I could have sworn they were two ego-maniac attention whores.
Via WaPo:
Michelle Obama and Beyoncé Knowles are both powerful women married to powerful men. They are friends. Their families have spent time together. They praise each other publicly and support each other’s projects.
Few would be surprised if Knowles is in town for the first lady’s 50th birthday party later month. (Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, will be in concert at Verizon Center on Jan. 16, the day before Obama’s birthday.)
As their friendship has developed, these two women have — wittingly or not — become markers of 21st-century feminism.
“They are incredibly competent women who have not just flourishing careers but flourishing marriages and flourishing children. That’s a very inspiring feminist message,” says Anna Holmes, a New York-based writer and the founder of the popular women’s Web site Jezebel. “It’s not contrived, but by default it feels very revolutionary.”
It is complicated, of course.
But, taken together, the public statements and choices made by Michelle Obama and Beyoncé represent a specific feminist strain of thinking on women, work and family, students of feminism say, that could rightly be called Beyoncéism.