Michelle Obama

Unlike her husband - whose Kenyan father and white Kansan mother track his family trajectory away from more typical life stories of African-Americans - the Robinson family moved northward to Illinois as part of the Great Migration, a path African-American families took in the decades after the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century.

Princeton Years

Robinson followed her older brother to Princeton University in the early 1980s. But as one of few black students, life was lonely. She wrote her 1985 senior thesis on the alienation she felt. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," explained Michelle in her thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Excerpted in various publications during the 2008 presidential campaign, the thesis was used by right-wing pundits as a means of proving Michelle Obama's black radicalism, though most independent observers called the thesis "dense" at best, and hardly radical.

After Princeton, Obama attended Harvard Law School. Though she spent the bulk of her time at Harvard working for the Legal Aid Society, upon graduation in 1988, Obama joined the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin LLP where she was eventually assigned to mentor a summer associate: another Harvard law student named Barack Obama. The couple married in 1992; controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright conducted the ceremony.

In 1991, Michelle joined city government - working for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) - and stayed in the public sector as her husband began a political career.

In 1998, she gave birth to her first child, Malia. Her second daughter, Natasha, nicknamed Sasha, was born in 2001.

By 2007, she was collecting around $300,000 a year as the vice president for the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she led community outreach. That year, she took a leave of absence to help her husband, then a senator, campaign for the presidency.

2008 Campaign Controversy

Obama professes to have been uncertain about her husband's path to the White House - indeed, into politics at all. But her pride in her husband's quest for residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got her in trouble during the primary season.

At a February 2008 rally in Milwaukee, Wis., Obama came to the podium and said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction."

Labeled unpatriotic, the "proud" gaffe cost the future first lady considerable public sympathy at the time, especially from Republicans and right-wing pundits.

Throughout the rest of the campaign, she worked hard to reclaim public support via appearances on female-oriented television programs like daytime's "The View" and in her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Denver where she emphasized the normalcy of her family.

The future first lady, very consciously, did not evoke the historic, or racial, nature of the race to the White House again during the 2008 campaign.

The White House

In November 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency, and the Obamas became the first African-American family to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Obama was swept immediately into a post-feminist debate when she officially left her high-powered job and declared her first priority in the White House would be as "mom in chief" to daughters Malia and Sasha. Feminist commentators wrote that Obama's choice not to continue working was a defeat for working women everywhere.

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