The XX Factor: What women really think.

Talkin' Bout My Generation

I have a strange soft spot for Michelle Obama, largely because she was born in 1964, the year I was born, and because she reminds me of women I knew in college. Our generation of women were not the first to get to the Ivy League. We had a different cross to bear: We were the first to be treated as absolutely ordinary there. As Michelle's infamous senior thesis attests, some felt a residual need to rebel against the old institution anyway, struggled with the idea of themselves as "insiders," or attempted to remain "outsiders" for just a bit longer.

But most, obviously including Michelle, adjusted and moved on. All of which is a roundabout way of agreeing with Dahlia and Dana that this was a brilliant speech precisely because it avoided the sometimes grating language that Hillary might have used, and precisely because it was in fact post-feminist rather than feminist: The perfect way to address her/my generation is not to brag about how we got there first (because we didn't) but to talk honestly about the myriad ways in which we've tried or failed or managed to adjust, having arrived. Which she did, rather well. 

All of that stuff about how parents try to set good examples for children was particularly well done, from Michelle as well as her brother and mother, and somehow not sick-making, as these things at conventions usually are. There, laid out for us, was an example of parents who persuaded their children to adopt their values: Would that we all could be so succesful in doing so.