The well-being of women and the effects of child care have become major issues in an election that was raging between two aging bulls haggling over which one was too old or unhinged to run.
JD Vance has changed much of that.
The 39-year-old, Ohio junior Senator accepted an offer from Donald Trump to become his 2024 vice presidential nominee. Trump seemingly had made the decision with Joe Biden in mind. In politics though, you need to expect the unexpected. The vice presidency is not considered very unimportant until it becomes very important. Franklin Roosevelt’s veep John Nance Garner said the vice presidency, “Wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”
But JD Vance has become a very controversial figure indeed. And he keeps getting the science very, very wrong, especially when it comes to gender.
The new GOP presidential team is an unlikely pair. Trump grew up as the son of a millionaire real estate mogul in New York State and made billions of his own with Trump Tower and other skyscrapers. He is the PT Barnum of the pair, having hosted the popular reality show ‘The Apprentice’.
Vance grew up dirt poor in Appalachia and Ohio, joined the US Marines, and first came to fame as the author of a critically praised best seller, Hillbilly Elegy. He met his Indian (South Asian) wife at Yale law school, and they have three kids. Along the way he picked up a mentor, high-tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who was central to Vance’s entrepreneurial career and provided much of the funding for his senate race.
“We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said in 2021. He further said, “If we want a healthy ruling class in this country … we should support people who actually have kids because those are the people who actually have a direct stake in the future of the country.”
Vance’s policy ideas are actually quite dark for women:
But he hasn’t stopped there. “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had,” he added.
Alas, if you listen to Vance about this, dear readers, you are the ones who have been hornswoggled. The science on working women has been around for a long time. We know because we were among its first midwives.
In 1998, Rosalind Barnett and the late Dr .Grace Baruch conducted a major four-year study (at Brandeis University) on working couples. It was fundd by the National Institutes of Mental Health. Caryl Rivers joined them to produce a definitive book called She Works, He Works. (Harper Collins).
The New York Times gave it a glowing review, saying the book showed, “that employed wives are not as depressed as were the fabled wives of the 1950s and that children do not suffer when both parents are employed. Furthermore, if one partner loses a job, it is less stressful to the family than if only one person had been working. Barnett, Baruch and Rivers argue that couples who share household and child rearing responsibilities are actually healthier than those who espouse “traditional” family dynamics.” Other researchers reached similar conclusions. The Sloan Foundation states that this study “has stood the test of time.”
If Donald Trump were saying what Vance is now saying, we might shrug our shoulders, because the former president says one bizarre thing after another, But Vance tries to present himself as a serious person, an author and a United States Senator. Further, Vance’s comments about Kamala Harris as a childless woman are most peculiar. Perhaps Harris did not actually give birth, but she and her husband Doug Emhoff co-parented his daughters along with his former wife, Kerstin Emhoff, They formed an extended family in the process. Kerstin says the two women are very close and the kids call Harris “Momala“.
Another illogical comment made by Vance is that day care is “A massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.” Good sense tells you he has got that backwards. Rich people can hire well trained, well paid child care workers and they do. The less affluent often struggle with a hard-of-hearing grandma or the supposedly reliable sitter who is necking with her boyfriend in the living room while the baby cries in his crib. The middle-class and the working poor desperately need good, well-funded child care. And just recently, JD said that Trump exemplified the Marine motto, Semper FI, Always Faithful, even though he dodged the draft and cheated on all of his wives.
Trump and Vance are tumbling forward through history in an uncertain embrace, bound together in a bond of lies and pseudo-science, an uncomfortable sight for many Americans.
About the Authors: Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C Barnett are winners of the Casey Medal for Excellence in Journalism and a Goldsmith Grant from Harvard University. Dr. Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University and Dr. Barnett is a senior scholar at Wellesley College.