Men Like J.D. Vance Are Why Being a Working Mom Is So Hard

And I’m not just talking about his policies

Plenty of dads would like paid leave too! Photo by Picsea on Unsplash

For me the most enraging moment of the Vice Presidential debate wasn’t about a specific policy or position. It was when J.D. Vance talked about his wife, Usha Vance. 

It was during a question about paid family leave – should the U.S. join every other economically advanced country on the planet and mandate paid family leave for all workers? (The specific question asked by the moderators was “Senator, do you support a national paid leave program, and, if so, for how long should employers be mandated to pay their employees while they are home taking care of their newborn?”)

And here is how he began his answer:

“First of all, I think there is a bipartisan solution here and a lot of us care about this issue. I speak from this very personally because I'm married to a beautiful woman who is an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids but is also a brilliant corporate litigator, and I'm so proud of her. But being a working mom, even for someone with all the advantages of my wife, is extraordinarily difficult. And it is not just difficult from a policy perspective. She actually has access to paid family leave because she works for a bigger company, but the cultural pressure on young families and especially young women makes it really hard for people to choose the family model they want.”

At that moment he was every man who asked me who would be taking care of my kids when I returned from maternity leave. He was every man who ever asked me how it “felt” that my kids were home with a caregiver while I worked. He was, more precisely, every male coworker, whose own kids were home with his wife, who shook his head and sighed “I just don’t know how you do it.” 

Or, as Lindsay Boylan eloquently put it: “I don’t want JD Vance talking about the cultural pressure of women. Ever. Men like him are our cultural pressure.”

It’s a cute trick to argue that better policies – mandated paid leave, publicly funded childcare – wouldn’t make a difference because your affluent wife, who had access to paid leave and childcare, still found motherhood extraordinarily difficult. 

Why, we might reasonably ask, is it “extraordinarily difficult” to be a working mother, even with access to paid leave, a mother who can help with care, and a great job that presumably pays enough money to be able to afford help picking up the slack? More importantly, why is it not extraordinarily difficult to be the working father of those same children?

The unspoken answer is very simple – mothers, but not fathers, feel a natural pull to care for their children. They feel the cultural pressure. Or at least they should.

Culture is serving as both sword and shield. Shield against calls to invest in public solutions. Sword to bully women into “choosing” the family model that doesn’t require more public investment. 

I get the conservative argument against progressive family policies. Lower taxes, less regulation, etc., etc. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. But Vance wasn’t making that argument. He was arguing that being a mother is uniquely hard because mothers are uniquely suited to care. It’s a blatantly sexist, extremely regressive idea. 

And by invoking these gender essentialist tropes Vance, and men like him, make it harder to be a working mom, regardless of policy. His messaging gives males bosses permission to pass women over for promotions because they assume she’d rather be focused on her kids. It’s the kind of thinking that leads hiring a young guy with a pregnant wife because he’ll be hungry to succeed, while dinging the woman candidate who dares to ask about maternity leave. These ideas also give men permission to be unsupportive spouses all while praising their “amazing” wives. 

That is why that moment in the debate was so infuriating to me. And that’s what I mean when I say my fury isn’t about the policies he was or wasn’t proposing. I don’t happen to agree with him on policy. But I’m a big girl, I can agree to disagree on policy. 

I am furious because while he was lamenting the “cultural” pressure on mothers he was also espousing a view that is the source of that very same pressure!

The call is coming from inside the house, J.D.