Stop looking at us and listen, was the message that both Michelle Obama and Laura Bush had for the media as they talked about being an American first lady at a George W. Bush Institute event in Tanzania Tuesday morning.
The duo chatted with journalist Cokie Roberts at the African First Ladies Summit. And they brought up, several times, how often they (and women in general) are judged by their appearance–including the hullabaloo that took place earlier this year over Obama’s bangs, which are now swooped to one side of her face.
“Who would have thought? I didn’t call that one,” Obama laughed, after Bush brought up said bangs. “I said that just because our daughter, Barbara, cut bangs at the same time Michelle did–they commiserated,” Bush explained. “I was doing what Barbara was doing,” Obama jumped in. “I was just following her lead.”
Then the current FLOTUS got to a bigger point. “But we take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see,” Obama said. “And eventually people stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we’re standing in front of.”
They also talked about their transitions into the White House.
Bush said that since her father-in-law and mother-in-law had lived there, she already knew much of the staff. “But what I didn’t really understand was how people would listen to the first lady,” she noted.
The first time it hit her was when she was department store shopping with daughter Jenna in Texas and a woman approached them and thanked Bush for speaking about the women of Afghanistan. “And that was the first time it really occurred to me that people really did hear me, and that I really did have that podium that Lady Bird Johnson knew about and had told us about,” Bush recalled.
As for Obama’s first foray into 1600 Pennsylvania, she said that day was a hectic mess. “And I remember walking into that house and I didn’t even know where the bathrooms were, but I had to get ready for a ball,” she said. “It was like, and I’ve got to look nice? It’s like, what door is this, and you’re opening up all these doors, and you can’t find your toothpaste, you don’t know where your kids are–so that’s day one.”
