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She left behind a high-powered career to garden, care for her kids and volunteer her time with schoolchildren. Once a business suit-wearing executive, now she marvels at organic broccoli and dresses in down-to-earth cardigans and windbreakers.
Yep, we’re talking about Michelle Obama, who, in her mission to promote healthy living, has taken up the mantle of America’s Domestic Goddess-in-Chief.
Not long ago, conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker had a fascinating essay praising Obama’s decision to position herself as a sort of uber-homemaker rather than continue her career as a hospital executive. As Parker writes:
Obama, though she holds a law degree from Harvard, has turned away from [Hillary] Clinton’s ambitious example and focused instead on the ultimate in domesticity — not just cooking but raising the food that goes to table. Her new cookbook, “American Grown,” features glossy photos and a personal diary of gardening in the city, albeit in the nation’s best yard with significant staff help.
A few paragraphs later, Parker suggests that liberals are unhappy with Obama’s domestic goddess image:
What upsets so many in Obama’s own political camp is that this first lady has so vividly chosen family over career, finding expression in the most elemental of endeavors — digging her hands into Mother Earth and offering nourishment to her young.
Amusingly, Parker is totally wrong about this. Liberals have actually been eating up the Michelle Obama-as-Organic-Earth-Mother thing, and have in fact been totally behind Obama’s healthy eating/gardening campaign. In fact, I’ve found it mildly disturbing to see how many progressives have actually criticized Obama for not going far enough with her domesticity. A few years ago, when Obama said she wasn’t a fan of cooking, critics like the New York Times’ Amanda Hesser took her to task, scolding her for setting a bad example.
These days, liberals seem to celebrate the Domestic Goddess archetype far more than conservatives. In liberal places like Seattle or Brooklyn or Boulder or Chapel Hill (my stomping ground), women are increasingly praised for – in Parker’s words – “digging her hands into Mother Earth and offering nourishment to her young.” A good liberal mother breastfeeds for an extended period, offers her children only the best handmade food, scrutinizes her home environment for chemicals. If she’s really a gold star crunchy mama, she grows some of her own food in the backyard, sews her kids’ clothes by hand from recycled fabrics, and homeschools.
A decade or two ago, Parker’s essay conclusion would have read as pure reactionary conservative anti-feminism:
Such an explicit embrace of a traditional female role is nothing short of heresy to some. In fact, it is a brave stance by a wise woman whose priorities deserve to be celebrated.
There will be plenty of time for career and Big Issues beyond the family table once the children are grown — a lesson best learned sooner than too late.
But today, this sentiment would earn nods from liberal, progressive parents all over America.
And I think this is a problem. While domestic tasks and caring for kids are crucial and beautiful parts of life, I dislike the way they’re fetishized these days. It’s all very Cult of Domesticity, woman as moral center of the home stuff. Very retro, even when repackaged with the progressive wrapping of “organic” and “natural” and “anti-corporate.”
So good on Michelle Obama for doing her thing, but let’s not suggest that her “priorities” are the best or only ones. There are plenty of high-powered executives who bottle-feed their babies, never touch their stoves, and would rather chew broken glass than dig around in the garden, and those are no less legitimate, “elemental” choices than being a Domestic Goddess.
