THE YEAR 2008—WHEN HILLARY CLINTON came close to winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination—marked a political watershed moment for women. But signs of change reached beyond one woman and one party. When the Republicans picked little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin for the vice presidential spot on their ticket, they achieved a historic first for the GOP. In Washington, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, had already made headlines in 2007 when she became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, a title that put her next in line for the Oval Office if anything happened to the president or vice president. With so many women at the top echelon of national politics, could a female president be far in the future?
Earlier predictions of who would break through that last barrier centered on women holding lower elective office. Wide speculation was that the first female president would, like most male presidents, come out of Congress or a state governor’s mansion.1 Most probably she would be a lawyer and be married to someone who showed no interest in politics, such as Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis Thatcher. By 2008, the number of women who fit this bill had grown, and the question was less “if” a woman would be president than “when.” Nine of the fifty states had women governors, several of whom boasted achievement records that put them on the short list to serve as running mates or hold high appointive offices. In the 110th Congress, sixteen of the one hundred senators were women, including one ex–First Lady; two states, California and Maine, were represented by only female senators. In the 435-member House of Representatives, seventy-four members were women, and although critics complained that added up to a measly 17 percent, it equaled nearly a third of all women who had ever served in the House.2 The very first, Montana schoolteacher Jeannette Rankin, found the House a lonely place in 1917, when women in thirty-seven states could not even vote.3 Now, a female voice addressing Congress was hardly remarkable.
Before Hillary, First Ladyship was not perceived as a springboard for the presidency, although American history is peppered with names of White House women who hankered to play the political game themselves. Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Helen Taft (1909–1913) stand out as women who in another age might have chosen to run for office themselves. But education standards for women of their time left them ill prepared; strong bias against women in politics would have stymied their efforts in any case. Sarah Polk’s lament in 1843 that she could not go out campaigning with her husband but had to stay home where she had “not much to opperate [sic] on” indicates how completely she felt barred from the public political arena.4
Barriers against women campaigning for their husbands did not fall easily. In 1964 Lady Bird Johnson traveled on her own through eight southern states, the part of the nation most hostile to her husband’s candidacy after he had signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that year. Her courage is all the more remarkable when compared to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reluctance. In 1940, when Eleanor realized the difficulty Franklin faced in seeking an unprecedented third term, she finally accepted the idea of campaigning for him. Although she had no compunctions about standing up for other candidates, a speech for her own husband did not seem “ladylike.”
By 2008, such reluctance sounded quaint; several women, including the very persuasive Rosalynn Carter, had eagerly followed Lady Bird Johnson’s example. Now wives of candidates typically prepared for campaigns by signing up for speech lessons and hiring consultants. Half a century earlier, Mamie Eisenhower did not even indicate a preference for one candidate over another when she urged women to “please vote.” Now impassioned spouses abandoned nonpartisanship entirely and faced large audiences to tout a husband’s record and fitness for high office. That Laura Bush had raised $5 million for George’s 2004 campaign simply underlined the fact that the two-person job of presidency started well before the votes were cast.
Spouses of both gender played an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, and one ended up a stronger figure than her husband. Elizabeth Edwards, a veteran of the 2004 race when her husband shared the Democratic ticket with John Kerry, had already captured popular sympathy with her poignant life story—which included the death of a child and a continuing battle with breast cancer. Now she became a powerful voice in her own right for health care reform. Bill Clinton, back at the center of national attention as he campaigned for Hillary’s presidential bid, made no attempt to duplicate Denis Thatcher’s detachment, causing voters to wonder what role he would play were Hillary to be elected. Cindy McCain, the brewery heiress, tried to limit her participation to standing modestly at her husband John’s side, but she ended up the butt of jokes about how many homes she owned. Michelle Obama, the first African American to campaign actively in a husband’s presidential run, was chastised as an “angry black harridan” when she talked of being “proud of my country for the first time.”5
After her husband’s election, Michelle Obama made more headlines. A Harvard-educated lawyer and former hospital executive, she was accustomed to bringing home a paycheck that exceeded her husband’s Senate salary, but now she described herself as a stay-at-home “mom in chief.” Unlike the only other attorney to become First Lady, she felt no need to feign culinary interests by talking about cookie baking, and she used her first public event at the White House to celebrate a new law extending workers’ rights. This willingness to combine professional expertise and a traditional woman’s role marked something new—another sign that the 2008 election was an important turning point for women.
The watershed moment had been a long time coming. Even after the 1920 amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, many chose not to use it, letting six decades pass before they equaled men’s numbers at the voting booths. By the time that happened, in 1980, a clear difference—a gender gap—showed up in voting patterns. Women favored candidates who supported what they liked: more government intervention to provide health insurance, day care, racial equality, and gun control. Women were decidedly less interested than men in issues such as the use of military force and expanded defense budgets.
All these topics appeared on the debate list of Democrats vying for the 2008 nomination. The two U.S. senators left standing by February 2008, one a woman and the other an African American, agreed on most of the important issues, so talk turned to how gender and race might affect votes.6
Many Americans could remember when neither women nor African Americans could vote in some states, but both populations had made enormous gains after 1965, when they experienced improved pay equity, gained fairer representation in professional schools, and took seats on the Supreme Court. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, few Americans admitted that either race or gender should disqualify candidates for high office, but it remained to be seen how they would vote when faced with a presidential candidate who was not a white male.7
American history is peppered with names of women who stepped forward to offer themselves as presidential candidates, but their efforts were more educational than geared to victory. When the tiny Equal Rights Party put Victoria Woodhull at the top of its 1872 ticket, she got nothing more than a few headlines. The flamboyant stockbroker and her running mate, Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist and newspaperman, drew attention to the subject of equal rights for both women and African Americans but attracted few votes.
