Ill-Mannered Women Seldom Make History

I came out of my parenting funk last week to learn that Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest champions of freedom in our era, had passed away. Chihuahuas were barking mad, of course, but as Mark Steyn tells us, Lady Thatcher was the kind who’d savor the fury:

Mrs. Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs,” almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.

The whiniest of all chihuahuas Morrissey opposes Thatcher on animal welfare grounds or some such. He certainly aged… but the good news is that he’s still alive. Who knew?  Morrissey was one of those entertainers who were big in the West, but gained virtually no traction in the Soviet Union.  We preferred classic rock and heavy metal.

And here is another quote from the infinitely quotable late Prime Minister:

“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding,” she once said, “Because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

“They” certainly lost a lot of arguments.  Steyn summed up the legacy of Lady Thatcher’s domestic policies:

Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.

Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable? [Emphasis mine, -- ed.]

My grade school years coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.  The Soviet media vilified both of them ferociously, but to our family they were friends.  We had family members who were trying to leave the Soviet Union, and we appreciated the unwavering support both Thatcher and Reagan expressed for Soviet dissidents and refusniks.

Regardless of family background, my generation loved action flicks and coveted blue jeans and bootleg rock music.  But it was up to the political leaders to explain the value of freedom.  Back in the 80s, Western leaderships projected optimism and confidence.  They showed us why capitalism was successful, and why it was worth imitating.  Maggie, Ronny and rock-n-roll were the picture of the West that I grew up with.

Maggie’s opinion was valued.  My grandma, who always got her news from the Russian Services of the BBC and the Voice of America, was heartened when the BBC broadcasted the Iron Lady’s opinion of Gorbachev: he was the man she can do business with.  That was the seal of approval Eastern Europe craved.

The Iron Lady is greeted by Moscowites in 1987 at the beginning of Gorbachev’s short tenure

Here is Oleg Atbashian — who is a couple of years older than me and has a more mature recollection of that period — on listening to Maggie on shortwave radio (click on the link for a cool poster).  He tuned in for rock-n-roll and stayed for politics:

 One night — it had to be late 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was running for her first re-election — my shortwave radio caught a BBC broadcast of the Iron Lady’s campaign speech.

[...]
Listening to Thatcher speak confirmed everything the Soviet media was reporting about her, and more. In a deep, powerful voice, she accused her socialist opponents of destroying the British economy through nationalization and presented the proof of how privatizing it again was bringing the economy back to life. The free markets worked as expected, making Britain strong again. The diseased socialist welfare state had to go, to be replaced by a healthy competitive society.

To the average consumer of the Soviet state-run media, that didn’t make any sense. When exactly had Britain become a socialist welfare state? That part never passed the Soviet media filter.

[...]

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn’t yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn’t it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn’t it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps — here’s a scary thought — to just get rid of socialism altogether? [Emphasis mine, --ed.]

My readers are welcome to dispute me, but I prefer Maggie to Ronny.  For one, the Iron Lady’s task of privatization was infinitely greater than anything Ronald Reagan had to face.  For another, I’m absolutely in awe of her speaking style.  Reagan was a great orator, full of passion, insights and spontaneity.  But Thatcher, ooow, her zingers were deadly.

I think it’s instructive that while the left talks incessantly about female empowerment, the actual great female leaders are conservative.  In part it’s because feminism is a false idol.  A non-Y-chromosomed Western politician too attached to the sisterhood is limiting herself.  The work of female emancipation now entails such all-important projects like providing already cheap birth control for free.  A woman with a vision, like Margaret Thatcher, has to have greater goals in mind.  Plus, if the story of Sarah Palin teaches us anything about the women’s movement, it’s that we, women, can be nasty and envious.

Since the second wave feminists taught women that personal is political, which really means that nothing is personal.  One’s choice of occupation, of clothing, of, notoriously, coital position, belongs to the sisterhood.  Feminism is a way of life, and as far as lifestyle advise goes, this one is highly questionable.  Per feminist bumper sticker wisdom, “Well-behaved women seldom make history”.  A now middle-aged death rocker we know has that one on her car.  There are plenty of obediently ridiculous women in the feminist movement, from raging grannies in pink to slut walks.  Is it worth it?

