Michelle Obama – Work/Life Balance in the Public Eye

“[My platform] is to make sure that my kids have their heads on straight. We can talk about [that] high-falutin’ notion … but here I am, a woman professional who has to work on top of my first job as a mother.”

Sounds like a statement that could have been made by any working mom in America. But it wasn’t just an ordinary mom, struggling to make ends meet between a full-time job and full-time parenting. It was Michelle Obama, wife of presidential hopeful Barack Obama, explaining to a voter that she hadn’t really given much thought to her “First Spouse” platform, because her duties as a mother and her job as a hospital administrator took precedence.

The woman who asked the questions apologized for offending the candidate’s wife. Realizing that she might have spoken too harshly, Mrs. Obama grabbed the woman’s hand and said, “Its personal.”

And it is personal, as every woman who has tried to juggle work with motherhood knows. But, to put a new spin on an old phrase, what happens when the personal becomes the political? What kind of inferences do voters draw from the presidential candidates’ spouses, especially Mrs. Obama’s public efforts to maintain the normalcy of her family life and address work/life balance issues that really resonate with female voters?

Both presidential candidates in the Democratic race are one half of a power couple, albeit in different ways. Hillary Clinton may well become the first female leader of the United States, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, could not be a more accomplished or outspoken campaigner on her behalf. Although Michelle might not be as much of a high profile presidential spouse as Bill Clinton, she is certainly an accomplished woman in her own right.

Like the Clintons, the Obamas present themselves to America as equals: pairs of lawyers that are intellectually on par with each other. “We’re two well-versed lawyers who know each other really well,” Mrs. Obama says in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We each think we’re right about everything, and can argue each other into a corner.”

According to the February 11, 2008 WSJ article profiling her, the Princeton and Harvard Law School-educated Michelle Obama met her future husband while working as an associate at Sidley Austin, a major Chicago-based law firm. In fact, she was assigned to mentor the young Barack Obama, who worked at the firm as a summer associate while attending Harvard Law School. Mrs. Obama went on to work for Mayor Daley of Chicago and then became a hospital administrator at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and served on the Board of Directors of a food company. The couple has two young daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Many times on the campaign trail, Mrs. Obama has noted that, when her famous husband is at home, she makes him do his household chores, whether its picking up bug spray at the grocery store or picking up his dirty laundry. Similarly, according to a recent interview, she structures her days around her children’s ballet recitals and soccer games, and tries to make time to snuggle with them in the morning before sending them off to school.

In a post-cookie baking era of first spouses (can’t really picture Michelle Obama frosting cupcakes any better than Bill Clinton), Mrs. Obama’s struggle to keep her children’s lives as normal as possible and maintain her own career in light of her husbands meteoric rise strikes a chord with other working moms. This is evidenced by the huge online response to the recent article on The Juggler blog, “The Obamas’ Supercharged Juggle.”

One reader pointed out that, the reasons that there is so much emphasis on Mrs. Obama’s parenting skills is “because almost everyone agrees with the sentiment that a female parent’s first job is as a mother. Most do not believe that a male parent’s first job is as a father, unless you define father-parenting as something that does not involve hands on care. That is why lots of professional women don’t have children, because they agree that if their first job is not mothering they should not be a mother.”

Indeed, Mrs. Obama may have to give up her high-powered career entirely if her husband wins the presidency, or at least put her ambitions on hold. Though she doesn’t aspire to run for political office, ironically, she may be both influenced and repelled by the Hillary Clinton model of a First Lady. While she avoids commenting on policy issues, she no doubt serves as one of her husband’s most trusted advisors, and certainly has the mental horsepower and job experience to become involved in a number of policy areas, if she chooses to. But, does she want to?

And what if any role does race play in the perception of the Obama’s relationship? While couples of every race and ethnicity certainly do the work/life juggle, women of color might have different cultural and social pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. Conversely, minority women may feel the pressure of being held up as a highly visible role model for women of their ethnic group, only to be judged by other community members and constantly criticized for failing at an impossible task: getting the work/life balance perfect and making it look easy.

However, race and gender have become too polarizing as issues in the campaign, and both Clinton and Obama, as well as most of America’s voters, have shown a desire to rise beyond the triviality of identity politics. Thus, race and gender are two lenses to view these issues through, but they certainly don’t tell the whole story.

What do you think about the Obamas’ superjuggle? Or the Clintons, for that matter? Do you think their struggles are representative of the kind of issues that other two-career families face, or do you think that they are exceptional? We want to hear from you!