Wife, Mother, Lawyer, First Lady
In her memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama recalls her childhood fascination with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore’s character represented the “hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest” of a liberated working woman who did not let her supervisors boss her around.[1] Yet, Obama remembers feeling conflicted by this urge as she simultaneously yearned for a traditional family life, claiming that the “stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother” might not coincide with her ambitious career goals.[2] Perhaps unexpectedly, this tension is a touchstone in her book, where much of her life experience is shaped by the desire to be successful in both her career and as a mother. Having been positively influenced by her own mother’s support growing up, Obama uses motherhood to drive her life’s focus, as she succinctly states, “motherhood became my motivator.”[3]
It is probably no surprise, then, that Becoming has already sold more than 10 million copies and is slated to become one of the bestselling memoirs of all time.[4] Women of all ages and backgrounds no doubt share these same internal conflicts of trying to balance a life inside and outside the home. When The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller in 1964—the year of Michelle Obama’s birth—Betty Friedan had pinpointed “the problem that has no name,” saying that there was “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning” that plagued American women who wanted to be more than simply a wife and mother.[5] Taking a cue from a childhood piano lesson, Obama learned early on to ground herself and find balance in all things, remembering her first maxim to “find middle C.”[6]