I’m sure it’s all very convenient in short term given how young ladies have all the rationale to party, but I pity the “girls” who will not, in a matter of year or two, grow to regret their participation.  The Ukrainian group Femen is selective high-end international version of slut walks.  I have to give it to them, they know how to get their egos massaged.  Occasionally, their protests have a kind of logic to it.  If one has to remove her bra for a cause, flash islamists.  Ultimately, though, they are dead-enders (via Leslie Lofties) destined to be a footnote to history.  If they get an honorable mention in history books, students struggling to figure out the narrative will wonder if they really need to know about partially naked women who once grabbed headlines.

Margaret Thatcher will get an entire chapter. I’m not sure she was “well-behaved”, certainly not by the standards of the socialist Left, but she was a lady, and as such she commanded attention and respect.  When the Meryl Streep film came out in 2011, Margaret Thatcher’s personal style became a popular topic of discussion, which is a bit silly.  It’s the women’s movement that’s about style, and the more outrageous, the better.  Morrissey is about style.  The Iron Lady was about substance.

Iconic Maggie, cheerful on the day she was elected, 4 May 1979.  Power, optimism, substance

A side note:  Margaret Thatcher had her twins when she was 28 — early by today’s standards.  She slowly developed her career and went on to be the most powerful woman in the world.  Had she waited another ten years to start her family, she’d spent her 40s carrying for young children, not moving up the Tory political ladder.  There is a lesson there.

And, oh, look how slender this mother of twins was — because she gave birth in her 20s?

Next Year in Jerusalem

Gorod(City) was one of my favorite Russian underground songs.  It’s simple, serene and mysterious, and I fell in love with it when I first heard it, in my early teens.  That version was performed by a group called Aquarium, and most Russians still attribute the authorship to the lead singer Boris Grebenshchikov (nicknamed BG).  I don’t think he still claims it, but at some point he probably did.

Appropriately enough, Gorod’s origin is shrouded by mystery.  In the late 80s a girlfriend of mine told me that BG stole it from some singer songwriter, altering the lyrics.  She said that the original version used quotes from the Bible which BG bastardized.  I knew about the accusations of plagiarism when I was getting married, fifteen years later, but I loved the song so much, I chose the Aquarim version of the song for the father-daughter dance.  I didn’t know where to find the original, plus, plagiarism or not, I loved BG’s execution, which always took me back to my teens — it’s very Soviet Union in the 80s.

Zeev Heizel did a thorough investigation of the origin of the song, and concluded that the melody was created by an amateur Russian lute player Vladimir Vavilov in the late 1960s, and that it was inspired by Italian Renaissance composer Francesco da Milano.  Poet Anri Volohonsky wrote the lyrics in 1972, and Aquarium recorded their hit in the 80s.

English translation of the Aquarium version is following:

Under the blue sky
Is a city of gold
With translucent gates
And a bright star
And in that city is a garden
Of grass and flowers
Animals of unseen beauty
Stroll there
One is a lion with a mane of fire
Another is an ox with stupendous eyes
With them is the golden celestial eagle
Whose look of light is unforgettable

But in the blue sky
Shines a star
She is yours oh my angel
She is yours forever
One who loves is beloved
One who shines is a saint
Let the star lead you
To the miraculous garden
To meet the lion with a mane of fire
And the ox with stupendous eyes
With them is the golden celestial eagle
Whose look of light is unforgettable

Ever since my bff told me that the lyrics were based on Biblical verses, I thought that the song was about Jerusalem.  And maybe the text was based on the scriptures, only in the original version the city was not “under”, but “over” the blue sky, the heavenly Jerusalem.  Anyhow, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate Passover with the Hebrew version of Gorod, with a very thick Russian accent, performed by Zeev Heizel:

Happy Passover and happy Easter to my Christian friends.

Van Cliburn, RIP

Americans might have given him a ticker-tape parade, and he was a rock star the world over, but I suspect Van Cliburn was best loved in Russia.  High-minded Russians love classical music, and they all (absolutely every single one of them!) fell in love with Cliburn in 1958 when the musician won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow.  The iron curtain lifted a bit, and a refined Texan with a wild head of hair wowed the country with his masterful execution of Russian Romantic composers.  The way his fingertips touched the piano, one would believe that he spent his formative years committing to memory Pushkin’s and Yesenin’s verses and playing in the snow besides birch trees.  Vanya Cliburn!

And please note, Cliburn was not a creation of any kind of centralized system designed to nurture virtuoso musicians.  He was just a guy who loved music and who came from a family that loved music.  The Soviets, on the other hand, scouted out talented children.  Turns out, classical music can strive in the culture of individualism.