The following decade, the Equal Rights Party, now renamed the National Equal Rights Party, nominated a lesser known candidate but one more qualified than Woodhull—attorney Belva Lockwood.8 A former teacher, she had earned her law degree at age forty-three and, in 1879, became the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. With another woman as her running mate, Lockwood managed to get her name on official ballots for president in 1884, but when the tallies came in she had won only a handful of votes. A second run in 1888, this time with a man, Charles Stuart Wells, as her running mate produced no better results, but the article she published fifteen years later, “How I Ran for the Presidency,” indicates how thoughtfully she prepared for the race, by working out detailed platforms and organizing rallies.9
Decades would pass before women got their names on the ballots of either major party. In 1964, Republicans in a few states provided Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine, with enough delegate votes to put her name in nomination at the GOP convention, making her the first woman to win that honor from a major party.10 But she quickly withdrew, and Barry Goldwater was selected to head the ticket.
In 1972, New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, who had already made history as the first African-American woman to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, put together an organization that collected more than 400,000 votes in primaries in twelve states, resulting in nearly 152 delegate votes at the Democratic nominating convention. But Chisholm recognized the odds against her moving into the Oval Office. That was not her goal. Rather, she wanted to “shake things up a little … [so that] the next time a woman of whatever color or a dark skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be President, the way should be a little smoother because I helped pave it.”11 Single-issue candidates occasionally ran, and one anti-abortion candidate, Ellen McCormack, became the first woman to qualify for federal matching campaign funds. But few people believed any one-issue candidate had a serious chance at the presidency.12
Even women with good connections to major parties dropped out when money and support did not materialize. Pat Schroeder, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had won her first election to Congress at age thirty-two, had strong credentials when she explored a presidential run for 1988. In her seventh term as a U.S. representative from Colorado, she had done her homework in a variety of areas not usually considered women’s domain. Aware that political analysts believed any successful woman candidate for commander in chief had to meet the “Sister Mister” test, that is, have “the body of a woman with the character traits of a man,” Schroeder had gotten on House committees that dealt with the military and defense.13
It had not been easy. As she wrote in her autobiography, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, unhappy with the fact that a woman and an African American had been assigned to his committee without his approval, announced that since women and blacks were “worth only half of one ‘regular’ member,” Schroeder would have to share a chair with Ron Dellums, an African American from California. Hard as it is to believe this could happen in 1973, she wrote that “nobody else objected and nobody offered to scrounge up another chair.”14
Even that bizarre experience did not prepare her for the sexism encountered in her presidential bid. No matter how broadly she shaped her campaign talks, the media heard only women’s issues. And all they saw was what she wore. She complained she could be talking about the most serious issues, such as environmental controls or defense policy, and a reporter would ask why she was wearing red. A hectic schedule required traveling light, but when she wore the same dress twice in one week, she heard someone joking that she might have to miss an event because “her plaid dress was at the cleaners.”15
When Schroeder announced she was dropping out of the race after only a few months, fatigue and disappointment combined to cause her to shed a few tears, and the media jumped on this as conclusive proof of her unfitness for high public office. For her, the most upsetting comment came from those who considered anyone who cried to be unfit to have a “finger on the nuclear button.” For her, those people had it all wrong—she wouldn’t want a commander in chief who couldn’t cry.16
For years Schroeder kept a “sob sister” file with accounts of powerful men known to have shed a few tears. Such accounts included George Washington saying good-bye to his generals and Lyndon Johnson at a civil rights ceremony. But the fact remained, in many voters’ minds, that tears disqualified a woman as presidential material because they marked her as unstable, too emotional, not fit to lead.
Elizabeth Dole could not match Schroeder’s elective successes but she had served as cabinet member, headed the Red Cross, and worked hard for her husband’s unsuccessful presidential run in 1996. In 2000, she decided the time had come for her to run on her own. But before any primaries were held, she dropped out, citing money problems and lack of public support. Her husband had not been much help by speaking publicly about her slim chances and hinting he might contribute to one of her rivals, John McCain. Short though it was, her candidacy nonetheless encouraged other women.17
Hillary Clinton’s announcement in February 2007 looked more promising. Like Elizabeth Dole, Clinton had achieved major name recognition and publicity through her spouse. But her eight years as First Lady and her service nearly that long as a U.S. senator from New York had combined to give her some advantages. She was not alone in thinking she could do what no woman had done before her—capture a major party’s nomination. President George Bush, talking to a reporter about her chances, explained why he thought she, rather than Senator Barack Obama, would get the nomination: “She has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big organization that is well funded right off the bat … [O]ne of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball.”18 Bush doubted Obama had the sticking power.
A few months later, it looked like President Bush had it right, at least about Clinton. She had collected a huge war chest, and her campaign spent lavishly, showing the full confidence of a front runner. But by February 2008, a different story was being told. With just two candidates still in the race, the former First Lady was losing ground. On June 7, 2008, after Senator Obama had collected the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination, she suspended her campaign. Supporters who crowded around her in the National Building Museum in Washington to hear her concession speech could hardly contain their disappointment, but she reminded them that they had helped her put nearly eighteen million cracks in the toughest glass ceiling of them all.
Clinton and her campaign managers had struggled to put together a winning strategy, but they found the rules for female candidates were different. The nasty rumors and unsubstantiated charges against her went back to her First Lady days, when she had endured attacks more vicious than those leveled at any of her predecessors. As Garry Wills wrote, “Hillary Hate” became “a large-scale psychic phenomenon” complete with Hillary rag-dolls made for dismembering, talk show hosts commenting on her purported lesbianism and drug use, and song lyrics altered to conclude “that’s why the First Lady is a tramp.”19
But her problem reached beyond personal characterizations and charges. It resulted from what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell described as a very old conflict between “gender norms for the performance of femininity and rhetorical norms governing public advocacy.”20 Cultural norms held that a woman should talk in nonconfrontational terms, sound compassionate, and reveal lots of little personal details that humanized her. But cultural norms were quite different for a leader, especially a commander in chief. Here the prize went to the decisive voice, one using strong argument and evidence to make a case. Hillary Clinton had decades of public speaking experience as a governor’s wife, First Lady, and practicing attorney. But she still struggled to develop a “feminine rhetorical style.” When she happened to tear up at an emotional moment or share a deeply felt personal conviction, she was accused, like women before her, of playing games or taking undue advantage.
