First Lady Michelle Obama is thankful for her life. At the More magazine Impact Awards at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the first lady credits her good life–and independence–to education.
“Growing up — and I remind these girls all the time — I wasn’t any smarter, I wasn’t more talented than they are. But instead of having to work to support my family, or being married off to a grown man and forced to bear children before I was ready, I got to go to school so I could support myself, so I could make my own choices about my body and my life,” the president’s wife told the crowd at the award ceremony.
“And none of us would ever accept anything less for our own daughters and granddaughters. We wouldn’t tolerate it. We would never accept a life of dependence and abuse for our girls. We would never allow their bodies to be violated or their potential to be squandered. So we have to ask ourselves, why would we accept this fate for any girl on this planet?
“And ultimately, that is why we started Let Girls Learn. As you’ve heard, it’s a government initiative, a brand new initiative to help adolescent girls worldwide go to school, and, more importantly, stay in school. And our focus on adolescent girls is deliberate, because we know that that critical moment when a girl is becoming a woman, so often, that’s when we lose her. That’s when they first confront the cultural barriers that take them away from school — things like early and forced marriage, genital mutilation and cutting, and the belief in so many communities that girls simply are just less worthy of an education than boys.”
Obama has an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard.
