Laura Bush Was Pro-Choice -- and Dozens of Other Things You Never Knew About America's First Ladies

By Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Huffington Post. Posted February 6, 2009.

Apart from programs that could lead to some form of policy, is the larger question of how she perceives her responsibility to the vast and complex constituency of the American people. Certainly Michelle Obama has a palpable sense of working-class life.

As a child, she had weekly chores requiring her to clean the bathroom and do the dishes, living with her parents and brother in a one-bedroom apartment, her personal living space being a cordoned-off part of the living room, another part set aside for her brother. Her father rose through the ranks from general janitorial work to a supervisory job in the city water works. There's already an early example of her empathy. As part of her work-study program as an undergrad at Princeton, she helped to create a tutoring program for the children of the manual laborers who worked there.

Although she hasn't shared any specific examples of direct bigotry she's faced, her sense of displacement as an African American from the larger, white Princeton student body is well known. It would be obvious and natural for Michelle Obama to provide sponsorship for issues uniquely faced by African American women and provide solidarity and support by accepting even honorary alliances with organizations dedicated to that constituency.

There's even a strong and largely unknown legacy of first ladies here. To name but three overt examples: Lady Bird Johnson faced protests and pickets in the Deep South as she heralded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 there; Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defied her husband in supporting anti-lynching laws and desegregation of the armed forces; Lou Hoover enraged racist lawmakers and newspapers by inviting Chicago congressional wife Jessie DePriest as her guest.

Of course, even were she not to undertake a specific project aimed toward African Americans, Obama will have a powerful emotional impact on black Americans by having an impact on non-black Americans. Subtly, the novelty of her as a first lady will become as routine as did seeing Kennedy in a veil go to Catholic Mass or Ida McKinley lifted from a wheelchair and lean on others to walk -- labels of race, religion, disability and other "otherness" become secondary when the individuality of a person is permitted to flourish.

The internal is more important than the external, and some of those personal qualities that have long guided her will be felt in Obama's East Wing -- most especially her intense focus. Since childhood, she had a discipline to strive for academic excellence, earning her entrance into a gifted class in grammar school where she skipped second grade, and a magnet high school where she was student council treasurer, a National Honor Society member, and made honor roll every year.

She proved wrong a high school counselor who said she wouldn't make it into Princeton, and a Princeton advisor who said she wouldn't make it into Harvard Law School. A point her mother has made: Michelle Obama will not remain silent if she feels strongly about an issue and hasn't since she was a child.

This works in tandem with a faith in mental discipline that came from her parents, a belief that societal limitations were more perception than reality that need not impede her success in whatever direction she wished to pursue. It wasn't just talk. It was a philosophy made poignantly real every day as she watched her father, despite being slowly debilitated by multiple sclerosis, persist in his routine to prepare and get to work on time.

While the media has focused on her earning a minor in African American studies, her major was sociology -- an excellent study for a first lady of a nation that has been diverse from its beginning. She also learned two refinements that seemed almost routine for first ladies in earlier decades -- speaking French and playing the piano -- matched with the most necessary one of modern times -- a skill for moving audiences. Michelle Obama is an easy, confident public speaker, a trait she apparently had at the family table but honed at Harvard Law.

In most of her speeches, she finds a thread that makes her accessible to the common man, some personal recollection that shows her to be less Lady Bountiful and more one of the people. When she spoke of knowing the burden of enormous debt, for example, the circumstances of how it accumulated (Ivy League college and law school) seemed less relevant than the convincing expression of the overwhelming anxiety it often created in her.

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Carl Sferrazza Anthony is historian of the National First Ladies Library and the author of several books, including the two-volume history, First Ladies, a history of the role's evolution and political power. He also has written biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy, Florence Harding and Nellie Taft.

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