A former first lady, senator, and secretary of state can barely fill up half of an arena as she tours with her husband across the continent. Meanwhile, a subsequent first lady who never really wanted the job is selling out tickets for her book tour at rock star style magnitudes and prices. And her memoir, Becoming, just became the best-selling book of the year.
The differences couldn’t be starker between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, who just two years ago were sharing a stage in a failed bid to keep the White House blue. But Obama’s star on the rise and Clinton’s favorability rating sinking below that of Donald Trump’s tell a far more interesting story about American womanhood than American politics.
The Clinton genre of staid, working womanhood and standing by your man, no matter how persistent and unapologetic the humiliation, it seems, is finally going out of fashion. Obama isn’t popular simply for her past as first lady, but it seems more her willingness to embody so many contradictions.
Obama is a two-time Ivy League grad who gave up a successful career to become the most glorified housewife in the country. She underwent in vitro fertilization twice to have children, but will honestly lament the pains of parenting. She’s spending the most powerful part of her career engaging in radical vulnerability, not the stoicism so many in her position embrace. And she’s never been more popular.
That’s a feature, not a bug. In an era where feminism’s loudest cheerleaders are also their angriest, Obama’s not running a third-wave, scorched earth campaign of gender politics, but rather a simple public grappling with the contradictions of modern feminism.
“Marriage still ain’t equal, y’all,” Obama told an audience this weekend. “I tell women that whole ‘you can have it all’—mmm, nope, not at the same time, that’s a lie. It’s not always enough to lean in because that shit doesn’t work.”
“Lean In,” the mantra adopted by Clinton ally and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, has come under criticism by both the traditionalist right and the intersectional left, but Obama’s critique is simply pragmatic. Her opinion is far more reflective of how many of my peers and women I’ve spoken with on this exact topic feel.
Where Obama is open and vulnerable, Clinton remains calculating and bitter. Her shtick has long worn thin. Her adversarial genre of feminism is increasingly going out of fashion, and she’s not buoyed by her commitment to a husband credibly accused of sexual assault.
Given that both women are Democrats, they make for an interesting case study for the future of women in politics. Perhaps Obama’s emerging superstardom points to a hopeful note for potential future female presidential candidates: the first female president can be vulnerable and honest, not an angry reaction to sexism of the past.
