A Modest Proposal for Jane Swift
Mass. Governor Jane Swift has become a national symbol for the tensions between work and home.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
May 21, 2001 2:55 p.m.

y refusing to turn over the reins of state government during the delivery of her twins last week, Massachusetts Governor

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Jane Swift has become a national symbol for the tensions between work and home. Or rather, the apparent lack of them. She's "a trailblazer for working women everywhere," gushed the Boston Herald. Added Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist in a Republican Governors Association press release: "She's a great role model for women everywhere who strive to balance a successful career and family."

Go girl! You can have it all!

Lost in the fuss over Swift is the voice of women who make a different choice: To quit their jobs and stay home with the kids. They don't write newspaper editorials or columns, and so we don't hear what they think when someone like Swift traipses along. All we get are the opinions of people who sound like they're reading from talking points handed out by Patricia Ireland.

Stay-at-home moms are used to the silent snubs they receive from mothers who decide to pursue careers — as if they were nothing but pre-feminist breeders who don't lead worthwhile lives. In a Washington Post article about their plight a few years ago, one woman who left a law firm to be with her kids remarked that at dinner parties, when someone asked what she did for a living, she resorted to saying she was the CEO of a small family firm.

Full-time mothers are accustomed to the unwitting obliviousness displayed by Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican. In the RGA release on Swift, he said, "If anyone can manage taking care of twins and a whole state at the same time, she can." It's as if motherhood were such a minor role that you might as well be the chief executive officer of a whole state, too. Granted, "running a state" may be less than it seems — but it certainly isn't something a woman can slip in during naptime.

There's one sure way Swift really could become a trailblazer: She could quit her job, and say she'd rather raise her kids.

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