The XX Factor: What women really think.

E-I-E-I-No

Hanna and Dayo: Ouch. Imagine if Michelle Obama had been caught breaking ground on her victory garden in her mommy jeans and a plaid shirt. “What a Hag!” the headlines would read. “E-I-E-I-No!”  She couldn't show arms. She couldn't wear pearls. So she opted to do what all women do when they have no good fashion choices: She wore plain, skinny, well-fitting black clothes and hoped her wardrobe would fade out behind the 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School with their shovels and wheelbarrows and puffy coats. No such luck.

The Obama crop isn’t just slated to “delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries.” The plan is to send produce along to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen. This is a nice small lesson in stewardship and compassion that’s been spun as elitist and anti-feminist and inauthentic and out-of-touch because that’s how we talk about nice small gestures. Maybe there really is nothing to wear for those occasions on which one can do nothing right.