While it is true that some voters may have been so enthusiastic about a woman, any woman, in the White House that they would have voted for Hillary Clinton even if they disagreed with her on major issues, the old negative bias against all women candidates was more visible. The same comment that would have been deemed abhorrent if aimed at a member of a racial group was simply ignored if it targeted a woman. Consider the Republican strategist on CNN who argued that it was okay to “call some women a white bitch because that’s what they are.”21
Television and newspaper reports focused on Hillary Clinton’s hair color and makeup and the cut of her suit and the height of her heel while rarely referring to such subjects for male candidates. When she objected to being treated differently, she was deemed testy. When she observed that TV debate hosts often pitched the first question to her, comedians parodied her for complaining. When Chelsea Clinton joined her on the campaign trail, the candidate was accused of “pimping” her daughter. The sexist treatment came from both men and women. When a female supporter of Republican nominee John McCain asked him what he was going to do “about the bitch,” he began his answer with a big laugh.
In listing her qualifications for chief executive, Hillary included her First Lady years. Her most controversial ad began with the sound of a phone ringing and a voice asking if this call came “while your children are safe and asleep” and something was “happening in the world,” who would you want to answer that call? Would it be “someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military? Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world?” The ad ended with Hillary Clinton picking up the ringing phone.22
Barack Obama pointed out that just living in the executive mansion hardly qualified as expertise. Judgment was what mattered, and Obama argued that Clinton’s vote in 2002 to expand President Bush’s war powers hardly showed good judgment. Her supporters replied that residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue did not necessarily prepare a person for the presidency but it did count for something. Encountering world leaders and national press on a daily basis, learning to juggle incredible demands, knowing how to choose the best staff and advisers and then rely on their judgment—all figured in the First Lady’s job as surely as in the president’s.
The Clinton campaign could have pointed to considerable documentation that supported that view. One student of the executive branch wrote that the First Lady is “a senior counselor for the president—perhaps his closest and most trusted.”23 Bradley H. Patterson then enumerated the many ways Hillary Clinton had assisted the forty-second president—including five appearances in front of congressional committees and more than nine hundred appearances in three hundred destinations in the United States and abroad, on top of the five hundred public events in the nation’s capital.
But, Patterson continued, “it was in the international arena that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made what may have been her most illuminating contribution to her husband’s presidency.”24 In the first six and one-half years, she took forty trips overseas, of which twenty-one were on her own without the president, stopping in eighty-three countries. He noted that in 1993 a federal appeals court had ruled that traditionally First Ladies act as advisers and personal representatives of the presidents.25
Debating the proper role of a First Lady was nothing new. Historians and political scientists had been trying to define the job for decades, even comparing it to the vice presidency. While the two jobs vary, depending on who holds them and how the chief executive chooses to use them, ceremonial appearances and policy making are part of both roles. But the presidential spouse holds some obvious advantages. While the vice president is elected and the First Lady is not, she almost always has higher name recognition, as was shown by political scientists who compared news coverage of the two jobs in the Carter administration: “Even Walter Mondale, who was heralded as the new prototype of the activist vice president, failed to receive as much attention in the New York Times as Rosalynn Carter.”26 Would anyone question that Hillary Clinton received more press coverage than Al Gore?
Attempts to codify a First Lady’s political influence and participation have never been entirely satisfying for the very obvious reason that so much of the evidence remains private and confidential. Even when presidential couples acknowledged a wife’s influence, as in the case of Betty Ford’s “pillow talk” or Harry Truman’s nod to Bess’s good judgment, skeptics have held back from quantifying it. Both Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter referred often to their close working relationship, including weekly business lunches. But did Rosalynn’s power exceed that wielded by Nancy in the Reagan collaboration?
Nancy repeatedly downplayed her clout, even when caught on camera suggesting lines to the president, but close aides insisted she controlled major White House policy decisions.27 Two journalists who covered the capital for nearly three decades concluded in 2000 that “Nancy Reagan was perhaps the most powerful First Lady in recent times. She controlled her husband’s schedule with the help of astrologers, forced the firing of a chief of staff and several national security advisers, and pressed her husband to set aside his ‘Evil Empire’ rhetoric to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.” When the producer of an ABC miniseries on Nancy Reagan finished his project, he concluded that people asking when the United States would have its first female president had missed an important point: “We’ve already had her.”28
Further confounding any valid measurement of a First Lady’s power is the fact that Americans disparage influential women and punish the ones who step out on their own platforms. The traditional woman who stands quietly behind her man is often much more to their liking. Historian Gil Troy concluded that Betty Ford “may have cost” her husband the 1976 election and “the historical respect his administration is now often denied” by her outspoken support of various causes and her unwise comments—sounding “like the boozy wife who speaks the unspoken at the company picnic.”29 Troy admitted Betty Ford received a lot of enthusiastic, supportive mail but it did not come from the conservative wings of the Republican Party where her husband needed votes.30
Hillary Clinton’s admission of influence—and her husband’s way of highlighting it—contrasted with what most of her predecessors had done. Eleanor Roosevelt always avoided acknowledging her influence, and she routinely warned those she had helped not to give her credit. Though historians have concluded she “acted as FDR’s vice president,” Franklin typically sounded more exasperated than pleased about her activism, even when he benefited from the fans (and votes) she brought in.31 Lady Bird Johnson, another exceptionally influential presidential spouse, concealed her power behind a soft voice and traditional gestures, such as planting trees or visiting schools. Liz Carpenter, her chief of staff, emphasized that Lady Bird was no Eleanor Roosevelt—Lady Bird saw her role as wifely and supporting and did not intend to make history in her own right. It is hardly surprising that both Eleanor and Lady Bird come out near the top of historians’ rankings of First Ladies.32
After suspending her campaign in early June 2008, Hillary Clinton waited for the Democratic Party convention to make Barack Obama’s candidacy official. Some of her supporters held out hope that she would get the second spot on the ticket, but Obama’s camp insisted that was never seriously considered. Instead, Obama had apparently decided almost as soon as he realized he had the nomination that she would make an excellent secretary of state.33
Within hours of the Democratic convention’s choice of Obama and his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, Republican nominee John McCain announced Sarah Palin would join him on the GOP ticket. The move, calculated to steal Democratic thunder, ended up producing its own lightning. Palin was virtually unknown outside Alaska, but the charismatic mother of five energized Republican voters who hoped to draw off some of the Clinton enthusiasts who had turned lethargic about the Democratic ticket once it had become entirely male.
