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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
The next first lady is an accomplished lawyer. But with the media focused on her clothes and family, Bamalot is starting to look a lot like Camelot.
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Parenting, Working Mothers, Motherhood, Rebecca Traister, Life, Michelle Obama
Reuters/Damir Sagolj
Michelle Obama and her daughters talk with Barack Obama via a live video feed following Michelle's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver Aug. 25, 2008.
Nov. 12, 2008 | Oh, what a week, what happiness, what kvelling joy: In January, Barack Obama will become president of the United States, and along with our first black president, we will also get our first black first family. A troop -- perhaps three generations! -- of powerful broads. Plus a puppy of as-yet-indeterminate provenance! A family so young and beautiful that they took our breath away when they strode onstage in Grant Park on Nov. 4, looking at once completely different from any presidential pack this country has ever known, and like the single most sparkling, shiny embodiment of the American dream ever to park a U-Haul outside the executive residence.
So it's no wonder that many of us have caught a touch of the Camelot-it-is (or, as the New York Post dubbed it last week, "Bam-a-lot"). Here we are, oohing and aahing over what they'll be wearing, and what they'll be eating, what kind of dog they'll be getting, what bedrooms they'll be living in, and what schools they'll be attending. It feels better than good to sniff and snurfle through the Obamas' tastes and habits. How unexpectedly comforting to slough off our brittle chrysalis of presidential detachment and invest so completely and uncynically in the lives of these people. Who knew we had in us the capacity to fall for this kind of idealized Americana again? And even better, however naive and retro it may feel, the Obamas' presence on our national stage is anything but: They are progressivism made manifest. For the first time in American history, our leaders look not like those pallid forebears who have occupied seats of power since America was born, but like the historically disenfranchised and oppressed populations that built those seats of power to begin with.
But with progress comes inevitable regress, and in our stouthearted dash to fit this family into a comfortably familiar tableau, we have fallen back into other, far too familiar, cultural traps: you know, like forgetting everything we've learned in recent decades about female achievement and identity.
The majority of the coverage of Michelle Obama in the week since her husband was elected has centered on her clothes. Not just the firecracker of a dress she donned on Election Night, but on her personal style, and what she will wear to the Inaugural balls.
Then there have been the oceans of transition pieces, about the adjustments the family will have to make as they move to Washington. In Newsweek came news that Michelle has been consulting with her husband's former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, talking not about politics or law but about how to raise children in the White House.
The Associated Press wondered what kind of first lady Michelle will be, and concludes, "the kind of first lady this country has not seen in decades." You mean, the kind with a high-powered job? No, "the mother of young children." True enough, and the AP story did include the fact that Michelle is known to be her husband's closest advisor. But it made sure to emphasize the campaign's assertions that "she is not interested in shaping policy or reserving a seat for herself at her husband's decision-making table. She prefers, at least for now, to focus on easing the transition for Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 -- getting them in new schools, settled and comfortable with a new way of life." Indeed, Michelle herself has been flogging the term "mom-in-chief" as the cheerily unthreatening title she'll assume when she gets to the White House.
It's a vision of her future that has been embraced by the New York Times, which published a piece about how the Obamas are "beginning to figure out how to become the first family of the United States" but did not make mention of the presumed end of Michelle's most recent job, at the University of Chicago Hospitals, from which she took a leave during the campaign. The story's only reference to the university was as the place where the Obama girls currently attend primary school.
While the story contained no specific acknowledgement of Michelle's long and varied career, it did go on to describe how, once she has settled her children into the White House, she will have to figure out "exactly what sort of first lady she wants to be. Although she dresses with unusual care -- in both designer clothing and off the rack styles she has become known for -- friends say she has only a certain amount of patience for the domestic arts. She is a get-it-done efficiently Rachael Ray type, they say, not given to elaborate Martha Stewart-like efforts." Hey, here's a crazy idea, but what if Michelle is a type of woman -- and therefore a type of first lady -- whose professional success has nothing to do with cooking or crafting?
I don't mean to suggest that I'm not as taken by the mommy and fashion stuff as everyone else. It's great that Michelle Obama is both a snazzy dresser and a terrific parent. Her solid, steely beauty, her innate sense of style and her obvious devotion to her children are among the many attractive things about her -- along with her humor, her capacity for self-deprecation, her cool confidence, her sense of self, her commitment to the community in which she grew up, her thorough and very polished education, her challenging and rigorous career choices, her good, strong, fiercely held views on America, race and politics, her protection of an identity outside of her husband's and how damn pretty she is.
Not all of these qualities will be easily transported to Washington, and some of the most extraordinary of them -- the ones that set her apart from many of her predecessors in the East Wing -- are already falling victim to a nostalgic complacency about familial roles, and to an apparent commitment to re-creating Camelot with an African-American cast, but little modern tweaking of the role of wife and mother.
The New York Times is certainly not alone in its static view of what kinds of choices shape the role of first lady -- i.e., how will she dress, what domestic arts will she or won't she ply, what "duties" will she assume on behalf of her husband?
Michelle Obama is a mom. And her girls are small. This kind of change will undoubtedly be extremely discombobulating for them, and they will require the attention of their parents. Michelle herself has been more than happy to tell people, most notably in a summer interview with Ebony, that her first responsibilities upon getting to Washington will be finding schools and making sure her daughters get comfortable in their new fishbowl, all invaluable responsibilities of a parent resituating his or her kids, a parent who in this case happens to be a mommy.
It's Michelle's job because Daddy is going to be the president, and he has to save the country and the world from an economic crisis and war, and so he might be too busy to come check out the new schools and decorate their rooms and help with the dog. But the fact is, he seems to be a pretty good dad, and I bet he will do some of that stuff anyway. What rankles is the smooth and unquestioning assumptions by the media that the fallback position is to assign all those duties to Michelle.
Prior to Hillary Clinton, we'd never had a first lady who had a post-graduate degree. Michelle Obama went to college at Princeton and law school at Harvard. She was a practicing lawyer at the Chicago firm Sidley Austin when she was assigned to mentor the summer associate who would become her husband. She was his mentor. And when Barack writes of first meeting her, in "The Audacity of Hope," he notes that "she was part of the intellectual property group and specialized in entertainment law ... Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for distractions -- especially men."
Later, Michelle's personal commitment to her childhood neighborhood led her to leave Sidley Austin and work for the city of Chicago, then to launch the youth mentorship program Public Allies. When Michelle cut back on work as a new mother, she was still ambitious and engaged enough in her professional life that she took on a community relations job at the University of Chicago, working to reach out from behind the school's cloistered walls to the working-class community in which she'd been raised. In 2006, Michelle Obama earned $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she was vice-president for community and external affairs, plus $51,200 as a salaried member of the board of directors for Treehouse Foods, a Wal-Mart supplier from which she resigned after her husband was critical of the anti-union mega-chain. Barack, on the other hand, earned $157,082 as a United States senator, plus loads more from his book royalties and their combined investments. At the point that her husband decided to run for president, Michelle was not working just to make ends meet; she had a career to which she was committed.
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