Michelle, no dumbelle

Although I have tackled the topic of Michelle Obama many times, it was worth revisiting several months into her First Ladydom when she's had a chance to establish herself in the role.

And establish herself she has.

So here's today's treeware effort, in toto, with some linky freshness.

Sorry but did I miss the scene in which U.S. President Barack Obama and his political advisers held a gun to Michelle Obama's head and told her she had no choice but to play, in her words, "Mom-in-chief"?

Is she being kept down and away from the West Wing where the big boys and girls play?

Not if you keep up with her schedule.

The woman is always on the go, promoting her husband's policies, making speeches to the United Nations, government departments, community groups, universities, schools and arts organizations, even pitching healthy habits in a Sesame Street public service announcement.

No wonder she bares her arms. Saves her the time it would take her to roll up her sleeves.

In fact, Ms Obama is more out there than any Mrs. President – including Hillary Clinton – has ever been. And she's done it with intelligence, grace and style, breaking all the fashion rules that dictate a First Lady should dress in the pastel suits a former Miss Texas turned Dallas real estate agent would wear.

Sure, as she told a little girl during a charter school visit in February, "the job doesn't pay much."

But that doesn't mean it's worth nothing.

It would be interesting to cost out what all her official duties would make on the open job market, not to mention what her usual – forgive me, I can think of no better term – "wifely" role would earn.

Just last week, Salary.com reported that the time mothers spend performing the 10 most popular "mom job functions" would, to put a value on undervalued "women's work," score an annual paycheque of $122,732 (U.S.) for a stay-at-home mom or $76,184 for a working mom.

Imagine what Michelle Obama's work would be worth.

No, she doesn't have to load the White House dishwasher, nor does she pick up the dry cleaning.

But being on top of the most important residence on Earth, plus being confidante and companion to a man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, seems like a pretty huge job to me.

To hear Michelle O's critics tell it, the Princeton-Harvard grad, blue-chip firm lawyer, former hospital administrator with a six-figure salary 10 times higher than most women make, plus family breadwinner during her husband's college debt-ridden community organizing days, has betrayed her feminist principles by not resuming her spectacular career track.

What's funny is that most of the criticism seems to come from the very same conservatives who would be the first to smack her down for not knowing "her place" as a wife. These are the same people who also claim that feminism is a forced march to the abortionist's and onto the job market.

You'll forgive me for questioning their motives.

Well, here's a news flash: Feminism is about choice, not just for women but also men.

And, with the tanking economy sinking men's traditional jobs, we'll see that long feminist struggle for choice bear fruit when more couples have to reverse roles.

Anyway, it isn't as if African American women don't already have a long history of working outside the home for pitiful or no pay, from plantation cotton-picking to domestic work. Eventually, they would become teachers and nurses – and now have succeeded in all fields.

It's laughable that some critics also claim Obama must work in order to be a role model to "welfare baby mamas" when the truth is, African American women have long carried double loads, well before feminism "liberated" middle- and upper-class white women from their domestic confines.

Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.

Sexism and racism are alive and well, on The New York Times' op-ed page no less, where, as Salon.com noted yesterday, pundits Maureen Dowd and David Brooks are "playing into a stereotype of black women as bossy and emasculating."

Can you say "Uppity Black Woman," the ultimate putdown for somebody like Michelle Obama?

You see the dilemma here?

She is breaking new ground, not only as an African American First Lady but also as a woman who is probably more qualified to be president than her husband.

That doesn't mean she has to want the Oval Office.

But don't think for a second she isn't the power behind that big swivel chair.

The email reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, although some of the pro-forced pregnancy types wrote to say that, while feminism may have given women choices, it robbed fetuses of theirs.

One email -- from a self-described feminist -- did surprise me. Here's a snip from it:

I believe that women who choose to support their spouse rather than pursuing their own independent projects likewise sacrifice an important aspect of their autonomous agency. I do not necessarily think that Michelle Obama has done this - she is still very active in society. However, some women do make a mistake when they abandon their own projects to raise their family, and they often later come to regret it.

In general, please remember that feminism is not SIMPLY the doctrine that women should be able to choose certain options willy nilly. Some options are consistent with feminism, and others are misogynistic - even if they are made by women. The option that women choose matters.

