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.
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Laura Vanderkam is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Portfolio, 2010) and Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007). She is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors, and her work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Scientific American, Wired, The American, Portfolio and other publications.
Write to her at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com.
I totally agree with this. And she (Michelle) made a point during the campaign of looking down on her accomplishments and playing down her career, in what I felt was her strong attempt to distinguish herself from Hillary, and other “ambitious” (shh, bad word here) women as the wife of and the great wife of, rather than the Michelle Obama.
There are many interesting and admirable things about the Obamas. I for example, as the child of a single parent, was quite moved by the image of Obama and his wife and his daughters, with his mother-in-law (note: none of his family as he has none and thanksgiving probably was a bit of a sad time for him growing up i’ d bet) , handing out turkey dinners to the poor on Thanksgiving.
As those of us know who have not had the picture perfect two-parent childhoods, these holidays are bittersweet for us, and I’m sure for Obama, it means so much to have built a family (unified under two parents, wealthy, secure and powerful) and unlike the one he was raised with (mother who went through husbands, left child to be raised by grandparents, father who abandoned him)…
This is great for Obama. And it may be great for Michelle. But it isn’t all that great for American Women.
SO it is important for us as WOMEN to remember that this life that Obama has built for himself and their family is very much based on the idea of her dialing down her career and sacrificing her own ambitions for his
(That is it is built on her back and for him at her expense) and this I think in a politician, in a first lady and in a role model, isn’t what we need in America today as women. We need to be able to share “The Second Shift” With someone, and if it isn’t going to be our husbands, as clearly it was not in the case of the Obamas, it better be someone and if it’s not gong to be the government, it’s got to be someone.
Can you imagine Obama if he were a woman, leaving his family in the mansion in Chicago for weeks on end to do work in Washington, being called a great mother? The interesting thing is he is as man and particularly as a black man considered an AMAZING FATHER, and he may in fact be, but what is really interesting to me as the child of a single parent, is that what distinguishes Obama from his own father is that he is actually married to Michelle, but how much parenting and cleaning and etc. that was not his career has he actually every been responsible for?
Who is doing the second shift in that household, it appears is the staff and the Grandma, and this has cost him nothing and Michelle a career of her own. This is sad even if Michelle doesn’t think so.
Another thing I really resented was Michelle telling Oprah (she appeared on the cover of Oprah this year) that it was great to get up at 4 a.m. in the morning to work out b/c we’d as working women get up to get work done at 4 a.m. to work to pay bills and cut sleep and rest and exercise, so why not pursue the perfect body (and thus be the perfect wife) at your own personal expense, that is at 4 a.m. This image of her on 4 hours sleep pounding it out in the gym to look perfect I also thought was way way out of date and not what we need as women to get ahead. Why should I have to get up at 3 a.m. to fit a workout in? What does that say about my life if the only tim efor myself and my own health is at 3 a.m. and prevents me from sleeping 7 hours a day?
This I thought was a most unmodern and unrealistic take on what women need. Men do not cut into their beauty rest to work out and women should also not have to. This idea of the sacrificing woman has got to do is ridiculously unmodern and disappointing… YOu can have it all if you are willing to do it all with less time.. i mean really how great is that NOT.
I like her garden, she has great biceps, but what is she really doing for and saying about American Women. It is not a good picture. And why is Palin so popular? Palin — whether you agree with her politics or not — She is to women what Obama is to black men, an example, and there are so so so few. She is there as herself and not as someone’s wife or mother and that is what we need to see and to be seen as.
I love Michelle Obama! She is so intelligent, graceful, stern when she needs to be and she has a wonderful sense of humor.