Although both Senator Clinton and Governor Palin claimed religion as a cornerstone of their lives, they came down on different sides on many issues, most importantly, a woman’s right to abortion. Clinton supported the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and its definition of a woman’s right to privacy, while Palin, a member of the anti-abortion Feminists for Life, wanted to outlaw abortion except in cases where the mother’s life was at stake.
At forty-four, Palin had sixteen years of experience in public service, mostly in the small town of Wasilla, Alaska (population 7,000), where she served on the town council from 1992 to 1996, then as mayor for six years. After a brief interim as Chair of Alaska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she ran on the Republican ticket for governor and took office in December 2006. While Republican headquarters focused on her maverick qualities—bucking Republican superiors in her home state to gain the governorship—bloggers zeroed in on other parts of her résumé, including her support for additional oil drilling and her inquiry about procedures for banning books from libraries.
Palin’s personal history intervened in ways that would have been less likely had she been male. The fact that her infant son had Down syndrome led some to question how she could manage both public office and family responsibilities. Revelations that Republican leaders had paid more than $150,000 for clothes and makeup for her and her family raised questions about authenticity and whether or not the same efforts would have been extended to a male candidate. A belated report that her teenage daughter was five months’ pregnant raised doubts about how carefully the McCain camp had vetted his veep choice.
Palin’s husband, Todd, also came under scrutiny. A college dropout, he presented a stark contrast to his Democratic counterpart, Jill Biden, a college professor with a Ph.D. The “First Dude,” as his wife dubbed him, was a member of the United Steelworkers union and had also worked as a commercial fisherman. He was occasionally a judge for beauty contests but also admitted to advising his wife on policy matters.
Just how the VP nominee’s gender figured in media coverage is difficult to quantify. Certainly her inexperience in the national spotlight proved a disadvantage, as it would have been for any candidate, regardless of gender. While her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, rarely met a question he had not faced before, she frequently stumbled or looked unsure of herself. When ABC’s Charlie Gibson interviewed her on September 11, 2008, she appeared not to know the meaning of the Bush Doctrine, and her answer to his query about going to war with Russia over Georgia and Ukraine struck some viewers as poorly formed. A few weeks later, when Katie Couric interviewed her for CBS, Palin startled some viewers by insisting that serving as governor of a state that bordered another country gave her “foreign policy experience.”
Within the McCain campaign, conflicts arose about how to present Palin. According to reports published later, some of the staffers’ objections to her centered on her gender—they saw in her a case of “post partum depression,” thought she “went off on her own,” and “wouldn’t take directions.” Other prominent Republicans, including William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, thought she did just fine, and he argued “let Palin be Palin.”34 But when the votes were counted on November 4, the conclusion was that she had not helped the McCain candidacy.
Cindy McCain had played a minor part in the campaign. She had married the military hero in 1980, before he ventured into politics, and she had never quite warmed to his career change. The pattern of their lives for many years had been that while he worked in the capital, she stayed in Phoenix, looking after the business and their four children, including an adopted daughter from Bangladesh. In fact, when John McCain entered presidential primaries in 2000, his wife, who accompanied him to some rallies, noted that she had never “spent this much time with my husband…. For most of the twenty years we’ve been married he’s been in Washington all week while I’m in Arizona with the kids.”35
Little else about the 2000 campaign pleased Cindy McCain. After her husband won in New Hampshire, false rumors that he was actually the father of their adopted daughter helped him lose the South Carolina primary. The baseness of such a charge caused Cindy McCain to break down and cry in front of reporters, and John McCain eventually suspended his first presidential campaign. The media scrutiny of his family had already uncovered old reports about Cindy McCain’s early ’90s addiction to painkillers and how she had reached into her own charity’s supply to meet that need. The stress resulting from incursions into her private life is sometimes cited as causing her stroke in 2004, when she was only fifty years old. And the stroke’s effect on her speech was cited as her reason for playing such a small part in the 2008 campaign, although during her brief appearances she showed no evidence of impairment.
In the interim between the November 4 election and the January 20 inauguration, while the McCains settled back into old routines and the Obamas packed for the White House, the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian reopened its popular First Ladies exhibit. The previous exhibit, “First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image,” had highlighted the women’s substantive contributions, causing Betty Ford to comment that she was happy to be remembered for something other than the dresses she wore. But the new exhibit returned to the old theme that had disappointed Ford. Although one of its three sections covered women’s contributions as campaigners and advocates, the main focus was on inaugural gowns and party gear.
Though no one would argue that the ceremonial role did not figure in a First Lady’s duties, it was only part of the picture. From the beginning of the republic, women had played “parlor politics,” using social situations to influence elections, shape policy, and manage personnel.36 But by the late twentieth century, presidents’ wives had moved out more openly into the political arena, and they were giving partisan speeches, taking stands, and making their influence felt. The twenty-first century had seemed to have promised more, but the new exhibit was a throwback to an earlier era.
Signs that women had indeed made impressive gains quickly appeared in President-elect Obama’s first appointments. Although he (and other Americans) had not supported Hillary Clinton for chief executive, he appointed her as his secretary of state. Journalists and political pundits found it easy to merge her two First Lady terms and eight Senate years into what amounted to sixteen years at the center of the nation’s political life. In the Senate, she had sat on the powerful Armed Services Committee, and her hard work on two important subcommittees, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, and Readiness and Management Support, had put her at the center of debates over national security.
Expectations ran high that as secretary of state Clinton would continue her advocacy work for women around the world and use her position to urge countries to improve women’s access to education and health care and to put their civil rights and opportunities on a par with their brothers and husbands. Her speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, when she argued that women’s rights are human rights, had received enormous publicity, but it was her many years of traveling the globe and speaking up for women that had rendered her face one of the most recognizable on earth. Her work to develop loan assistance programs and health care facilities for women in developing nations had made her popular in areas where she had never set foot. As the Boston Globe reported, in remote villages of Ecuador, in homes lacking electricity, women were “beaming at the thought that she would become the next Secretary of State.”37
By the time of her Senate confirmation hearings in January 2009, it was easy to forget that she had so recently focused all her energy on becoming president, but the confidence with which she explained her views and revealed her considerable knowledge made clear she remembered. To the millions of Americans who had supported her presidential bid—and those who had not—she gave no indication she meant to exit the national stage anytime soon.
