Michelle Obama’s “momification” is positive too

November 13, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized

Rebecca Traister on Salon has a thought-provoking article called “The Momification of Michelle Obama.” Traister’s thesis is that while it’s tempting and wonderful to get excited about “Bamalot” and our new, very now first fanily, it’s also an essentially regressive and anti-feminist focus. Traister writes, “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.”

I have to disagree. I think the media and popular focus on Michelle as Mom (and she has self-identified her role now as “Mommy in Chief) is a reflection of our deep desire to be dual-centric, or even family-centric, in our lives. Especially because work is so tenuous now. We choose to focus on family.

Traister questions “In one of the smartest pieces that has been written about the next first lady, Geraldine Brooks’ profile of her in the October issue of More magazine, Brooks writes that while you can see Michelle’s life as the quintessential modern woman’s success story, the trajectory can also be read as a “depressingly retrograde narrative of stifling gender roles and frustrating trade-offs.” In serious ways, Brooks writes, “it is her husband’s career, his choices — choices she has not always applauded — that have shaped her life in the last decade.”

It’s true. This is nothing new for Mrs. Obama however, and after all, her husband is president of the United States. As compromises go, perhaps hers was not so painful in the end.

I choose to draw hope from her example. A growing portion of the American workforce is “dual-centric,” as researchers Ellen Galinsky and Ellen Kossek have found: seeing work and home as complementary activities, and feeling they can be successful in both. In research, at least, workaholism is losing its appeal. Gen X and Gen Y are more “dual centric” than the Boomers: younger generations care more about integrating work and family and will prioritize their lives to strike the right balance. Gen Y and millenials are even more family-centric than Gen X-ers.

And this is a good thing: a study from Boston College, the Sloan Foundation, and the Families and Work Institute found Employees who are “dual-centric or family-centric exhibit significantly better mental health, greater satisfaction with their lives, and higher levels of job satisfaction than employees who are work-centric.”

I hope that Michelle’s time as Mommy in Chief, during which she will no doubt work very hard, inspires us all- even hard-working feminists- to value both work and home. It’s ok.

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