If Cliburn’s performance showed the nation that America had a soul, American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow the following year offered something different.  Two million Russians attended the installation that featured the wonders of the day-to-day capitalist existence.  Had Americans with their Coca-Cola and dishwashers lost track of what’s important in life?  After Van Cliburn there was no way to convincingly argue that the United States were too materialistic.

Van Cliburn’s entry in the Tchaikovsky competition was one of the iconic moments of Khrushchev’s Thaw of the 1950-60′s, a period of relative freedom following the death of Stalin.  My parents’ generation that came of age during the Thaw absolutely idolized the pianist.

Van Cliburn passed away yesterday at the age of 78.  Please enjoy the recording of his extraordinary performance in Moscow, one of the few hopeful moments in Soviet history:

Odd Pen-pals

For some mysterious reason American politicians are required to kiss babies.  We might be increasingly skeptical as a people, and we distrust both major parties, but, evidently, it’s still advantageous for the politicians to put their lips to germ factories.

Cuties!

I hope Obama’s latest use of children as props to advance specific agenda will backfire, and our leaders will stop stop hanging out with kids in general.  When announcing his executive orders intended to curb gun rights, Obama lined up a handful of kids.  The kids, evidently, sent letters to the President asking him to curtail the 2nd Amendment.

The first time I heard of an American kid writing letters to world leaders was in 1982.  I was 9 and the very photogenic Samantha Smith was 10.  The uninhibited Samantha sent a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov asking him to not have a war with the United States.  Although Andropov didn’t personally answer Samantha, her note was printed in Pravda.  Samantha persisted, contacting the Soviet ambassador to the United States.  After that Andropov printed his answer to Samantha in Pravda, and the girl’s family was invited to visit the Soviet Union.  The Smith family went on a guided tour of Moscow and Leningrad, and the girl spent a few day in Artek, the camp for the children of nomenklatura.

Samantha Smith holds up a letter

She was a minor TV celebrity and a news sensation in the States, but I doubt many Americans remember the girl, or even had heard of her.  She was, however, a huge star in the Soviet Union.  Since she had enormous propaganda value for the Soviet regime, she was put on state TV on heavy rotation.  An average Soviet person was taken with the affable American girl.  Andropov said that she reminded him of Becky Thatcher, and the country digged the comparison.  (Do American kids still know who Becky Thatcher is?)

I couldn’t understand how a girl of 10 could write to world leaders.  Unlike everyone else I knew, I did have a foreign pen-pal, a cousin in San Francisco, whose letters, when they arrived, arrived pre-read — it was obvious that somebody messed with the envelope.  I knew better than to write to foreign politicians, and I certainly wouldn’t correspond with our own Soviet higher ups.

Irina Tornopolsky did.  She was about the same age and, like me, lived in Kharkov.  Irina signed a letter to Andropov asking him to release her dad, a political prisoner, and allow her family to emigrate to Israel.  Although the letter was printed in the Western press, and it’s hard not to sympathize with her family’s predicament, Irina did not become a glob-trotting international celebrity.  Let her travel abroad, and she’ll defect.  Without strategically staged photographs, she was merely a footnote to a footnote in Cold War history.  Tornopolsky’s family later admitted that the message was written by a friend, and that the friend wanted to attract attention to the plight of refuseniks at the time when Samantha Smith was giving gushing interviews about Lenin being just like George Washington.

The very photogenic Katya Lycheva became the Soviet peace prodigy a la Samantha Smith.  She “wrote” to Reagan, and traveled around the world as a young “goodwill ambassador”.  Katya, of course, was widely believed by her compatriots to be a KGB stooge.

Promotional picture of Katya Lycheva. In case you are wondering, no Soviet kids didn’t play with stuffed globes and doves. We had normal toys, meaning all boys were encouraged to engage in imagination play with plastic guns. What do you do with a globe and a dove, anyway? The bird is not even half as good as your average Teddy bear, and the globe is a poor cousin of a soccer ball

I had questions about Samantha Smith, and my dad explained that Americans generally don’t feel constrained about approaching their politicians, but that particular girl was probably encouraged by her parents.  The girl didn’t live to figure out that she was used.  Samantha Smith and her father died in a plane crash in 1986.  The Soviet press immediately declared that the tragedy was a result of foul play — it wasn’t.  Anyhow, I doubt Samantha Smith’s surviving mother would agree with my dad’s assessment.

Gosh, what do I know?  Girls certainly like to exchange notes, and some American girls particularly unself-conscious.  I certainly don’t see my children approaching world leaders any time soon, and I see it as a good thing.  Their scribbles are most likely to be ignored.  Should they be particularly unlucky, they can be used as stage props, as Obama did to the anti-gun kiddos a few days ago.