While Hillary geared up for her important new job at the State Department, Michelle Robinson Obama settled her family in the White House. It was a move she had not expected to make when her husband first announced he was running. In fact, the November 4 victory had surprised many people, and viewers around the globe took some time to register the reality that an African American with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama had been elected to the most important job in the world. His campaign had stressed the need for change—in Iraq, in health care, in how government worked—and a deep economic downturn, just weeks before the election, reinforced dissatisfaction with the status quo. At the time of his inauguration, expectations ran high for the forty-fourth president of the United States and for his wife, an attorney and mother of two who had taken a leave from her six-figure job to campaign for him.
Unlike her husband, Michelle Obama had strong ties to a single city, Chicago, Illinois, where she had been born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. On the day of her birth, January 17, 1964, a rancorous debate in the nation’s capital centered on just what shape a new civil rights act would take.38 JFK’s assassination less than two months earlier had rocked the nation, but Lyndon Johnson determined to put that shock to good use and to get important legislation passed. He signed a new civil rights law a few months later, on July 2. That law, signed before she learned to walk, would significantly alter Michelle’s life path by enlarging her opportunities with magnet schools and affirmative action. The Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law the following year, helped send her to the White House.
Young Michelle did not look to Washington for her heroes—she found them right at home. Her only sibling, a brother named Craig who was twenty-one months her senior, provided an excellent example both inside and outside the classroom. But it was their hardworking parents, Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant worker, and Marian Shields Robinson, a homemaker, who pushed both children to excel. Rejecting the easy option—to send their son and daughter to a convenient public high school—the Robinsons encouraged their athletic son to enroll in a parochial school with an outstanding basketball program. For Michelle, they decided the newly opened Whitney M. Young Magnet School offered a quality education that more than compensated for the daily three-hour commute. Among racially mixed classmates who came from all over the city, she did well both academically and socially. She made the National Honor Society in her junior year and was elected treasurer of her senior class.39
After graduation in 1981, Michelle followed her brother to Princeton, and like him, she majored in sociology. Although one of the oldest colleges in America, Princeton had only begun to accept women as undergraduates in 1969. African Americans, first admitted after World War II, still comprised only about 10 percent of the student body. Even the “little sister” of a basketball star could feel like an outsider, and Michelle saw herself as a “visitor on campus, as if I really don’t belong.”40
According to Liza Mundy, a Washington Post reporter who graduated three years ahead of Michelle, Princeton was not a congenial place for African Americans in the early 1980s.41 A small but vocal group of students made no secret of their opinion that admission standards had dropped to accommodate minorities, and the editor of a campus publication, Prospect, described “black culture” as pathologically violent and inferior to white culture.
Before Michelle had a chance to see how widespread those ideas were on campus, she encountered blatant racism in her freshman dorm. Her assigned roommate, a white coed from New Orleans, had no experience with interracial living. When she called her mother to describe Michelle, the mother immediately began trying to get her daughter moved. Princeton officials stood firm on the assignment, but eventually, when a larger room became available, Michelle’s roommate moved out. While not fully aware of her roommate’s maneuverings at the time, Michelle began searching for a spot on campus where she felt more comfortable, and she soon settled on the Third World Center, a gathering place for students of color.
When it came time to choose a topic for her senior thesis, Michelle decided on “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” Working under the direction of Professor Walter Wallace, one of only five tenured African Americans on the entire faculty, she examined how the college’s African-American alumni had changed their attitudes while at Princeton. Specifically, she set out to learn if the Ivy League experience had made graduates more or less willing to help other African Americans who had not enjoyed the same privilege.
The eighty-nine respondents who answered her questionnaire provided too small a sample, she admitted, to draw many general conclusions. Indeed, what emerges from the thesis tells more about the author than about those surveyed. As the twenty-one-year-old senior struggled with ideas about race and class, she realized that many of her non-black fellow students came from economic backgrounds much like hers, and they found themselves equally bewildered by classmates with large expense accounts, considerable international travel experience, and important family connections that promised easy access to successful careers.
But, in Michelle Robinson’s case, race added a powerful component to the mix, raising what seemed to her an insurmountable barrier between her and white students. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my Blackness than ever before,” she wrote in her thesis, adding, “[I]t often seems as if, to [Whites at Princeton], I will always be Black first and a student second.”42
Although Michelle understood she and her white classmates shared identical goals—“acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school … [and] a high-paying position in a successful corporation”—she worried about how she could ever fit into a “White cultural and social structure [that kept her] on the periphery.”43 And how would she reconcile her personal success with the obligation instilled by her parents to give back to the working-class community of Chicago’s South Side where she grew up? More than a survey of alumni attitudes, the thesis shows a thoughtful young woman pondering life choices.
Following graduation from Princeton, the “prestigious graduate school” Michelle Robinson chose was Harvard Law, and after receiving her J.D. in 1988, she headed back to Chicago and a job at the Sidley Austin law firm. At twenty-four, she was already collecting a larger salary than her father ever hoped to earn, yet she continued to question whether it was the life she wanted. Michelle shortly decided to change course. She left Sidley Austin in 1991 to join the staff of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Then she moved on to hold various executive positions at the University of Chicago and its hospital.
It would be easy to attribute Michelle Robinson’s career change to the influence of Barack Obama, whom she met when he came to work as a summer intern at Sidley Austin in 1989. His focus on community organizing offered a stark contrast to the views of many of her colleagues in corporate law, and their courtship and marriage (in October 1992) pulled her into his world. But Michelle had already indicated her wish to “give back” to the community by working at the Legal Aid Society while at Harvard, and her directorship of a Chicago youth program, Public Allies, continued that dedication.
