Obama declares himself a feminist
In Glamour magazine essay, president denounces ‘dated’ assumptions on gender roles
In his most extensive remarks about feminism, U.S. President Barack Obama has written an essay for Glamour magazine that reflects on American women’s long fight for equality and calls on men to fight sexism.
His 1,500-word essay, which was published online Thursday and will appear in the September print magazine, spoke about the optimism he has gained watching his daughters Sasha and Malia grow up during his term in office.
“The progress we’ve made in the past 100 years, 50 years, and, yes, even the past eight years has made life significantly better for my daughters than it was for my grandmothers,” he wrote.
“And yes, it’s important that their dad is a feminist, because now that’s what they expect of all men.”
It is not the first time that the president has declared himself a feminist. In June, while speaking at a White House summit meeting on women, he declared: “This is what a feminist looks like.”
And, of course, Obama is not the first world leader to declare his feminism. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously offered the succinct explanation “because it’s 2015” to introduce his half-female cabinet last November.
In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trudeau urged men and women to embrace the feminist label and spoke about raising his son “to grow up to be a feminist just like dad.”
Still, Obama’s essay was the most extensive statement on feminism yet from a sitting U.S. president.
Brenda Weber, the professor and the chairwoman of the gender studies department at Indiana University, said she was “delighted” by the essay, which she said showed a nuanced sense of women’s issues. It is unusual for a man to write such an essay, let alone a president, she said.
To claim the identity of feminism and discuss why it is personally important to him and his daughters is a meaningful gesture coming from someone with the cultural authority of the president, she said.
“Those are all pretty radical statements in terms of a politician at that level of influence,” she said.
In the essay, Obama argued that “when everybody is equal, we are all more free.” He praised the progress of American women over the past century while pledging to work on securing equal pay and reproductive rights.
In an extended passage, the president also warned against “dated assumptions about gender roles.”
“We need to keep changing the atti- tude that raises our girls to be demure and our boys to be assertive, that criticizes our daughters for speaking out and our sons for shedding a tear,” Obama wrote. “We need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs.
“We need to keep changing the attitude that permits the routine harassment of women, whether they’re walking down the street or daring to go online. We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to feel threatened by the presence and success of women.
“We need to keep changing the attitude that congratulates men for changing a diaper, stigmatizes fulltime dads, and penalizes working mothers. We need to keep changing the attitude that values being confident, competitive, and ambitious in the workplace — unless you’re a woman. Then you’re being too bossy, and suddenly the very qualities you thought were necessary for success end up holding you back.”
Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, said on CBS This Morning that she thought the essay went “beyond the kind of boilerplate ‘I believe in strong women’ that at this point anybody can mouth pretty effectively.”
“It did strike me as this very modern moment, something that we wouldn’t have heard probably from any other president, but honestly we would not have heard before this year,” she said. “I do think the embrace of the term feminism by men as well as women has really been on the rise.”