We all know that the kids were thrust in front of the cameras in order to mix up our cool logic with emotion — or, to spell out the particulars, to get the wingnuts to shut up already — how in the world are the correct-thinking individuals suppose to win an argument?  I doubt any of these kids would be hanging out with the ‘Bamster, should their parents not approve and encourage their epistolary habits.  “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen” is what we say about politics.  And yet it’s perfectly appropriate to drag kids into it.

Soviet City Youth in Kolkhoz

In the mid-19th century, about half of the peasants in the Russian Empire were serfs.  After the 1861 emancipation, former serfs gained control of half the land they cultivated.  In the late 1920s-early 30a, Joseph Stalin implemented collectivization, confiscating privately owned land, animals and grain and killing and exiling wealthy or unwilling peasants.  The resulting famine claimed the lives of anywhere from 6 to 8 million people country-wide, with an overwhelming majority of deaths occurring in Ukraine.  The famine bares the Ukrainian name Holodomor, literally “hunger kill”.

As a result of collectivization, agricultural production immediately plummeted.  Peasants burnt their warehouses and slaughtered their livestock rather than surrender them to the government.  Once herded into kolkhozes, they responded with theft, sabotage and a deliberately slow pace of work.  And yet posters with smiling peasants graced the walls of government buildings and stories of record harvests made yearly headlines in Pravda.  One of the common themes of the socialist realist art was women and ample harvest, especially grain. While the best examples of the genre were masterfully drawn and poignant, they had nothing to do with reality.

“Bread” by Tetyana Yablonska, painted in 1949, is a pretty good example of the genre. I remember it from my grade school textbooks.  Ukrainian peasant women,sunburned, stout and hardworking, are gathering grain against the backdrop of modern agricultural machinery.  The woman in the center of composition must be pointing at the bright communist future

“Bread” by Ilya Isupov, 2010

Collectivization restricted the movement of peasants who had to obtain permission of the kolkhoz leadership in order to move.  But when regulations were relaxed, people, particularly the youth, flocked to the cities.  Soviet country life offered few educational and vocational opportunities.  If there was little money to be made by the residents of Russian villages, there was also little to buy because the government preferred to prop up big cities with material goods.  Although they like to deny it, Russians are materialistic people — not that there is anything wrong with that — so they like to live in places with good shopping.  Living conditions in the countryside were (and still are) deplorable.  In the late 1950s, my mother was stationed in a village with no electricity.  Never mind that according to the official story, all of the Soviet Union was supplied with electricity in the 20s.  Running water and indoor bathrooms were a luxury.

This babushkas pictures you see on The People’s Cube shows the aging and heavily female population of countryside devoid of amenities

In the cities, peasant youth usually settled in nearly identical soulless suburbs.  Many newcomers filled the ranks of manual laborers and single mothers.

M. Kugach “To the City for Education”, 1965.  This hard-working girl from a nice village must be a budding intellectual. It’s amazing that a painting with so much humanity can be totally divorced from reality

Because of the shortage of people willing and able to work the land, city dwellers were directed to help the kolhozes.  Since we weren’t trusted with heavy machinery or the cattle, we ended up picking vegetables or working at the warehouses.  A few times a year my parents, both engineers, were sent to kolkhoz warehouses (na kohaty).  They always fretted both because they didn’t want to spend the whole day away from home and family and because it was hard to see how menial agricultural work was a good application of their skills. I once asked my mom how come she just didn’t blow them off.

“Somebody has to do this work.” She replied. “Otherwise we will have nothing to eat.”

There were more immediate reasons to go, though.  She usually came back with bags full of fresh vegetables for family and friends.  Technically that was theft, but in the country with a vast black market economy it was expected, and collective farm administrators looked the other way.

High school and university students, too, were ordered to the countryside where unlike the married older subjects we could spend long stretches of time.  I suppose we could get out if we’d put our mind to it, the way young men get out of mandatory military service, but as a rule we wanted to go.  My one and only time at kolkhoz was in about 1988.  It was during Perestroika, and some boys in my class had the nerve to ask to be paid.  From what I remember, it was explained that our earnings will cover room and board.  You see, we went for the whole month and were stationed in a dormitory near a lake.  In the mornings we were supposed to pull weeds out on a strawberry field, but the rest of the day was spent sunbathing, swimming and socializing.  In other words, it was a camp.

