of American corporations, some were Governors of their States, and some were the real power-behind-the-throne types. Some paraded their children on stage to cheer their mothers on for the wonderful upbringings they received at the hands of their liberated single, career Moms.

I wouldn’t waste a moment of my time to see any of that again.

James N. writes:

Both Rick Santorum and Ann Romney praised “single moms” by name in their speeches, and Scott Walker did so by implication with his anecdote about. “mom” who could feed her children after his reforms in Wisconsin got her a job.

Although there are (a few) women who can pull this off and some who have no choice, the vast majority of “single moms” voluntarily condemn their children to lives of grinding poverty and enormous physical danger.

That this taxon has become a term of approbation, and at a “conservative” event, no less, is a sign of the times. To quote Jeanine in “Ghostbusters” – “it’s a sign, all right – a going out of business sign.”

Laura writes:

At VFR, Lawrence Auster writes:

In her speech at the convention, Romney’s wife said that women “care” more than men, that society treats women unfairly and forces them to work harder than men, and that “single … mothers hold this country together.”

Mrs. Romney, along with the GOP which approved her speech, has inadvertently demonstrated once again why women should not have the vote and should not have prominent positions in politics. Because once women have the vote, they become a separate constituency with interests separate from those of men. This inevitably results in (1) female emotionalism and female resentment becoming central in politics, with everyone bowing down at the altar of the mistreated, overworked “moms” of America, who are thus turned into a new type of oppressed ubermensch; and (2) in women as a group demanding substantive equality with men as a group. In short, sexual socialism.

And, as with all socialist egalitarian schemes, some equal humans are more equal than others. Thus women, according to Ann Romney, work harder than men, care more about the good of society than men, and women represent the “best of America,” which men do not. Thus women, under Obamacare, get free contraceptive pills and services as an absolute “right”—a right granted to no other “health care” need.

Republicans say they believe in a free society. But the truth is that women’s political equality is incompatible with a free society, because women’s political equality moves society irresistibly in the direction of socialism.

Kid

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