WASHINGTON - The challenges facing American women have taken centre stage in the national political debate as President Barack Obama and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney do pitched battle for the hearts and minds of the country's all-important female voters.
Romney's attempts to stop a growing deluge of women to Obama were met with mockery on Sunday by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who derided him for his claim last week that women accounted for a whopping 92 per cent of the jobs lost since the president took office.
"It's misleading and ridiculous," Geithner, making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "It's just a political moment."
Geithner conceded that the second half of the recession involved more female job losses due to teacher and education-related layoffs precipitated by state budget cutbacks.
It was mostly men, however, who found themselves out of work at the start of the recession in 2008 due to construction and manufacturing job losses, he said, meaning the pain was felt equally by men and women over the course of the economic downturn.
"The recession ... was already a year in the making before President Obama came into office," Geithner said.
"It's a meaningless way to look at the basic contours of the economy in that period of time, again because it starts artificially at a time when the president came into office and the crisis was still building momentum."
Politifact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, has in fact rated Romney's claim as "mostly false."
Nonetheless the so-called "war on women" has become a flashpoint in the 2012 election campaign, even before Romney was all but assured the Republican nomination last week when his only real rival for the crown, Rick Santorum, dropped out of the party's presidential race.
Polls suggest that Santorum's controversial stances on birth control and working mothers, in fact, sent women who consider themselves independent voters into Obama's camp.
A high-profile brawl earlier this year about access to birth control, resulting from Republican efforts to portray Obama's health-care policies as trouncing on the rights of Catholics, also put women's issues at the forefront of debate.
Republicans were hammered in public opinion polls on the issue, especially after conservative icon Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University law student a "slut" and a "prostitute" for her congressional testimony in support of Obama's policies on access to birth control.
Last week, Republicans had their revenge when a relatively obscure Democratic strategist, Hilary Rosen, said on CNN that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life." Even though both Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, condemned Rosen for her remarks, Republicans said it revealed Democratic contempt for stay-at-home mothers.
"I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work," Ann Romney tweeted shortly after Rosen's remarks.
The Romney campaign has since churned out bumper stickers reading: "Moms drive the economy."
It's all part of a full-court press undertaken by the Romney campaign to woo women away from Obama and into the Republican fold given female voters will likely represent almost 53 per cent of the electorate in November.
The former Massachusetts governor has repeatedly said during recent campaign stops that the president's policies have waged a "real war on women."
And yet a four-month-old video has surfaced that could prove damaging to Romney's efforts to portray himself as a white knight to stay-at-home mothers, in particular those who don't have the benefit of a spouse earning millions.
Shot in early January at a town hall event in New Hampshire, Romney spoke of his proposed welfare reform proposals when he was Massachusetts governor that would have required parents with young children to get jobs.
"I wanted to increase the work requirement," Romney said.
"I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said: 'Well that's heartless,' and I said: 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work."'
Conservatives have long railed against welfare, advocating for policies that would force welfare recipients back into the workforce.
During his failed run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, Romney also acknowledged that many women have no choice but to work.
"This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work," he said. "Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs."