Harrison of Capitol Commentary mentioned that a friend of his remembers young women getting pregnant working in kolkhoz.  It’s easy to see how something like that would happen.  In our case, we were 15 and most of us still reasonably innocent.  We were housed in a dormitory with large rooms; I think there were four rooms for nearly 40 of us, and we were chaperoned by a teacher called class leader (klassnii rukovoditel).  We were begging for a disco, and it did happen, but only on the last weekend of our stay.  Mysteriously, one girl was sent home early.  But if anyone got pregnant, she didn’t carry pregnancy to term.  My mom, however, who went to kolkhoz multiple times in her youth, had all-girls assignments.

We thought we scored with that strawberry field, but when we arrived on location, we found that the field was so overgrown with weeds, there were no strawberries to save.  We kind of pretended to work, with our class leader watching over us.  Once we walked into the sunflower field nearby where were shocked to discover sunbathing semi-nude peasant women with their ugly white bras around their waists.  On the last day of our stay, a kolkhoz tractor drove through the field and cut down the weeds.

There was a saying in the Soviet Union “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”, but that particular strawberry field was a surreal example of non-exercise in futility of not-so-forced non-labor.  One of those things that makes you wonder why the Soviet Union fell.

City youth at a collective farm, “working”.  Judging by his sweater, this picture was probably taken in the 80s

In the 1990s, old Ukrainian collective farms were re-registered as corporate farms.  The land was not redistributed, and the management practices didn’t change.  Forced student labor persists in the former republics, like Belarus and Uzbekistan.  They harvest cotton in the later.  Ring any bells?

UPDATE: many thanks to Professor Jacobson for linking.

Lots of Courage to Go Around

Ladies, you are so brave.  In this post-Sex and the City world the decision to remain childless is a test of courage, you tell me.

Lots of people are brave these days.  Flipping off Ronald Reagan can pass for courage in certain circles.  I first heard of the activists at the gay pride White House reception on the radio.  I was somehow under the impression that they were having fun, but then I looked up the picture.  I dono… if you are going to flip off a portrait of a United States President, at least show a bit of an attitude.  And by the way, did you know that Reagan was a champion of gay rights?

Remember when gay people knew how to party? This one looks like the government has been rationing her Prozac.

I’m sure Alice Walker thinks of herself as brave.  She must; she’s a raving anti-Semite.

On to a different subject-matter, King Shamus has a parody of a certain WW2 Brit poster here.

Are Americans losing faith in public schools?  Only 29% express confidence in the latest Gallup survey (Via Instapudit).  Lack of confidence in public schools might be not unlike the lack of confidence in Congress.  Nobody likes them, but everyone likes their own.  Not to say that all people like their public schools, but many do; that’s why they bought their houses in the vicinity.

Thomas Sowell said (via Conservatives on Fire):

Whatever the merits or demerits of the Obama immigration policy, his Executive Order is good only as long as he remains president, which may be only a matter of months after this year’s election.

People cannot plan their lives on the basis of laws that can suddenly appear, and then suddenly disappear, in less than a year. To come forward today and claim the protection of the Obama Executive Order is to declare publicly and officially that your parents entered the country illegally. How that may be viewed by some later administration is anybody’s guess.

I don’t think this “law” will disappear.  I mean, really, after granting this amnesty we will not take it away, particularly considering that some sort of legislature of this kind was coming.  It’s a particularly nasty way to grant it, but oh well.  Anyhow, Romney makes His Pitch to Hispanics.  I know Romney wants to stay on message, which is the economy, but it’s Obamster who put assault weapons into the hands of drug lords, the weapons that ended up killing Mexicans.  In a long run, “Hispanic” immigrants are yesterday’s news, and Republicans should be courting Asians since they seem to be the next wave of immigrants.

Is that what happens when that *reset* button is hit?

A carnival of Obama fundraising ideas.

Obamanation Presidential guest edition.

Maggie, who’s blogging again, is telling me that the former Obama CBO director thinks voting should be mandatory.  In the Soviet Union we had something like a 99.9% participation rate with 99.9% voting for the one guy on the ballot.  Everyone just sort of went to the polls because that’s how it’s done, but my big sis, once she reached the voting age, didn’t much care for that.  She’s always been an apolitical kind, G-d bless her.  On the evening of the election day we had poll workers knocking on our door telling her to go vote because they are tired of waiting for her and want to go home.  After the poll workers made a few visits, and my grandparents were a bit freaked out, she made it to the polling place.