Hmm. I would think that choosing to raise children constitutes tending to one's ''projects'' and is perfectly consistent with feminist principles. That many women may come to regret it, especially if they end up alone and short of cash, is another matter. (By the way, the US Supreme Court just screwed older women who took maternity leave. Read this.)

The idea that raising children is a ''misogynistic'' option boggles my mind, especially when feminism promotes the idea that men should and can be part of the process.

In any case, I hardly think that feminists would trade old what-women-should-do think for new what-women-should-do think when it comes to how they live their lives.

What do you think?

Comments

[stageleft]

This is obviously nothing more than the liberal foisting of the "orange fuzzy creature" agenda on innocent American school kids through children's advertising..... who knew those little orange critters were so organized?

[neko]

"In general, please remember that feminism is not SIMPLY the doctrine that women should be able to choose certain options willy nilly. Some options are consistent with feminism, and others are misogynistic - even if they are made by women. The option that women choose matters."

What do I think?

I think the woman who sent that to you is trying to tell me what to do with my life and my body. The only difference is she's using 'Feminism' to tell me what to do when I'm used to people using 'God/Jesus' to command my life and body to their world view.

Feminism is the right to choice. I can choose to have a child, or not. I can choose to be a working Mother or a Stay-At-Home Mother. I can choose to educate myself in and pursue work in any field I wish because it isn't about what's between my legs, it's about all of us being human beings and therefor, generally speaking, equal. Yes, with choice comes consequence. Yes, a number of those consequences are negative ones and people are out there fighting to lesson or negate the blow of some of these consequences. Yes, if I make a choice, I may live to regret it. But that's life, right?

Any option that I choose, I get to choose because others fought hard for me to be able to choose (many before I was even a twinkle in someone's eye) and I am GREATFUL that they fought for that choice. Insisting that there are "wrong" choices out there that aren't the "feminist" choices? *That* puts us back and sullies all the people who fought for us to be able to choose.

[Michelle C]

Dear Antonia,

I see your point, and I do acknowledge that not all forms of "homemaking" are autonomy-undermining, but I still maintain my general point that not all women's choices are ipso facto pro-feminist. In assessing a person's choice relative to feminism, we have to take into consideration the causal history of that choice: how did it come about? When a woman chooses, e.g. voluntary clitoridectomy, or anorexia, or to stay in an abusive relationship, we should ask WHY she made this choice. Is it because she has thoroughly considered the implications of this decision and come to endorse it, or is because she has been socialized to accept this choice - and has been deprived of alternative deliberative possibilities? Has she been allowed to consider the alternatives? Or has she been shut up in a harem and sexually abused since birth? These considerations matter.
The etiology of our beliefs plays a role in their normative status relative to feminism. Choices that come about through misogynistic processes of sex-role socialization should be considered suspect. This is not to say that they should be dismissed out of hand. My proposal is more modest than this: it is merely that choice-evaluations should take into consideration social conditions, personal history and early childhood education.
Also, this kind of scrutiny should take place only if we suspect that a person has suffered some sort of physical or psychological trauma that might affect her choices or her ability to evaluative her real-life options.

I hope that this clarifies my position.

Best,

Michelle C.

[Michelle C]

Sorry - just as an addition:
The idea that feminist choices are just any choices that women make willy nilly is consistent with the idea that a woman's choice to deprive women of their rights (hypothetically speaking - e.g. imagine that Margaret Thatcher had deprived women of the right to vote) is a feminist choice. This is an unacceptable conclusion.

Best.

Michelle C

[PaulR]

"Feminism is about choice, not just for women but also men. "
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Feminism may, as a side benefit, propose choices for men, but there is no concerted effort within feminist circles to emancipate men from their gender scripted roles. "Man as success object" is still very much supported by men and women. Feminism is as much about men's emancipation as I am a feminist.

[Kat]

What do I think? I think defining feminism as "the right to choose" is terribly upper-middle-class and silly. No-one makes choices in a vacuum. There is always something colouring those choices.

