Salon's Rebecca Traister on Michelle Obama

There's a great piece up on Salon by Rebecca Traister entitled "The Momification of Michelle Obama," in which she criticizes the fact that all the publicity surrounding the new first lady focuses on her clothes, what schools she's going to send her daughters to and how she plans to stay out of politics (i.e. "Look, she's black, but she's not scary, because she's definitely not a Hilary Clinton-type first lady!"). Now, I love reading about the Obama family as much as the next person--They're getting a new dog! They're BFFs with the Bidens!--but something about the coverage of Michelle had definitely been irking me, and Traister does a great job of illuminating why.

If only she had refrained from stating that the media coverage of Michelle Obama reveals "the shortcomings of feminism." Way to generalize, Traister. Whose feminism? Which feminism? Ugh.

An excerpt, for those of you too busy to read the (rather long) article:

All of these imaginatively ghoulish impressions of Michelle were made possible by her real-life achievements: She had a career that made the equal division of labor in her home a necessity; she had an education and pedigree that meant neocon critics could pick apart her honors thesis; anxieties about her imagined conference remarks had heft only because it was plausible that this accomplished woman would be at a conference with Bill Clinton to begin with. What was even scarier was that Michelle was widely understood to be her husband's closest advisor and consigliere. The threat of Michelle Obama was built around her intellectual and professional competence, her personal power and insistence in the home and in the world that she have the same opportunities for success as a man.

But the day that Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race, the bar for conversation about Michelle dropped precipitously. Suddenly Fox News was calling her "Obama's baby mama," and Michelle was on "The View," jawing about her bargain dress and pantyhose, breakfast foods and childcare. It was back to cookie-recipe land, the antiquated universe from which she has not since escaped. And we understand why. The exoticism and difference of Obama's race was all the progress the American people could take in one election, conventional wisdom went. A threateningly competent woman might put them over the edge.