When asked about her reasons for leaving Sidley Austin, she often pointed to the deaths of two persons close to her—her father, in March 1991, and a college friend who died of cancer a few months later at age twenty-five. “All of a sudden,” she later told a reporter, “I was on this path … sitting as a second-year associate at Sidley Austin and I hadn’t really thought about how I got there.” Her coworkers showed no special pleasure in their jobs, she noticed, “and the longer you stayed, the harder it was to get out. The golden handcuffs.”44
Regardless of the kind of work Michelle did, both she and her husband struggled to balance careers and family responsibilities. Neither claimed it was easy, and both admitted the bulk of their household’s management fell to her, especially after his election to the Illinois State Senate, which required him to spend several days a week in Springfield. Even earlier, during the time when he was writing Dreams from My Father, the book that would later make them rich, and teaching law, he had little energy left over for mundane household matters. The birth of their first daughter, Malia, in 1998, brought immense joy but it also complicated scheduling and led to tough bargaining on how to handle childcare. In 2000, Barack’s failed race for Congress soured Michelle on politics, and by the time Sasha was born in 2001, their marriage was “strained,” according to Richard Wolffe, a journalist who came to know both Obamas well.45
According to Wolffe, Michelle Robinson “had fallen in love with an idealistic young man who spoke about the difference between the ‘world as it is and the world that can be.’ “46 But his political career had given him little chance to work toward his vision. In her view, politics seemed “like a waste of energy” and holding elective office could do little to achieve that world “that can be.” Much more likely to produce change, she believed, were nonelective jobs in public service.
For her part, Michelle did not want to quit working—she took great pleasure solving “problems that have nothing to do with my husband and children.”47 But she felt frustrated and angry by conflicting demands on her time, and she perceived her husband’s political aspirations as “selfishness and careerism.”48 Only when she decided to call on other resources—her mother and a good babysitter—to fill in when Barack could not be there, did she make peace with her situation. As she explained, she had spent a lot of time expecting her husband “to fix things but then I came to realize that he was there in the ways he could be. If he wasn’t there, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a good father or didn’t care…. Once I was OK with that, my marriage got better.”49
Yet Michelle was not fond of the idea of Barack entering the 2004 race for a U.S. Senate seat. His election would keep him in Washington, D.C., several days a week, leaving her with two little girls and a full-time job back in Chicago. Nonetheless, she was convinced of his competence and commitment and reluctantly joined his campaign—an experience that helped prepare her for the 2008 presidential race.
By that time Michelle had become a lively public speaker who was comfortable in front of large audiences, and she frequently reached out to women in the audience by revealing her own struggles to combine job and family. “If a toilet overflows,” she would say, “we women are the ones rescheduling our meetings to be there when the plumber comes.”50 As First Lady, she would of course never have to wait for plumbers, but she promised to continue her efforts to find ways to help all women juggle work and family responsibilities more easily.51
Accustomed to speaking her mind, Michelle accumulated critics during her husband’s presidential race. After she told an audience that she finally felt proud of her country “for the first time in my adult life,” unfriendly media zeroed in on what they described as her “angry” attitude. The National Review put her picture on its cover and dubbed her “Mrs. Grievance.”52 In contrast to her husband’s cool, unruffled demeanor, Michelle’s exuberance gave her an unsettled look, and her frankness was sometimes interpreted as carrying a “chip on her shoulder.”
Some voters had trouble reconciling her “anger” with what they saw as an enormously privileged life. The Obamas reported a family income (his Senate salary, her hospital salary, and the royalties from his books) of $4.2 million in 2007, which put them in the very top echelon of American households.53 Michelle pointed out this was a recent development, and in fact, the bulk of their income that year ($3.9 million) came from book sales that were a result of his new popularity. Because their earnings had been considerably more modest in their earlier years together, Michelle explained that both she and Barack had struggled—like many other Americans—to pay off their student loans.
In other ways, Michelle Obama helped render her family “ordinary” and her husband “just like” other Americans. In her speech to the Democratic convention in August 2008, she melded her own very American family story, which included roots in South Carolina slavery, with that of her husband’s more exotic, international background. With one parent from Kansas and one from Kenya, he had grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia, raised by a single white mother and white grandparents. But his wife insisted he had a lot in common with the Robinsons in Chicago—who put a high value on hard work, held to the promises they made, and recognized the importance of treating everyone, whether you agreed with them or not, with dignity and respect. In the remaining weeks of the campaign, Michelle repeated this message as she traveled the country on her own and with her husband, but she made a point of getting back to her young daughters in Chicago after no more than one night’s absence. “I am a mother first,” she often said.
As the reality of the November 4 victory set in, millions of Americans could remember when the idea of African Americans residing in the White House was inconceivable. Black Americans, both enslaved and free, had helped construct the mansion in the 1790s, and they had staffed the building and grounds as butlers, maids, chauffeurs, and gardeners for more than two centuries.54 But getting on the guest list was something else. When President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, whose book Up From Slavery had just appeared in 1901, to dine with him, newspapers treated it as front-page news, and some lambasted TR for defiling the White House.55
Michelle Obama took up residence almost exactly eighty years after another African-American woman from Chicago’s South Side helped write White House history on a much smaller scale. In June 1929, when First Lady Lou Hoover planned her traditional tea for the wives of congressmen, she included newcomer Jessie DePriest, whose husband, Oscar, had just become the first African American ever elected by a northern state to the House of Representatives. The elegant Mrs. DePriest had no way of knowing the extent of preparation necessary to guarantee she would not be embarrassed when she showed up at the White House gates. Staff had to be prompted not to turn her away or direct her to the service entrance. Other congressional wives had been sounded out so that only those agreeable to her presence would attend that day.56
But no amount of preparation could control what newspapers printed and how people reacted. Letters of protest came from men and women across the nation, including the DePriests’ hometown. One Chicago woman wrote Lou Hoover that “this nation of white people elected you and your husband to take care of the nation and … we did not think we would have to be ashamed of our actions later.”57
The eight decades separating the White House appearances of Jessie DePriest and Michelle Obama had seen many changes. It was no longer remarkable for African Americans to hold high government jobs or important elective offices. Those celebrities who came to Washington as guests of the presidential family merited no special attention. When Sammy Davis, Jr., famously chose to sleep in the Queen’s Bedroom rather than in the Lincoln Bedroom when President Nixon invited him to stay overnight in 1973, he quipped, “Now I don’t want [Lincoln] coming in here talking about ‘I freed ’em but I sure didn’t mean for ’em to sleep in my bed.’ “58 Little did Davis know that only thirty-six years later, an African-American family would be sleeping in the master suite.
