O: Open Flexible Work

Meet Annie Spiegelman, a Bay Area mom who blogs as “The Dirt Diva” on matters of love, gardening, and cultivating a healthy planet.  Just in time for Mother’s Day, Annie shares her interview with Rachel’s Network Co-Director Laurie Syms on the evidence that women in Congress, regardless of party, support the environment at rates that outpace their male counterparts.

A Rachel’s Network report entitled “When Women Lead: A Decade of Women’s Environmental Voting Records in Congress,”  compares the environmental voting records of Congresswomen and Congressmen from the 107th through the 111th Congress.  The conclusion:  in both houses of Congress, whether red or blue, women are greener!

Here’s Annie’s personal account of a moving conversation:

How did a girl raised and hardened on the streets of New York City become a passionate environmentalist, geeky master gardener and full-fledged compost queen? I read Rachel Carson’s bestseller, Silent Spring.

This Mother’s Day we’re celebrating the fact that moms are now networked and engaged in ways unimaginable just a decade ago. More than 36 million women are now active in the blogosphere, either publishing or reading blogs.  And, by the end of this year, more than 90 percent of moms with kids under age eighteen in our nation are expected to be online.

We are powerfully, substantially, fully “Networked Moms.”

Increased Internet access, coupled with new communication technologies–like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and even emails– allows women to reach dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of other women at one time with a quick press of a button.  It’s an unbelievably fast moving tool that significantly accelerates communication, education, organizing, and impact.

Last Thursday an online tempest erupted when Hilary Rosen went on CNN to explain that she didn’t think Ann Romney was a worthy voice for America’s women because she “has actually never worked a day in her life.” The kerfluffle might seem familiar. Twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton came under fire for a remark she made during her husband’s presidential campaign, which many interpreted as dismissive of stay-at-home mothers.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life,” Clinton said – in 1992.

So why are mommy wars such a perennial?

There is no question that Hilary Rosen should have chosen her words more carefully when she said that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” As an organization representing moms of all political persuasions across the country and run by moms, we at MomsRising know well that raising children is work.  Caregiving is immensely rewarding work, but it’s work just the same.  Ms. Romney is justifiably proud of the work she’s done raising her children.

It’s time that we as a nation recognize that whether mothers’ work is paid or unpaid, the work of caregiving is important to us all. Every day, moms around the world are doing this hard work.  Work that involves making sure that children get the nutrition, care, education, and health care they need to grow up to be healthy, thriving adults who are part of our nation’s economic success.  It’s much easier to do this when families are economically secure. That’s why it’s so important that when we talk about how much we value moms, we also talk about how important it is to advance public policies that allow families to thrive.