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.
Current Issue
“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.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
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.
Can we count on you?
In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.
We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.
Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.
Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.
Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation
More from The Nation
Calling Trump and his supporters Nazis misses the genuine danger the fake billionaire and his authentically plutocratic friends pose to our republic.
Weather forecasters used to be some of the most trusted people in the news business. Then they began speaking openly about climate change.
Even some actual billionaires are happy to betray democracy for Trump’s favors—and fear and greed help keep the rest in line.
They distort our democracy, have little value, and make us all insane. We should do what other countries do, and ban them this close to an election.
If Kamala Harris is elected, we can continue to pressure her to end the war on Gaza. The other option for president, Donald Trump, is a threat to our right to protest.