Even before Michelle Obama took up residence in the nation’s capital, TV commentators liked to compare her to Jacqueline Kennedy. Both were attractive young mothers with two little children. Each showed a special flair for clothes and caught the imagination of Americans not previously interested in government or politics. In Michelle’s case, the iPod generation saw her as one of them, and her dedication to physical fitness, feisty comments, and high energy level all set her apart from previous First Ladies who had sometimes seemed stodgy, prim, and out of touch.
In fact, Michelle had more in common with Hillary Clinton than with Jackie Kennedy, who rarely felt at ease on the campaign trail, never earned a graduate degree, and made no secret of the fact that she preferred art to politics. While the Camelot First Lady ran up huge bills for clothing and jewelry, Michelle made a point of appearing in outfits from J. Crew, just like those worn by working women across the country.
As the first mother of two young children to preside over the White House in nearly fifty years, Michelle Obama’s first task was to choose a school. Amy Carter, nine years old when her father was inaugurated, had attended public school, and Caroline Kennedy, three years old in 1961, had taken classes on the top floor of the White House, along with a few other children her age. The Obama girls were already accustomed to the private University of Chicago lab school, and their parents followed the Clintons’ example in choosing Sidwell Friends. At least Sasha and Malia could count on seeing some familiar faces there, as they had already made friends with the vice president’s grandchildren who also attended Sidwell.
While the incoming First Lady focused on such matters as a school for her daughters, whether or not her mother would move to Washington, and what kind of dog the family should get, she showed little interest in taking a public role in her husband’s administration. Even with her law degree and executive experience, she gave no hint she wanted to schedule regular “working lunches” with the president or chair any important task forces. Apparently comfortable with the idea of putting her own career on hold, she caused feminists to squirm as she admitted to more than a casual interest in fashion and delighted in describing herself as “mom in chief.” Rather than old-fashioned or too traditional, her combination of choices appeared youthful and new to many Americans who looked to this 5’11” health enthusiast with an athletic gait to redefine the role of First Lady.
The second attorney to put her stamp on the job of First Lady stayed out of the spotlight for the first ten days of her White House tenure, leaving her husband to garner the bulk of attention with his plans for an economic stimulus, choice of advisers, and announcement on Guantanamo. The First Lady had plenty to do in order to get acquainted with the workings of the 132-room mansion and line up a staff of her own. But when time came for her first public event, Michelle Obama felt no need to follow Hillary Clinton’s example and emphasize her domestic side. She called in guests to applaud passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act extending workers’ rights.
Signed by President Obama on January 29, 2009, the law permitted workers more time to file discrimination suits against their employers. In introducing Ledbetter to the 180 White House guests, Michelle Obama said, “She knew unfairness when she saw it, and was willing to do something about it because it was the right thing to do, plain and simple.”59
In the weeks that followed, Internet blogs and major newspapers showed an active First Lady reaching out to D.C. residents as she visited schools, ladled out pasta in a soup kitchen, and took her friends to local pizzerias. Although she had never lived in Washington, she connected easily with youngsters in urban working-class neighborhoods much like the one she had known in Chicago’s South Side.60
When one young student queried her about her feelings on kitchen duty, now that she had a professional chef, she cheerfully admitted not missing cooking at all—the White House chef turned out “really good” food.61 That same candor marked her comments about balancing work and mothering, as she confessed to one audience, “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wonder or worry about whether I’m doing the right thing for myself, for my family, for the girls.”62
Such openness about private struggles was relatively new for a First Lady. Betty Ford had surprised reporters by releasing details of her breast cancer surgery, talking about her children’s possible use of marijuana, and admitting she took “a Valium every day.”63 Like Ford, Michelle Obama gained many fans because of her honesty about day-to-day frustrations and adjustments. Her popularity soared in the early months, and the Pew Research Center reported in April 2009 that Republican women had raised their opinions of her considerably. Fewer than half had admitted a favorable view before the inauguration but now two-thirds liked what they saw.64 A USA Today/ Gallup poll taken at about the same time reported that 79 percent of Americans approved of the way Michelle Obama was handling the job of First Lady while only 8 percent disapproved.65
Fashion and style media who covered the new First Lady found she had a mind of her own. Unlike her predecessors, Clinton and Bush, who had permitted media stylists to choose their clothes and supervise makeup for the photo shoots, Michelle Obama insisted on controlling her image—with clothes out of her own closet.66 Her Vogue cover photo made her look like a smiling, innocent schoolgirl.67 The topics covered in her interviews—children, dogs, gardens, and healthy eating—sounded a lot like those favored by Barbara Bush or Mamie Eisenhower. Reporters’ requests to talk with her about more substantial topics, such as health care reform, were politely turned down as the Obama team sought to turn the attorney/executive into a non-threatening, nonpartisan woman-next-door.68 She made a couple stops at federal agencies in early February to talk up the president’s stimulus package but these were more cheerleading, goodwill missions than activist promotion of policy.
The Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff declared the Obama White House press operation “the most brilliant and successful and certainly calculated” of any he had observed.69 With a professional staff of fourteen in the press office and an additional forty-seven people working with them, the forty-fourth president employed a remarkably large PR machine. But its effectiveness had other explanations, according to Wolff: “It’s more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably” with a press secretary “personally closer to the president than any press secretary in history.”70
This careful image management extended to the First Lady, according to Wolff, and although her omnipresent photos and print coverage gave an impression she was “everywhere,” in fact she appeared in public only about three days a week in carefully managed events. She gave her only commencement speech in spring 2009 at University of California, Merced, after students staged a lovefest to get her there. For the New York Times, Michelle Obama chose to unveil her White House garden, not typically front-page news and a rather unlikely project for a woman raised in a city apartment. After the smiling First Lady was shown wielding a shovel, one journalist wondered if Laura Bush would have made the front page had she started a garden. Wolff concluded the Obama press team operated “pretty much at the levels of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.”71
Such management of the First Lady’s image was a long time coming. Many of Michelle Obama’s predecessors, having struggled unsuccessfully with the public’s insatiable curiosity about them, would have marveled at how she did it.72 From the nation’s founding, people have never seemed to get enough information about the chief executive’s family, and it is fair to point to George Washington as making decisions that accommodated them. When he arranged for Martha to join him in New York, the nation’s first capital city, he engaged the presidential barge and ordered a thirteen-gun salute as welcome. Then he ensconced her in living quarters connected to his office and invited New Yorkers to social events over which she presided. Such mixing of family and business inevitably involved spouses in their husbands’ jobs and, as more than one of the women pointed out, they could hardly avoid knowing something of the political maneuverings of the day.73
As early as 1789 one New Yorker, calling himself “Pro Republica,” grumbled about newspapers paying so much attention to the president’s wife. If they did not mend their ways, he wrote to the New York Gazette, something like the following might appear about Mrs. Washington: “Her Serenity who was much indisposed last week by a pain in the third joint of the fourth finger of her left hand … is in a fair way of recovery [after catching a cold when she went out in] the Siberian fur lately delivered to her by the Russian Ambassador as a present from the Princess.”74
Remove the quaint language and Pro Republica had it right—First Ladies gradually became accustomed to having every detail of their private lives put out for public scrutiny. By 2009, Michelle Obama faced an extremely intrusive public—one intent on knowing how much she paid for her clothes and how she “worked out” those “bare” arms. In an interview with Oprah, she cheerfully answered a query about whether she was pregnant, using different language (“Not pregnant. Not planning on it”) than that employed about Mary Lincoln nearly a century and a half earlier when a national magazine informed readers: “The reports that Mrs. Lincoln was in an interesting condition are untrue.”75
Complaints against such invasions of privacy have never worked—as Abigail Adams learned. Thoroughly disgusted with newspapers revealing just how much her son earned and other family matters, she wrote her sister that she saw in the articles “the true spirit of Satan…. Lies, falshoods [ sic ], calumny [ sic ] and bitterness.”76
Nor did the threat of fines scare people off. In 1888, after President Grover Cleveland’s young bride found her face gracing advertisements for perfumes and household products, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives making the unauthorized use of the “likeness or representation of any female living or dead, who is or was the wife, mother, daughter or sister of any citizen of the United States” a crime subject to a fine up to $5,000.77 But the bill failed to pass, and White House families had to come up with their own remedies. The Kennedy White House used pressure to keep their young children and Jackie out of ads,78 just as the Obamas in 2009 appealed to a manufacturer to stop producing “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha” dolls.
The Obama daughters were bound to attract attention, and their parents had to consider carefully how to deal with that. A look back at other young White House occupants is instructive. When tourists started prowling White House grounds with cameras in the late nineteenth century, safety concerns led presidential families to call for restrictions. That led to angry outbursts from irate reporters and disappointed voters. Julia Grant (1869–1877) ordered the gates of the residence closed to protect her young children, then heard herself chastised as “exclusive,” a costly pejorative for an elected official’s spouse. When Frances Cleveland (1886–1889, 1893–1897) decided to keep her very young children indoors and out of sight, retaliation came via rumors that they were “sick” and “deformed.” Caroline Harrison (1893–1897) gave reporters fuller rein, allowing her young grandson, “Baby McKee,” to appear in what later came to be called “photo opportunities,” and it was generally agreed that he became “the most photographed” child in America.
Edith Roosevelt (1901–1909) deserves credit for initiating more successful controls over what went out about her and her family, although her efforts seem positively quaint when compared to methods routinely used a century later. She employed a social secretary, a first for a president’s wife, and then instructed her about what to tell reporters about the color of her dress or the menu for a state dinner. In those pre-television days, reporters and readers had little chance to check on the accuracy of what they were told, and the frugal Edith admitted she fibbed a bit, saying the same dress was blue on one night and green on another. She also arranged for the distribution of posed, formal pictures of her children so reporters did not have to camp out on the White House lawn waiting for their chance.
Michelle Obama faced a curious public far more ubiquitous and better equipped than that encountered by her predecessors. Large dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post assigned reporters full time to the First Lady, and dozens of blogs, some independent, some affiliated with mainstream publications, reported on her every move. The Internet made possible the nearly instant global sharing of images and words so that anyone from Maine to Honolulu could compare thoughts on the price of Michelle’s sneakers and how she ate her hamburgers.
As annoying as such intrusions could be, they presented a more serious problem if the presidential family’s image on the Internet did not mesh with West Wing objectives. Michelle Obama had already encountered considerable negative publicity during the campaign: critics charged she sounded angry in her Princeton thesis; she looked combative on the New Yorker cover; and she seemed disrespectful describing her husband’s stinky morning breath. Now a diligent press could shape an image of her as sweeter, more traditional, and less threatening.
Although the Ledbetter reception had been her first public event at the White House, Michelle’s next few months featured a bipartisan First Lady far more attuned to fashion, family, and good works than to any substantive matter that might divide voters. The few interviews she did grant went to periodicals that underlined this image of a contented, traditional First Lady. She even tempered comments about her job, and after earlier complaining that it “doesn’t pay much” she started describing it as the “best job in the world.” Her closest brush with controversy occurred when she was photographed with one arm casually looped around the Queen of England’s waist. Whether this constituted a breach of royal etiquette remained unclear—some bloggers weighed in to say she might just have extended a supporting arm to a fragile, aging monarch in danger of falling.
Simply by taking her place in the White House private quarters, Michelle Obama signaled an important shift in American history. Her portrait would now join the dozens of white faces that made up the portrait gallery on the ground floor. What clearer sign could there be that the color of one’s skin no longer disqualifies a person for occupancy of the White House? But the same election that took Michelle Obama to the executive mansion carried another equally powerful message—gender does not disqualify either.
That the first real contender to break this last glass ceiling came out of the ranks of First Ladies may seem remarkable to some. But it was unsurprising to those who had already seen presidential material in many of Hillary Clinton’s predecessors—keen intelligence, enormous ambition, and a pronounced political streak.