In a recent Politico magazine piece, Michelle Cottle refers to Michelle Obama as a “feminist nightmare”. I have had conflicting thoughts about this article and thought it would be interesting to address them. Criticism against Michelle Obama include that she is too traditional, that she has not made enough of a difference, and that she is to busy playing the role of mother. I think it is important to recognize Obama’s crucial placement at the intersection of race and gender issues. Cottle’s article contains the implication that Obama is trying to avoid the ‘Angry Black Woman’ stereotype and criticizes her for stating that her most important role is “mom-in-chief”. What Cottle seems to ignore is that feminism for white women is not precisely what feminism means to black women. Melissa Harris-Perry hits the nail on the head in her article “Michelle Obama a ‘feminist nightmare’? Please” when she states. “But when she calls herself mom-in-chief, she is rejecting a different stereotype- the role of Mammy... Instead of agreeing that the public sphere is more important than Sasha and Malia, she buried Mammy and embraces being a mom on her own terms”. She further states that while this may be Cottle’s feminist nightmare, it is her “black motherhood dream”. What Cottle fails to realize is that for many black women, having the ability to stay home and care for their own children is a privilege. Furthermore, Obama has a Harvard Law degree and was her family’s breadwinner before her husband’s political career took off. Cottle uses the fact that she is Ivy-league educated to emphasize how disappointing Obama has been in terms of speaking out on important issues. Cottle’s article suggests that to be a feminist, you can’t care about children’s issues (such as childhood obesity), you can’t care about being a mom, and you can’t dress well. To me, this is counter productive to the feminist cause. Rather than painting a picture of what being a feminist looks like, we should acknowledge that different people (and different races) can take up the feminist cause in different ways and embrace that rather than shame them for it.
