Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/432957/michelle_obama_mom_in_chief
Interesting snippet from a Mother's day piece MHL wrote on the criticism of Michelle Obama's self-selected "Mom in Chief" role potentialy undermining feminism:

White, middle-class, gender norms in the United States have generally asserted that women belong in the domestic sphere. These norms have limited white women's opportunities for education and employment. But the story has been different for women of color and women from poor and working class origins. These women have faced the requirement of employment and the shouldered the extreme burden of attempting to effectively parent while providing financially for their families. Black women were full participants in agricultural labor during slavery, the backbreaking work of sharecropping, and the domestic services of Jim Crow. Even middle class and elite black women have typically worked as teachers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and professionals. At every level of household income and at every point in American history, black women have been much more likely to engage in paid labor than their white counterparts. Even Claire Huxtable worked full time!

So when Michelle Obama makes a choice to focus on supporting her daughters through their school transition and providing companionship to her husband as he governs she is not really conforming to norms. She is surprisingly thwarting expectations of black women's role in the family and representing a different image of black women than we are used to encountering in this country.

As mom-in-chief Michelle Obama also subverts a deep, powerful, and old public discourse on black women as bad mothers. Enslaved black women had no control over their own children. Their sons and daughters could be sold away from them without their consent, or brutally disciplined without their protection. So when a black woman claims public ownership of her children she helps rewrite that ugly history.

In the modern era, black mothers have been publicly shamed as crack mothers, welfare queens, and matriarchs. Black single motherhood is blamed for all manner of social ills from crime to drugs to social disorder. And black mothers are often represented in popular culture and the public imagination as domineering household managers whose unfeminine insistence on control both emasculates their potential male partners and destroys their children's future opportunities. These public images of black motherhood encourage the state not to assist black mothers as women doing the best they can in tough circumstances, but instead to blame them as unrelenting cheats who unfairly demand assistance from the system.

Michelle Obama is an important corrective to this distorted view of black motherhood. She and her own mother, Grandma Robinson, are kind, devoted, loving, and firm black mothers who challenge the negative images that dominate the public discourse on black motherhood.

she also suggests that Michelle could be brought out in September as a secret weapon for the Healthcare Reform effort. Should be interesting - healthcare needs all the help it can get!