I sincerely hope the media is about to move on from the incessant Michelle Obama mania. I'm not a First Wife groupie; I don't love Michelle Obama. I don't hate Michelle Obama. I just wish the media would cool it with the over-the-top celebration of Barack Obama's good fortune in getting a dutiful wife.
I confess, my idea of change requires a First Wife like Howard Dean's spouse.
As the cable news channels tell us ad nauseam, Michelle Obama is a role model for little girls:
"Nothing in my life's path would have predicted that I would be standing here," she told the girls. "I am an example of what is possible when girls, from the very beginning of their lives, are loved and nurtured by the people around them."
Welcome to the new millennium of women's rights where girls of all colors can aspire to attend the best of colleges and attain high powered careers as doctors, lawyers and CEOs. Women of all colors can follow Michelle's example, they can marry well and give it all up in order to serve husbands in the role of dutiful wife. Hello? We need a role model for this?
Surprise. Progress is not linear. We who don't know our history just keep on repeating it and around and around we go. Like Dale Spender observed many years ago, every 50 years or so a new crop of women wake up to discover the patriarchy camped inside their heads and then proceed to reinvent the feminist wheel. And women like Betty Friedan just keep on rolling over in their graves.
1950s First Lady Feminist Politics Mental Colonization News Gender Misogyny Women's History Michelle Obama Patriarchy
