Politics / October 28, 2024
The former first lady’s incandescent speech on Saturday night in Michigan centered women’s bodies and excoriated the man who gropes but won’t protect them.
Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
(Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
Gone are the days of “When they go low, we go high.” That was Michelle Obama’s mantra during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 cage fight with Donald Trump. I wanted to believe it so much I had coffee mugs made with that saying on them. I don’t have them any more.
I’m trying to figure out what slogan I’d put on a coffee mug from Obama’s incendiary, incandescent Saturday night speech in Kalamazoo. I’m leaning toward “Take our lives seriously.” It was a 38-minute feminist manifesto, excoriating Trump but also the men who either support him or aren’t sure they’ll vote for our first Black female president. “A vote for him is a vote against us,” she declared. Obama laid out everything women suffer under while trying to just live our lives, from crippling double standards to menstrual cramps, the expectation of perfection, and sexual abuse. The pain and threat posed by even a “normal” pregnancy.
Oh, and menopause. I’ve attended hundreds of political speeches about women’s health over the years, but I’ve never heard menopause talked about from the stage. (We might whisper about it backstage.) But of all the stages of women’s health, menopause could be the most shrouded in mystery, even shame, and one of the most debilitating.
“Every month, far too many of us experience excruciating cramps and days of nausea,” she said. “As we struggle through menopause, crippling hot flashes, and depression, too many women my age are unaware of what’s happening to our bodies,” she added. (Obama opened up about her own menopause experience to People magazine in November 2022.)
“I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this, because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth,” she said. “Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work.”
Young girls might not know what to expect from puberty. Women “my age,” she noted, don’t know what to expect from menopause. Now, they face the erosion of their healthcare options, she said, in the wake of Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling that set the stage for bans across the country.
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“Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all,” Obama said, to a bit of laughter. “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us. In those moments, all we have to rely on is our medical system, in those dark moments, all we have to rely on is our faith in a higher power and the experience of doctors to get us the care we need in a timely manner.”
Obama described the hideous new reality in so many states around the country, in which pregnant women can’t get the emergency care—which may include abortion care—that they need. “If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” she told the men in the room. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”
She went on.
“Please, please, do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us, because a vote for him is a vote against us, against ourselves, against our worth. To think that the men that we love can be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world.”
Leaving the realm of women’s health, Obama also talked angrily about the media and voters’ double standards Harris faces.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior. His obvious mental decline. His history as a convicted felon. A known slumlord. A predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.”
“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
Talking about barriers to women at the 1988 Democratic convention, the late Texas Governor Ann Richards famously said: “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” She might also have been doing it with terrible cramps if she’s menstruating, morning sickness if she’s pregnant, or hot flashes, sleeplessness, and brain fog if she’s leaving that time of life.
At all of those times in my own life I was able to reach out to girlfriends and cousins and aunts to get support. But we didn’t want to whine. I was told by a friend not to ask for time off during my (brief) period of morning sickness when I was pregnant. If we propagate these notions of women as sickly or frail, whether during menstruation, pregnancy, or menopause, “they” will hold it against us, we feared. Indeed, protective labor laws that had been passed decades earlier to recognize the special challenges women face served to limit women’s hours, wages, and mobility in the work force. They have been dismantled over the last 50 years, but in terms of not talking about these burdens, maybe we overcorrected.
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To end on a happier note, after the event, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer took Kamala Harris to a nearby pub, where they drank some local beer, to the slight shock of the media. “I’m having what she’s having!” Harris told reporters. The two women sat closely, keeping their conversation low. “We just told all the family secrets—shit!” Harris said when asked.
That and the beer seemed to shock some observers. I loved it. Maybe they talked a little menopause management, too.
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
Joan Walsh
Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.
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