Jim Wilson/The New York Times  Ann Romney, with family in January, said, âMy career choice was to be a mother.â Raising five boys was not so easy, she added.  The campaign for the White House spilled into the politics of motherhood on Thursday as a combative back-and-forth involving a Democratic strategist and Mitt Romney’s wife quickly revived a deeper, decades-old cultural debate about the roles of women in and out of the workplace.  The strategist, Hilary Rosen, who has some ties to President Obama, apologized Thursday afternoon to Ann Romney, a stay-at-home mother of five, after setting off a firestorm on Twitter and cable news programs by saying that Mrs. Romney had “never worked a day in her life.”  By the end of Thursday, the most prominent voices in Washington had weighed in, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the first lady, Michelle Obama, and the president himself, who said that there is “no tougher job than being a mom” and that anyone who thinks otherwise “needs to rethink their statement.”  The latest flare-up in the working-mother wars was fueled by the political stakes on both sides as Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama begin waging a seven-month battle for the White House. The top advisers for the campaigns see the political fortunes of their candidates intertwined with the conclusions reached by independent women in swing states across the country. Mrs. Romney has lately taken a more prominent position on the campaign trail, acting as a surrogate for her husband and reaching out to female voters, a bloc that is one of Mr. Romney’s greatest vulnerabilities.  But women of various political ideologies who said in interviews that they had struggled with how to balance work, family and society’s inevitable judgments, largely disapproved of the debate’s tone, calling it demeaning and superficial, even as the issue remains as timely a conversation as ever.  “I’m not a Mitt Romney supporter, but I think the comments about his wife were petty and unfair,” said Beth Shelton, 33, a property manager and mother who described herself as a moderate independent voter. “I was a stay-at-home mom for nine years. Working at home is hard. Working at an office is hard. There’s no way to say what’s easier. That’s not the point.”  Ms. Shelton continued: “There are a lot of real issues right now with Republicans and women, things having to do with birth control and women’s health care. There are more important things to be talking about having to do with supporting families, from a woman’s perspective.”  Other women echoed those sentiments.  Charlotte Udziela, a retired community college instructor in Beaverton, Ore., who supports Mr. Obama, said she wished both campaigns would address the issues of work, home economics and family balancing with more gusto. There is a “huge divide,” she said, between wealthy women like Mrs. Romney and women of more modest means who would like to stay home to raise children, but cannot afford to.  If Ms. Rosen “had chosen her words differently,” said Ms. Udziela, a grandmother of five, “this might have been a more useful discussion, something we should be talking about.”  In Ms. Rosen’s initial comments Wednesday night on CNN, where she is a political analyst, she questioned Mrs. Romney’s ability to relate to financial struggles of mothers who must work full time. Even after the initial criticism, Ms. Rosen continued to press that case for hours on Twitter, in an online column and in television appearances.  “This is not about Ann Romney,” Ms. Rosen said on CNN Thursday morning. “This is about the waitress at a diner someplace in Nevada who has two kids whose day care funding is being cut off because of the Romney-Ryan budget and she doesn’t know what to do.”  She added: “This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.”  A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney lashed out at Ms. Rosen on Thursday before she apologized, turning the economic argument against the White House.
The Romney and Obama campaigns spent the day weighing in on Hilary Rosenâs remark that Ann Romney had ânever worked a day in her life.â