by Jaclyn Geller

In the past three years Americans have been saturated with images of Michelle Obama. She has been profiled in virtually every major American magazine: like Jacqueline Kennedy, another photogenic first spouse to whom she is often compared, she has been featured in myriad photo spreads, often with her husband and natal children at her side. Celebrated as a role model for young women, she seems to exude a sacrosanct aura. Hers is now one of the most recognizable faces in the world, and the phenomenon of her celebrity creates an opportunity to analyze her role: that of first lady.

Why, in the twenty-first century, do we have first ladies, and why do some receive accolades while others attract criticism and innuendo? The figurehead role exists, it seems, because of the prejudice that matrimony makes one a "whole" person and that an unmarried president would be incomplete and less fit to lead. The more single-mindedly married a first lady is, the better her reception is likely to be. Prior to her political career Hillary Clinton was a successful attorney: the first female partner at Little Rock, Arkansas’ Rose Law firm, she out-earned her governor husband, with whom she seemed to enjoy a successful, open relationship. As first lady she began using her original last name as part of her full name. Throughout the 1990s reporters vilified her as, alternately, a masochist and a cold opportunist who had made an unsavory financial investment (in cattle futures contracts in the 1970s). Independent counsels pored over her old billing reports and scrutinized her White House travel records.

Prosecutors and journalists would overlook the fact that Clinton’s successor, Laura Bush, a homemaker with few extramarital ambitions, had, in her youth, run a stop-sign in Midland, Texas, killing another driver. The victim, Michael Douglas, was reported in some sources to have been her former boyfriend.  Extant police reports are inconclusive as to whether Laura Bush (nee Welch) was tested for alcohol. Ambiguous and far more serious than the minutia of which Hillary Clinton was accused (and for which she was exonerated), this incident received minimal attention. There were no independent investigations and no subpoenas issued; no news headlines read "Lauragate."

Perhaps Michelle Obama learned from these examples, tailoring her image. But I believe her popularity has its origins in American anti-intellectualism. Americans demand a modicum of intelligence and education from their elected officials, but they distrust acumen. Unbiased analysis, curiosity, critical thinking, the accumulation of knowledge, and the ability to generalize and make novel observations, are capacities that tend to evoke suspicion. These qualities are often said to be useless, as opposed to the plain sense of the common person: that pragmatic "can-do-ism" on which a politician like Sarah Palin has shrewdly based her career. (In her recent autobiography Palin cites married motherhood as the ideal preparation for politics, likening her work as governor of Alaska to that of a mom managing the weekly grocery budget: "Just as my family couldn’t fund every item on our wish list, and had to live within our means…I felt we needed to do that for the state.") Or, intellectualism is said to produce social decadence and inertia. The historian Richard Hofstadter explains this as a nineteenth-century inheritance –- the legacy of a period dominated by the ethos of business, in which men with no formal schooling could earn fortunes. Academic study was often deemed useless or detrimental to success: "intellectual and cultural pursuits were called unworldly, unmasculine, impractical."

From the start, therefore, a candidate like Barack Obama was at a disadvantage. Encumbered by not one but two Ivy League degrees, he had taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Many popular presidents have had macho vocations or avocations: Theodore Roosevelt was a soldier and an amateur boxer and hunter; Dwight D. Eisenhower was a five-star general and a football player; Harry Truman was an artilleryman; Ronald Reagan never saw combat, but he played a military man in the movies; and John F. Kennedy was a war hero, as was Obama's opponent, John McCain. None of these activities correlate, in any clear way, with the demands of the presidency, but the popular belief that they do is overwhelming and must, to Obama’s handlers, have presented a problem. A mild-mannered Democrat festooned with academic honors, Obama was in danger of sharing the fate of the mentally adroit Adlai Stevenson, who, during two failed 1950’s presidential campaigns, was labeled an "egghead" (by journalist Joseph Alsop) and derided as an unmarried woman: the New York Daily News called Stevenson "fruity" and "a genteel spinster."

Obama’s masculinity had to be affirmed; this could best be accomplished by projecting the image of a married man –- the ultimate married man, and in feature after feature Michelle Obama was put on display. Articles stressed –- and continue to emphasize -- her good looks, her erotic bond with her husband, and her commitment to marriage. In 2007 Ebony magazine crowned the Obamas "the hottest couple in America." The 2009 New Yorker magazine profile, "A Couple in Chicago," highlighted Obama’s conjugal identity, showing a photo of the pair intertwined on a sofa.

Michelle Obama’s biography, streamlined into a narrative to sate popular appetites, is now familiar: she grew up working class in an "Ozzie and Harriet" style nuclear family. After graduating from Harvard Law School she met Barack Obama at the Chicago firm at which both worked. Ladylike, she declined his advances at first but was won over by his assertiveness. They dated and debated the relevance of marriage as an institution – a dialogue that ended when he produced a diamond engagement ring, reducing her to a state of rapturous incoherence. They married; she relinquished her name. She bore two daughters; they took his name. Eventually she relinquished her work as Vice President of Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to support his presidential campaign, and, finally, to assume the world’s most visible marital role: that of first lady. In this persona she tends to issue clichés. In a recent Glamour magazine interview that featured her as "Woman of the Year," Obama urged women to look at the "hearts"and "souls" of potential husbands and stated that she had always made mothering her first priority.

Assuming marriage as a timeless virtue, this kind of advice simplifies history and offers women a whimsical prescription for the conduct of their personal lives. It is frustrating to hear platitudes from a woman who seems capable of more. Given Michelle Obama’s credentials, it is tempting to imagine an alternative biography: she might have greeted her partner’s marriage proposal with a kind but firm, "no," explaining that she did not need her sex life licensed and would certainly not give up her surname, Robinson. She might have fortified her career as Barack Obama honed his political ambitions. But these choices would have rendered her unpopular, limiting her access to the corridors of power.

Fortunately, not all partners of high profile politicians take the conventional route. Diana Taylor, the superintendent of banks for the State of New York from 2003 to 2007, offers a potent counter-example. The longtime girlfriend of New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the fifty-four year old Ms. Taylor maintains her own residence and works as managing director of an investment-banking firm. Setting aside two days per week for charitable activities, she displays no matrimonial ambitions. The New York Times recently reported that, "a mention of the M-word causes her to purse her lips as if she had just swallowed cough syrup." In November 2009 a reporter for Forbes magazine asked Taylor for advice to readers, especially women. Speaking bluntly, Taylor eschewed the usual truisms: "You should never quit your day job ... And never, ever, depend on anyone else for money." She will not be the kind of media darling that Michelle Obama has become, but for those of us who question marital privilege, Diana Taylor is a woman worth noting.

Jaclyn Geller is an Associate Professor in the English department at Central Connecticut State University, where she specializes in Restoration and 18th century studies.