In the midst of a presidential election year, we’re being hit with political news left and right. But something outside of the nominees has come across the circuit recently.
Family Circle magazine is hosting a potential first lady cookie recipe contest, as they have for the past four elections. In the 21st century, however, it is extremely archaic to assume that potential first ladies occupy such a domestic tradition.
The newsworthy aspect of the cookie contest is that the first lady, who has won the recipe challenge in the past four elections, has been attached to the politician who wins the election itself. It’s very impressive because, in a spooky way, a wife’s cookie recipe can forecast her husband’s success. But that is a mindset from past generations of nuclear families.
Today, female role models should not come from Betty Crocker. Women may still get married, have children and manage to run a household, but we also go to college, have careers and make names for ourselves that do not revolve around our famous chocolate chip cookie recipe.
The idea of the cookie contest may have come around to promote the first lady as a positive role model, but children should really be hearing about how she is married to a senator and a presidential nominee. She didn’t marry so she could be a trophy on a man’s arm.
It is a demeaning contest to be asking these successful women to come up with homemade cookie recipes when they, like most working mothers, probably buy the Pillsbury ready-made dough.
Between litigations, children and her husband’s campaign, do you think Michelle Obama is really considering if cinnamon is the missing ingredient in her famous shortbread cookie recipe? Would Cindy McCain? Frankly, no. I do not expect that they ever, especially not now, have enough hours in the day to be creating cookie recipes from scratch.
I actually feel bad for Cindy McCain. The woman is an heiress to one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the nation, has a Master of Arts in special education and founded the American Voluntary Medical Team, which brings emergency medical care to disaster or war-torn areas in third-world countries.
Do we care if she has a homemade recipe for macaroons? She already got in trouble earlier in the year for plagiarizing a passion fruit mousse recipe from the Food Network. For the competition, she is trying oatmeal butterscotch cookies.
And should we be concerned about Michelle Obama’s shortbread cookie recipe? It makes more sense to focus on the fact that she received her undergraduate degree from Princeton, graduated cum laude and received her Juris Doctorate from Harvard.
Maybe our society is afraid of having intelligent and successful role models and the cookie crumbs are more accessible to the public. Or maybe people can’t seem to understand that a politician is more believable when he has an intelligent, self-supporting woman on his arm that chose him over all of the other men she could have taken.
If we want to get to know these women and use them as positive role models, we should be asking them about what they really know.
How does Michelle Obama actually balance her work, family and husband’s career? How does Cindy McCain chair her father’s company, run a NPO and maintain a smile for her husband’s campaign? These men should feel privileged to be married to such successful women and not have them downplayed or domesticated into a Stepford wife.
First ladies should be intelligent, articulate and just as successful as their husbands. It makes no difference if they cheat with Bisquick or make batter from scratch. It does not change who they are. Even though the cookie results will not be revealed until October, I can safely say, we already have two winning women.