I come from at least four generations of working-class working women. My great-grandmother and grandmother had difficult, low-paying jobs, and no real opportunities to improve their lot. Women didn't have a lot of jobs they could be hired for, and they didn't have access to the education they needed to do better with all the hours spent working. They worked because they had to -- their husbands worked, but also in blue-collar jobs. They simply needed the money.

My mother started off as a secretary and went on to be a successful business professional. In contrast to her, I've had two careers, but both in professional fields. We both wound up as primary breadwinners, so it was just as well we had access to better-paying jobs and the educations required to be successful in them.

We have never, ever, thought of being a stay-at-home mom as a status that was supposed to last past the youngest kid going to kindergarten, at the very latest. Why? Because in our class, it doesn't work that way. That's a rich person's dilemma, and from where we stand rich people only work because they're bored. For us, there has never been any question of whether to juggle work and family; the only question was how to do the juggling.

Lots of other things can colour one's choices. One of the ones the cons like to beat women with is the baby clock -- go up two management levels in the next five years or go childless. It's a horrible, heartless way of putting it, and it's completely unfair that our society thinks those should be the choice parameters, but that's what they are sometimes.

People choose for all sorts of reasons. They choose to go against their hearts because the consequences of going for what they really want are unfairly harsh and weigh too heavily against the benefits. The privileged ones get to choose in a balanced way. They can be philosophical about living with consequences because they don't know what it's like to have to choose your way out of a trap.

No, I don't see feminism as an expansion of some sort of cosmic menu. I see it as a way to get the respect and freedom humanity deserves, if only it was willing to give it. With true respect and freedom in place, the real choices can start. Some things have got better, some other things have got worse, and we're definitely not there yet. But we could get there.

[Paul]

"the baby clock -- go up two management levels in the next five years or go childless. It's a horrible, heartless way of putting it, and it's completely unfair that our society thinks those should be the choice parameters, but that's what they are sometimes." --Kat
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Or go childless? Like men?
That sword cuts both ways, Kat.

Plus, it's not always the gestation that dumps you from the worker's pool - it's the rearing. And there are choices for that. Not enough, and not as good as they could be (I'm an advocate for universal childcare), but they are choices nonetheless, where none exist for men - nature's way.

[Mark]

I agree with your reader. One of the great failures of feminism is that while it attempted to achieve equality in schooling and succeeded, it was nowhere near as successful in transforming the working world. Those upper-middle-class women who have a 'choice' owe it to the rest of us - both male and female - to make a choice that fights misogyny, which means working and getting to positions of power in large organizations and changing the way they are run.

Or am I wrong in thinking that more female management would make the working world less harsh? Would we still be so profit-focused? Would we still have mass layoffs? Would millions of American children be without health insurance?

Maybe the world would be the same. I'd like to think not. But we'll never know if women make 'choices' that don't change things for the men in their lives.

[Paul]

"Or am I wrong in thinking that more female management would make the working world less harsh? Would we still be so profit-focused? Would we still have mass layoffs? Would millions of American children be without health insurance?" -- Mark
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If you thought that, you'd be buying into hundreds of years of stereotypical chauvanistic thinking that paints women differently than men. You'd be buying into the kind of thinking that the Women's Movement of the 60's and early 70's fought against.

I've had a lot of female managers - good and bad - and I have found them them to exhibit the full range of behaviors that I've seen among the men, from wonderful to ruthless and backstabbing. I have seen this range of behaviours even within devout feminist advocacy organizations - which you'd think should be a feminist utopia.

No matter how many such utopias are promised, real life always intrudes, proving that men and women are just folk, more alike than unlike.

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"it was nowhere near as successful in transforming the working world. " - Mark
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That's because its myopic gender focus only bailed out half of the canoe. Men were never emancipated from their societal gender script as "success objects". At the same time, the gender feminists continued to work hard to devalue the choice to be a stay-at-home parent - that's not good salesmanship if you want male gloryhounds to be minding the house.

This wasn't necessarily the fault of feminism - it performed, early on, exceptionally well within its scope to rectify a dramatic disparity and to resocialize a culture within a generation or two. Quite amazing really. But 40 years later, it isn't being very successful at adapting or evolving to move to the next stage. It still carries on the old fights, making enemies where it should be seeking allies.