The First Lady: A feminist disappointment?

last updated 8 January 2015

As First Lady, Michelle Obama is a “feminist nightmare,” said Michelle Cottle in Politico.com. She held such promise when her husband was elected in 2008; here, many feminists thought, was a strong, “Ivy-educated, blue-chip law firm–trained” woman who would go beyond the traditional role of adoring wife and address tough issues, like poverty, out-of-wedlock births, and women’s reproductive rights. Unfortunately, Michelle has chosen to “stay out of the line of fire,” mostly playing “supermom” to her two daughters and addressing the same safe causes as her predecessors. “Gardening? Tending wounded soldiers? Reading to children?” Michelle could easily pass for a First Lady from the 1950s. Even in her husband’s second term, when there’s no need to worry about re-election, FLOTUS is avoiding saying anything that would frighten the “white male establishment.” How very sad. “Someday somebody will shatter the conventional First Lady mold. It just won’t be Michelle Obama.”

What an offensive and unjustified attack, said Noreen Malone in NewRepublic.com. Michelle Obama has led several important campaigns, including the one against obesity, which happens to be America’s biggest health crisis. Behind the scenes she “functions as the president’s liberal conscience” and was instrumental in pushing for Obama’s signature health-care bill. “If that isn’t a serious amount of power, on a serious topic, I don’t know what is.” If she’s also focused on being “mom in chief,” said Kat Stoeffel in NYMag.com, then good for her. Being free to choose motherhood over work is “aspirational for some black women”—unlike affluent white women, they don’t see motherhood as a “domestic prison from which feminism liberated them.” Their mothers and grandmothers often had no choice but to work outside the home, raising other people’s children. In that sense, Michelle’s strong mom-in-chief role is “revolutionary.”

Besides, let’s not pretend our society would accept a mouthy, 6-foot-tall black woman in the White House, said Kate Dries in Jezebel.com. Hillary Clinton’s “gung ho, policy-oriented” approach to the role made her the most controversial First Lady in history. Imagine how the country would react to “the same attitude from a black First Lady.” Even when Michelle offers diet or body-toning tips, threatened white males respond by insulting her body and evoking “Angry Black Woman” stereotypes. Michelle undoubtedly has strong views that she’d like to express. But “as a black woman, she can’t.”