Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Smugness of Mommies
The Arkansas governor is weaponizing motherhood. Let's hear it for mean girls!
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS DESERVES more credit. She brilliantly demonstrated what I’ve observed for years: Motherhood has become a license for smugness. And cruelty.
Sharing the stage with Donald Trump at a recent rally in Flint, Michigan, the Arkansas governor initially launched into a harmless, cutesy anecdote about power and kids:
You can walk into a room like this where people cheer when you step onto the stage and you might think for a second that you’re kind of special. Then you go home, and your kids remind you very quickly you’re actually not that big of a deal . . . So my kids keep me humble.
Then, she went in for the kill: “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble.”
Humble brag?
First of all, if you’re bragging about being humble, then maybe you’re not so humble? Plus, she’s on stage with the biggest, greatest, most amazing megalomaniac in America, maybe the world—to borrow Trump’s phraseology—and she’s faulting Harris for lacking humility?
Truth is, Huckabee Sanders wasn’t even being original. She was merely picking up the thread that JD Vance had started with his childless cat lady rant that made him the butt of a thousand jokes. Like all good Trump acolytes, she doubles down and takes it to the next level.
Yay, cat fight!
And what’s the next level? Cat fight! (In case you haven’t noticed, it’s raining cats at the GOP. They’re either being pampered by sad career gals or getting consumed by hungry immigrants.) I mean, who can resist two women going after each other?
Huckabee Sanders is setting up an epic battle: Mom v. Selfish Bitch. Good v. Evil. The Sacred v. the Profane. The not-so-subtle message is that a woman who’s failed to fulfill her primordial duty to birth children is unfit to lead this great nation. Simply put, Harris is morally deficient. And Huckabee Sanders would know, because she’s a woman—and a mommy to boot—so she’s got the creds.
Moms make better leaders?
To be fair, mommyism—the idea that moms are somehow superior, special, and more morally upright—is not new. In my 25-year journalism career covering law and business, I’ve heard all sorts of arguments about why moms make better leaders—that they’re wiser, more emphatic, more agile. Yada, yada, yada.
I don’t buy the mythology. Frankly, I think it’s treacly gobbledygook—which, I know, goes against a certain strain of feminism. To me, the notion that motherhood is somehow a qualifier in its own right is neither true nor helpful. It plays into gender stereotypes that ultimately constrict and hurt women.
And speaking of unhelpful, I don’t think the GOP is helping itself with its mommy strategy. It seems as though Republicans judge women based on the occupation rate of their uteri. Is pitting biological moms against childless women or those with non-biological kids the way to win those coveted suburban female votes?
It’s also strange that the Republican party keeps trotting out its shiny female stars to make the case that women really ought to be stay-at-home moms. (Remember how Alabama Sen. Katie Britt contorted herself into Senator Mommy in her nauseating rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address in March?) And, of course, JD Vance is still tripping over himself with his attacks against childless women. (Hey, JD, if you’re so keen on women popping out more babies, why didn’t you show up to vote for the bill protecting IVF?)
Who can forget the mean girls in our lives?
As clumsy and pukey as some of the GOP rhetoric has been on motherhood, Huckabee Sanders somehow pushed it further. Her dig at Harris was personal and vicious. She knows damn well that Harris is a beloved stepmom but she’s saying that doesn’t rate.
And, yes, it counts that she’s a woman attacking another woman. JD Vance might have a longer documented record of spewing nonsense about childless women, but Huckabee Sanders’s singular comment about Harris feels more stinging and cruel. She appointed herself Queen Bee, picked her target, then went about the business of making her prey a pariah. It was classic mean girl stuff—something that hits a nerve for many women.
All this is to say that Huckabee Sanders is not giving off warm sisterly vibes. Clearly, her mommy schtick is a cover to bully and belittle members of her own sex. But didn’t we all know that behind the glorification of motherhood lurks the shadow of misogyny? Funny, it took a mommy to drive home the point.
Contact: chen.vivia@gmail.com
Twitter (X): ViviaChen
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