Who does Michelle Obama think she is being a stay-at-home mom rather than a career woman? A Republican?!
That's the sentiment U.S. News & World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe conveys to readers of the magazine's Thomas Jefferson Street blog in back-to-back May 11 posts.
In the first, "Michelle Obama's Mom-In-Chief Image Is a Cave to Politics and Stereotypes," argues that (emphasis mine):
... Mrs. Obama's "Mom-in-Chief" image was created more by Obama image-makers David Axelrod et. al. to soften her into a first lady Americans could love. I think it is a sad state of affairs that Americans are more comfortable with a non-threatening first lady than with a career woman, but it is also a stereotype that screams to be abolished. Michelle Obama is just the person who could have done it, but she decided against it. Instead, she caved into advisors' demands.
The truth is, until that stereotype becomes history, all women will suffer less power and clout in the workplace.
In her second post published a few hours later -- "Republican Women Are Stay-At-Home Moms While Female Democrats Run for Congress" -- Erbe passed along her thoughts about why Democrats outnumber Republicans among the female members of Congress:
I think the main reason, however, is that Republican women are generally more traditional than Democratic women, who tend to be more progressive. Therefore, GOP women are more likely to be fulltime homemakers or to work part-time and not to pursue all-consuming careers such as politics. Republican women like former Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) have even agreed with me in conversation that this is the case.
This does not mean all Democratic women want to run for office or be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or that all GOP women want to be homemakers. Certainly not. But the majority fall into those stereotypes and that is the main reason I believe the numbers are skewed in Democrats' favor.
So Erbe admits that not all Democratic women are as career-obsessed as she herself is, and yet without any credible evidence she portrays the First Lady as a prisoner of her husband's political advisors, insisting that Mrs. Obama would rather be lawyering away in some firm somewhere rather than raising her kids and performing the traditional duties of first ladies before her.
Happy Mother's Day, Mrs. Obama. This is how radical feminists, a far from insignificant portion of your husband's political base, think of you.
