Michelle Obama
Life lessons from an inspirational First Lady
IF YOU thought marriage to Barack Obama seemed all moonlight and roses, Michelle Obama begs to differ.
The former First Lady brought the publicity tour for her best-selling memoir to Britain last night, and with it some straight-talking about relationships. “When I talk to young people just starting to get married, I say: there are going to be huge chunks of time where you want to push him out the window,” she said.
“Many people look at my marriage as #relationshipgoals. ‘We want to be like Michelle and Barack.’ Ok, let me tell you about Michelle and Barack...”
The comment raised a huge cheer from the predominantly female audience that gave Mrs Obama a rock star welcome at London’s South Bank Centre. The event was part of her whistlestop tour to promote Becoming, the memoir that has become the fastest-selling book of 2018 with three million copies sold. Mrs Obama is arguably now more of a box office draw than her husband.
More than 50,000 people applied for tickets and the 2,700 lucky enough to secure them were treated to an hour of Mrs Obama’s thoughts on women, race and life in the White House.
In conversation with the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mrs Obama revealed what she had learnt about power. “Here’s the secret. I’ve been at probably every powerful table that you can think of ... I’ve served on corporate boards, I’ve been at G summits, I’ve sat in at the UN. They’re not that smart.
“There’s a lot of things that folks are doing to keep their seats because they don’t want to share power. And what better way to do it than to make you think you don’t belong? I’m not saying that there aren’t talented people out there. But I’m here to tell you that their ideas are no more exciting.”
She reminisced about her meetings with the Queen. “Barack is so incredibly fond of Her Majesty. I won’t go into his fangirling but I think it’s because she reminds him of his grandmother,” she said. And she joked that she never thought her husband would win the election “because I didn’t believe that America was ready for a black president, let alone a black president called Barack Hussein Obama who, at the time he was elected, looked like he was 12”.
Earlier in the day, Mrs Obama made a return to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington, north London, which she first visited in 2009.
Around 90 per cent of the school’s 900 students are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, and are drawn from a deprived borough. Mrs Obama told the girls that she still suffers from impostor syndrome. “It never goes away,” she said. “I still feel that on some level I have something to prove because of the colour of my skin, because of the shape of my body, because who knows if people are judging me.”
Mrs Obama said she believed that top universities such as Oxford should invite disadvantaged children to “walk the hallowed halls” long before they reach the GCSE stage. “All kids can only dream things that are known to them. So if they don’t see elite colleges, if they don’t get access to them, they don’t know those places exist,” she said.
‘All kids can only dream things that are known to them. If they don’t see elite colleges, they don’t know these places are available to them’
Feminist ideals have only ever succeeded in making most of us feel like failures
Hearing the former First Lady swear was always going to get people going. But the fourletter word Michelle Obama let slip at a talk on Saturday was the least important part of what she said.
“Marriage still ain’t equal, y’all,” she told the sold-out Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, where the 54-year-old was taking part in a Q&A to promote her memoir, Becoming.
“It ain’t equal. I tell women that whole ‘you can have it all’ – mmm, nope, not at the same time, that’s a lie. It’s not always enough to ‘lean in’ because that s--- doesn’t work.”
Because we’re living at a time when PC lies are not just accepted but expected and propagated, and because we’ve all grown used to saying what we should rather than what we feel, common sense tends to sound like genius. But slices of honesty from women of Michelle Obama’s calibre are invaluable in puncturing the supposedly feminist ideals that have only ever succeeded in making most of us feel like failures.
It wasn’t until last year that I read Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg – a book the activist COO of Facebook published in 2013 “to encourage women to dream big, forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential”.
And although it was insightful about the business world and acute about professional female failings (don’t ever start an email with “sorry”, for example), all it really did was confirm my gloomy suspicion that both in my life and marriage I was leaning so far back I was practically horizontal.
The book also already felt a little passé by then. How could a self-help book that might have been written by Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl and was inspired by a TED talk Sandberg once gave about the perils of “taking your foot off the gas” hope to resonate with the women who had turned to colouring books in a concerted attempt to slow down?
And yet the “lean in” feminist philosophy that extended itself from the boardroom into the marital home has been upheld. And as cool, confident and empowered wives, mothers and grandmothers (of either the working or stay-at-home variety), we’re all still perpetually being encouraged to “lead, not follow” – and urged to prize “fairness” above all else. Which might not be a problem if the concept of fairness in either a career or a marriage wasn’t almost as cretinous as the concept of fairness in life – and all that urging and encouragement didn’t feel quite so much like bullying.
I’ve heard non-working women (supported by their husbands) proudly tell me that they make them cook and change the baby’s nappies as soon as they get home. “It’s only fair,” they say. They’re usually the same women who refuse to pick up their husband’s socks and will embark on arguments about how picking up those socks would be some form of ethical betrayal. By which time a thousand socks (and stockings) could have been picked up and both sexes engaged in a far more intelligent pastime – like watching actors eat animal testicles on I’m a Celebrity.
Because lean in only works on paper, not life; turning your home into an ethical battlefield strewn with mines of the most banal sort
(“I emptied the washing machine last time”) won’t just be exhausting but a passion and marriage-killer of the most savage kind.
Sandberg’s point seemed to be that the feminist revolution had stalled, and yet that was and is far from being the case. And in the five years since those two words were chosen as the empowering refrain of our day, we have understood that feminists come in different shapes, sizes and sexes, and revolutions can be stealthy and slow-burn as well as loud and frenzied. There isn’t one kind of female power.
Nothing about the position Michelle Obama was forced to assume from the moment her husband decided to run for president will have been fair. It certainly wasn’t fair that the Harvardeducated power mum should give up her $212,000-a-year job at the University of Chicago’s Medical Centre, and that once she became First Lady her assertiveness, like the new Duchess of Sussex’s, could have been perceived as pushy. Which is why she took her time, she admitted – urging Meghan to do the same and not be “in a hurry” to accomplish “more ambitious work”.
She leant back in order to achieve more further down the line and help her husband achieve his goals. And it’s because she was clever enough to understand that the “lean in s--- doesn’t work”, that their marriage does.