Of course, no female candidate who hoped to gain an ounce of public approval could have survived that first sentence in the Vanity Fair story: the plaintive wail of a child whose misery was tied to the political ambitions of his parent. No woman, dead or alive, could hope to win the nation’s heart by writing about seeking communion in a Kansas bar while her husband drove carpool in El Paso. 

…During the 2014 gubernatorial race, the New York Times Magazine ran a story headlined “Can Wendy Davis Have It All? A Texas-Size Tale of Ambition, Motherhood, and Political Mythmaking.”

…The tight knot for women in politics (and perhaps in life) has been, will always be, this: Everything associated with motherhood has been coded as faintly embarrassing and less than — from mom jeans to mommy brain to the Resistance. And yet to be a bad mom has been disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking something: gravity, value, femininity. Just this month, Tucker Carlson wondered, about New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether “someone who’s never even raised children gets the right to lecture me about morality,” as if parents are given a moral compass upon the birth of a child.

…As our expectations for fatherhood rise, even when the fathers castigate themselves for absences, the judgment hasn’t been harsh. 

…How can we get to a place where women’s relationships to their domestic lives are not undermining? Those who’ve been out there have tried a million approaches. 

…“I knew that my male colleagues had come when they were 30. They had a jump on me because they didn’t have children.” But of course they had children; there was simply no expectation that they’d be responsible for raising them.

…Because fatherhood hasn’t been a structural impediment in the way motherhood has, the proportion of childless male presidential candidates has been statistically less significant; neither Cory Booker nor Pete Buttigieg gets asked much about the fact that he doesn’t have children and how that’s shaped his view of the world. Buttigieg, in fact, often positions himself as childlike in wondering what the world will look like in 35 years, when he’s Trump’s age.

…Those privileges aren’t really about fatherhood; they are about childhood.

White men — in life, on streets, in cop cars, within their families, on the pages of magazines, and in politics — are permitted to fuck up, to gain our sympathy and protection. They are offered the possibilities of blamelessness, selfishness, naïveté, and second and third chances. They are offered the benefits of youth itself, no matter their age. It doesn’t matter whether they have kids or how they raise kids; these men who want to lead us get to be kids.

What Changes When the Presidential Field Is Full of Mothers

hmmmm