Michelle Obama Watch

OH Oh CNN is at it again. Hat Tip to Rikyrah for sending us this link to an editorial called Michelle Obama Reinventing Motherhood.

Again, I am troubled by this “stay at home” vs. “working mom” meme. Women who work are MOMS. MOMS who stay at home WORK! I think we’re all projecting onto poor Michelle! The article is by Jolene Ivey who cofounded Mocha Moms. She is celebrating the idea that Michelle Obama will be a “stay at home” mom.

It was common for black women to leave their own children at home to fend for themselves and go to work for low wages as domestics in the homes of well-off white families. As African-Americans have gotten more opportunities, a college degree has been a ticket to the career ladder. Period. Devoting full time to motherhood is considered a waste of education by many in the black community.

Middle-class white women, on the other hand, were expected to stay home with their children. They fought their way into the workforce in large numbers relatively recently. The feminist and civil rights movements opened the working world to all women, but culturally, black women still were discouraged from being the primary caretakers of their own children.

Michelle Obama is bucking that mind-set in deciding to take time off from her career to focus on getting her children acclimated to life in the White House. Her own mom stayed home with her children, but this was unusual enough that few African-Americans have such a family memory. CNN.com

For the record, my mother worked, but I wasn’t left to fend for myself. ARGH! People. Seriously! Just because our mothers worked outside of the home didn’t mean we were raised by wolves.

However, Ivey makes the point often missing from some of the laments from feminist writers over the last few weeks, Black women have never had to fight for the right to work outside of the home. We were forced to! So this working woman vs. Stay-at-home vs. Mom lament just isn’t relevant to our lives. We’ve always had to do it all whether we wanted to or not. We don’t see a Black woman choosing to focus on her children as some great defeat for all of womanity. It’s a triumph because it is a privilege many of our mothers and grandmothers did not have.

I think all of these Mom vs. Mom discussions say more about US than they do about Michelle Obama’s choices.

Posted by Gina