“Changing the Conversation”: Contexts for Reading Michelle Obama’s American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America

Whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden.

—Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”

In March 2009, barely two months after Michelle Obama resigned from her position as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center and before her husband began arguing with Congress about health care, workers broke ground on the White House lawn for what would eventually become the first lady’s 1,100-square-foot organic kitchen garden.¹ Shortly afterward Obama enlisted students from nearby Bancroft Elementary School to help with the planting.² These were Obama’s first moves in her campaign against childhood obesity, and less than a year later, in February 2010, she launched Let’s Move!, “a comprehensive initiative . . . dedicated to solving the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.”³ In June 2012 Obama published American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America.⁴

Obama has drawn fire from the public since her husband first stepped into the national spotlight, and when she planted her garden and launched her campaign against childhood obesity, shots volleyed from additional quarters. Some, understandably, hoped Obama would be as outspoken and unconventional a first lady as Hillary Clinton. In 2010, for example, feminist activist Gloria Feldt complained that she wished Obama would “quit with the recipes . . . and use her power to embed a new and more aspirational image of woman in our culture.”⁵ In a November 2013 article in Politico, writer Michelle Cottle called Obama a “feminist nightmare” and disparagingly remarked that Obama occupies herself with—among other things—gardening.⁶ Critics such as these were judging the first African American first lady by white feminist standards and overlooking her significant cultural work. They were also forgetting that the public holds first ladies to restrictive standards and that as first lady, Clinton paid a high price in lost popularity and public criticism for openly participating in policy making.

Rather than openly intervening in policy, as Hillary Clinton did with health care, Obama, like several previous first ladies, speaks from the private sphere to appeal to a broad audience while distancing herself from her husband’s office. Political scientist MaryAnne Borrelli writes that “the public continues to assess first ladies by standards that, routinely, are more reflective of the separate-spheres gender ideology,” and that first ladies who have advocated in the public sphere have received “greater support” when they presented themselves as acting from the private sphere.⁷ Obama’s adoption of the rhetorical stance of a mother and her use of the White House kitchen garden as her platform are calculated choices the first lady has made to further her goal of improving public health. This essay demonstrates that in American Grown, in discussions about her garden, and in her public health advocacy, Obama typically assumes two closely related rhetorical stances that are updated versions of “republican motherhood,” historian Linda Kerber’s term for the role for women that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when “the mother came to be seen as the custodian of civic morality” in the young republic. “The Republican Mother’s life was dedicated to the service of civic virtue,” Kerber writes. She notes that “the influence women had on children, especially sons, gave them ultimate responsibility for the future of the new nation.” Although marginal, Kerber notes, this role “justified women’s absorption and participation in the civic culture.”⁸ When speaking of public health, Obama typically speaks as National Mom, an advocate for the well-being of American children, and as Everymom, a busy mother who understands how the challenges of managing work and family obligations sometimes play out on the kitchen table. To paraphrase rhetorician Carla Peterson, for Michelle Obama, “speaking and writing” about her garden and what’s on her daughters’ plates “[constitute] a form of doing, of social action continuous with [her] social, political, and cultural work.”⁹ Obama’s adoption of her National...