Archive for November 18th, 2009

When First Lady Michelle Obama made the cover of some editions of Glamour magazine last week in a sleeveless red dress with a necklace as sparkly as her smile, it wasn’t for her undeniable good looks. She won the spot as part of the magazine’s annual Women of the Year awards, honoring the world’s female movers and shakers.

Katie Couric, who interviewed Obama for the December issue, notes that “I couldn’t imagine a list of 2009 Women of the Year that didn’t acknowledge America’s First Lady.” Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, on her blog, called Obama’s inclusion a “very, very, very easy choice to make.”

I’m not so sure it should have been.

Michelle Obama has broken barriers, but she still represents a rather old-fashioned notion that the female route to power is to marry it – one it’s puzzling that Glamour would promote.

Though filled with the usual clothes and sex tips, Glamour has done an admirable job of stretching the genre of women’s magazines, honoring, for instance, ambitious young women through its annual Top 10 College Women list. The magazine prides itself on its feminist sentiments, and endorsed Al Gore in 2000 out of worries that George W. Bush would limit abortion rights.

In that vein, the purpose of the Women of the Year project is to show Glamour’s young readers that they can do anything. They can speak up for justice (as the Iranian women honored this year have done). They can be Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice in 2008), House Minority Leader and then Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi in 2002), executives at major companies (Marissa Mayer of Google this year), or even break the glass ceiling in that very male-dominated profession, comedy (Amy Poehler). Sure, some in-the-news celebrities (Rihanna) get put on the list to garner headlines, though these women have generally done something (e.g., top the charts) in their own right.

That’s what makes the First Lady a curious choice. With degrees from Princeton and Harvard, she could have run for office herself. She could have used her law degree to rise through the ranks of judges to land on the Supreme Court. She could have had a pioneering business career, perhaps becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. She could have started a company or a national non-profit.

She didn’t do any of that.

Instead, though she’s held many prestigious (and well-paying) jobs, overall, she kept her personal ambitions relatively limited in order to spend time with her girls and run the home front while her husband advanced his career, first in the Illinois state senate, later as a U.S. Senator, and of course, during his epic campaign for the presidency.

There’s reason to believe she wasn’t thrilled with the sacrifices this required (The Audacity of Hope recounts her complaints) but she did it, nonetheless, and there is nothing wrong with putting your husband’s career first. It’s a choice many women make. It certainly paid off for her, as evidenced by the Obamas’ multimillion dollar net worth and the platform she now has to promote the causes she cares about.

But because of her choices, the First Lady is on the national public stage mainly because she is the wife of a famous man. Unlike, say, Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin, who built their own power bases and public careers, the only reason you’ve heard of the brilliant Michelle Obama is that she married a man named Barack.

Is this the message Glamour wants to send to its readers? The fact that Barack, not Michelle, holds the office of president belies Couric’s statement in Glamour that Mrs. Obama is “a powerful symbol of our nation’s progress.”

In a year in which five women won Nobel Prizes alongside the First Lady’s husband, Glamour could have done better.