Web Letters: Mad About Michelle

Katha Pollitt's creaky gender war-era polemics offer younger readers a valuable window into why men and women in their 50s and 60s seem so miserable. Having grown up with working mothers and grandmothers, we find the idea that women might venture out into the wide, wide world--and even pursue their "wilder dreams"--refreshingly quaint. Next thing you know, women will be playing rock music on stage, wearing jeans and having orgasms, just like men.

The pursuit of personal happiness by ordinary men and women who must work to balance the demands of careers, kids and spouses in an imperfect but more gender-equal America may not excite the passions of jittery, sell-shocked ideologues who are want to relive the glorious battles of first-generation feminists with Norman Mailer. Guess what? Norman Mailer is dead. It is a salient fact of contemporary post-gender-war America that even people with degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School--male and female alike--hope to find balance in their lives, rather than subjugate their own needs and desires to dated prescriptions about gender equality that bear a suspicious degree of resemblance to the one-dimensional he-man ethos they were supposed to combat. While it might be preferable, in some alternate universe, for men and women alike to spend their days and nights surfing to the moon while becoming secretary of state and raising two beautiful kids, it's not very practical. That's life.

Michelle Obama is an example of a successful, educated women with degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School who has achieved an obvious degree of personal happiness by pursuing multiple roles as a mother, a lawyer and a wife, rather than choosing to sacrifice her time with her kids and her husband to the goal of making partner at a big-name law firm. So what? Are the facts of Michelle Obama's life really so threatening that Katha Pollitt has to turn them into a plot against women, led by me and Christopher Hitchens? Other women in Michelle Obama's position make different choices, just as men do. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I admire Michelle Obama because she knows who she is, and because she is happy.

As for Michelle Obama's vaunted salary of $273,618 to which Pollitt refers--ripping off an equally obnoxious blog post by Rebecca Traister in Salon--it seems worth pointing out that the job in question was as a lobbyist for the University of Chicago Hospitals and that Michelle Obama was appointed after her husband was elected to the US Senate in 2004. A nice little kicker, to be sure. But that's not the salary that she earned while she was having her kids and working the practical professional jobs to which I referred in my modest squib for New York magazine. Michelle Obama's salary during those years ranged between $50,343 and $121,910. While that seems like a lot of money to me, it hardly puts her in the top 75 percent of her graduating class at Princeton--let alone Harvard Law School.

David Samuels

Brooklyn, NY

Michelle Obama, baring her arms at every opportunity is puzzling and disconcerting. I haven't a clue what is the overriding purpose. If she should have similar pride in her legs, would micro-minis, then, be in order? It is striking to me, the lack of recognition of proper decorum. The "rockstar" status bestowed upon the Obamas is troubling from the standpoint that a true assessment of practice and policy will be missed due to American Idol reverence. The whole "black thing," which adds to the imagery, is tiring but not retiring. It is not and, I feel, will not be lost or forgotten. He's black, she's black, their children are black, shoot, I'm black. "Hope"fully, she and he will be analyzed simply for how they are and performance. If the analyzers can manage to remove the stars from their eyes.

Brian Peters

Newington, CT

Thank you so much for really putting a real prospective on the national conversation about first lady Obama. I too am a working mother and I really appreciate her hard work and her example that she is setting. I love your honest and well researched writing style. Thank you.

Amy Swift-Johnson

Zion, IL

I don't suppose Katha Pollitt would mind telling us just exactly what sort of work Michelle Obama has deigned to do for us, for free or otherwise? While she's at it, perhaps she can explain why hospitals might need directors for "community affairs" (??) and whether their outsized salaries might not have something to do with why healthcare is so goddamned expensive.

Frankly, I'm waiting for a presidential spouse with the backbone to refuse to go to Washington. Assuming such is a woman, then that's when we'll really see an example of a woman holding her own to chase her dream. I'd vote for such a woman in the next election for that alone.

But that, of course, is not germane here. A black woman with a law degree and good looks is first lady. Katha Pollitt simply must pedestalize her. Maybe Ralph Nader should marry a Seven Sisters alumna. Not that it would make Pollitt stop blaming him for the 2000 election.

Douglas Presler

Minneapolis, MN