Most voter fraud probably goes undetected, but The Daley Gator has an instance, and a union boss is involved.

Guns don’t kill people, bodies of water do!

Warn your liberal friends: That $3 dinner with Barack can cost them hundreds in taxes (and that’s not counting the tax hikes we shall see if he gets his way).

How to Afford the Luxury of Not Working at Home

Confirmed: “natural” is in the eye of the beholder.  In September 2007 Vogue printed Rebecca Johnson’s piece on Michelle Obama, a shortened version is available online (I hope they won’t disappear it).  Barack Obama claimed that his family didn’t have “the luxury” for Michelle to stay at home, but The interview, titled The Natural, confirms that Michelle — how should I put it? — pretty much hated stay at home motherhood with every fiber of her being (via Political Junkie Mom):

Every year, Michelle Obama considers quitting her job and staying home full-time to take care of her children. “It was a gift having my mother home every day. I want my kids to feel that way,” she says. But having experienced the pleasures of work outside the home, she is reluctant to give up her independence. “Work is rewarding,” she says. “I love losing myself in a set of problems that have nothing to do with my husband and children. Once you’ve tasted that, it’s hard to walk away.”

Then, too, there is that little-discussed fact that staying home with children can be—how else to put it?—less than intellectually stimulating. “The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill,” she says. “My head starts to ache.” When she mentioned it to her mother, Marian Robinson told her daughter she didn’t think Michelle could handle the boredom of staying home with kids. [Cursive mine, -- ed.]

Naturally, cum laude Michelle preferred to work for the Chicago machine.  The Lonely Conservative comments:

Look, there are days when kids drive even the most perfect, loving mothers a bit insane. Nobody can deny that. But for someone with a six figure income to classify the choice of staying at home to raise her children as a “luxury” is disingenuous at best.

Every once and a while we all need a break.  Actually, we need a lot of breaks, even if we don’t describe our aversion to spending time with our children in such tactile terms.  Perhaps Obamas who found child-rearing too difficult of an undertaking can show some respect for women who actually did it.

Anywho, I am lucky to have my mother come over every week, as expected from a Russian granny.  In the Soviet Union we were practically raised by our grandmothers.  In the four decades following World War 2, Soviet women had very long maternity leaves after which they had to go back to work full time.  Now, one of my grandmothers managed to be a homemaker, which was unbelievable.  My mom likes to say that she and her husband lived in the 20th century as if it was the 19th.

My mother worked out an agreement to work half a day, which was also unbelievable.  I didn’t know any other kid who had it so sweet.  One of my earliest memories is sitting with my grandmothers and waiting for her to come home in the middle of the day.  All other kids were tended to by babushkas or were in daycare and kindergartens.  My grannies were of the opinion that day care was low class, and I started kindergarten at 4, a year later than everyone else.  It was pretty much a factory of conformity and despair, which is a different topic altogether.

Although my daughter started part time pre-school when she was ready for the social experience, we have no sitters and no nannies.  I had an opportunity to hire a trusted Russian woman with a nursing degree, but passed.  Money is one reason, another one is that we prefer family members taking care of each other.  My children had developed relationships with people who love them more than anything else in this world and who will be there for them until their death. I’m not against sitters, just pro-granny.  I think people who can afford sitters should hire them — along with maids, gardeners and other service providers — to give themselves a break.

I was eager to leave home as a teen, and moved out when I was admitted to a university.  My experience is fairly unusual considering that even in this country Russian kids don’t move out until they get married.  Living alone, or at least far from parents, can be great fun for people in their 20s, but once we get on the breeding path, it’s reckoning time.  Thankfully, I didn’t move too far.  Balancing family and opportunity is something for young people to consider.

Since many Russian American women are able to pursue both carriers and motherhood because they have grandmothers tend to their children, I was intrigued by the role of Mrs. Robinson, Michelle’s mother, in the upbringing of her children.  Turns out, it was not a big one.  Here is the clue:

To keep things as normal as possible, Michelle’s mother will soon be retiring from her job as a secretary at a bank—in order to help watch the Obama daughters, Malia, nine, and Sasha, six.  [Cursive mine, -- ed.]

So basically, while Michelle entertained herself with the Chicago machine, the Sasha and Malia spent their formative years in the care of strangers.

UPDATE: Forgot to include this portrait of “natural” motherhood: matching daughter’s clothes to self.  Anyway, one example of many.

Yahoo comments: "Put on your to do list: Mother-daughter matching days". Oh come on, stay at home moms, don't be party poopers.