I love Michelle Obama. It’s honestly quite hard not to like her. When I knew hardly anything about her, I liked her based on what little I knew. When I knew quite a bit more about her, I liked her just as much.

And I love her even more for saying things like this.

There were several unforgettable moments in the Obama campaign—Barack’s impassioned speech about race, the DNC finale at Invesco, Madelyn Dunham’s death just before her grandson became president-elect—but none meant more to me than a two-minute bit of tape, a simple but monumental exchange between Michelle Obama and Soledad O’Brien.

In her interview with Michelle, Soledad circled around the issues placed at the center of every discussion about female identity by second-wave feminism. O’Brien wondered how Michelle felt about following a dream that wasn’t hers. She asked about leaving a “high-powered and highly compensated” career.

Michelle acknowledged the challenges. She graciously offered that she missed her colleagues and her work. But, she continued, she could always find another career. With only the slightest hint of irony, she said if she had more time, she might bemoan the loss, but she “had a lot on her plate” and what she was doing was “pretty significant.”

I thought, “You go, girl!” As if working with the love of her life and the father of her children to become the first family of the United States while radically transforming the world as we know it isn’t the most empowering choice a brilliant and self-determining woman could make.

But the real moment came in the next beat, 30 seconds that remain forever etched in my mind as the final blow to an ideology in which women’s empowerment is narrowly defined by financial independence, emotional autonomy and professional advancement.

O’Brien went in for the kill, the coup de grâce of second-wave feminism. “But sometimes your career helps to define who you are,” she said, probing.

“It doesn’t for me,” Michelle said immediately. “What I do in my life defines me. A career is one of the many things I do in my life. I am a mother first. Where do I get my joy and my energy first and foremost? From my kids.”

This has been a point of contention for me since I discovered feminism years ago. I was struggling with my disability, in the simplest, truest sense of the word: I didn’t know how to handle my life. I was in too much pain to participate in pretty much any regular outside-the-home activity. Certainly I couldn’t work. And yes, I felt judged for that. I felt like a bad feminist for “staying home.” Especially when a long term relationship with a man entered the picture.

More broadly, adult life in this society is centered around work for pay. One’s job is a central defining aspect of one’s identity. If not the specific job, certainly the act of working, cashing your paycheck, and paying the bills. The environment you work in, interaction with your coworkers, dealings with the public, dealings with your boss, the physical or mental effects your work has on you. For most people, work takes up a majority of their waking hours. How can those hours not be an important part of who you are?

Higher-class white feminism has wholly embraced this in recent decades as women made the move into the workforce. This is unfortunate, because it is alienating. It is alienating to many people and many groups. It is alienating, as I touched on, to people with disabilities who are unable to work. It is alienating to people in the lower classes for whom the idyllic “career” is a fiction, or at least a very distant and unreachable phenomenon. It is alienating to people for whom the pursuit of more wealth and more power are not the end-all, be-all to life. Hell, it’s alienating to people who just plain don’t much care for their job and who wish not to have their lives defined by it.

A person’s job, their industry, their field of study, can be part of their identity. Again: for many people, it’s a pretty big part of your life. That doesn’t mean it has to be the biggest part. And if it’s the biggest part for you, well, congratulations: don’t assume the same for every other person.

If you’re still not getting it, for a change of perspective, try rereading that paragraph replacing job with parenthood.

Get me now? Good. Moving on.

I don’t particularly think feminist theory values work for pay as the defining aspect of egalitarian womanhood, as such. But anyone reading this blog should be well familiar with the reality that the feminist movement is afflicted with (rather, more accurately, afflicts) a variety of prejudice, preconception, misconception, and general dysfunction. A movement is made up of people. Messy, imperfect people, who soaked in all sort of prejudice, preconception, etc. as they grew up in a messy, imperfect society. And here we are.

The thing about this work, issues of social justice, is that we cannot remove the mistakes and start over with a clean slate. It’s not that easy. We are working with complex, shifting, messy, organic beings, and the immaterial force they create when they are brought together.

And sometimes, the solution that is best to address a problem in that messy world is not the solution that would be best to address that problem — excuse the phrasing — were all other things equal.

For a time, financially privileged white women felt a very real force at work around them: the dictates of their social class preventing them from participating in work-for-pay. This, whatever their privileges might otherwise be, was not fair. And so feminists fought against it. And, in a limited sort of way, they won. Now women are accepted in most fields of work-for-pay. They’re allowed to be not just the secretary but the attorney. They’re allowed to be not just the nurse but the doctor. And though it’s laughable to assert that sexism in the workplace is largely conquered (ha!) they earn much more respect than they might’ve fifty years back.

But here’s the thing. When this subset of women had their worlds cordoned off, reduced to a fraction of what they could be were they not so imprisoned, what was the problem?

By this, I don’t mean “Was it actually wrong?” I mean, instead, “What is it that made it wrong?”

Was it that women weren’t allowed to experience that world of work-for-pay (and, largely, the prestige that came with it) for themselves? That seems to be what feminism has settled on, in practice. Feminists fight fiercely when anyone threatens their place in the industry. And they are fiercely offended when anyone reduces them to their traditional purposes: child-making and -rearing, house cleaning, looking pretty, existing only for the whim and betterment of their men. And often the response is much like that of Melissa (whom I mean not to put down; it’s merely the example at hand) at Shakesville a few days back:

I’ve worked or been otherwise acquainted with married men who told me their wives were gorgeous, thin, good in bed, big-breasted, etc., long before they told me their wives’ occupations, or any other bit of information that wasn’t designed to convey how awesome the men were because they’d scored hot wives—just another accessory like a car or a great flat in a trendy neighborhood.

Why is it that when feminists seek to define their identity as women free from patriarchal constrictions, they almost always default first and often only to their occupation?

What is it that made that restriction wrong?

I submit that what made it wrong was not the specific area forbidden to women: it is that they were forbidden from an area — any area — that could contribute to their personhood and identity, that would allow them to contribute in return to their families, communities and wider society. The wrong is not that (this subset of) women was forbidden this particular aspect of self: the wrong is that (this subset of) women was forbidden any particular aspect of self.

Considering this, we round out the picture of what, exactly, work-for-pay means to women. It is something a large set of women were denied for a long time, or severely restricted, a system of coinciding and contradictory reward and punishment, a system in which women simply could not win. They saw that the system was flawed, and they worked, hard, to change that system.

But their sights were limited. They could not scrub the slate clean. They could only clean up some of the mess, then build on what they had left. So we find ourselves here. Some of the fiercest feminists are also the most accomplished professionals, and they have no reservations when it comes to defending that place for which they’ve fought so hard. But in doing so, maybe they — we — have let that part of ourselves consume the rest of us. Maybe we lost sight of the rest of our lives. The so, so many other things that we do, that are so important to us, but which are not nearly so highly valued when reflecting on our own identity.

Do you identify yourself, first and foremost, as a member of a certain profession? Why? Is it really the most important part of you?

Can you see the cracks in that facade? Do you see the classism, lurking in the assumption that everyone (who matters) excels at one thing in high school, then studies it in college, perhaps masters it in graduate school, and then moves straight into a career in that very field? Do you see the ableism, lurking in the assumption that everyone (who matters) works, and that it is always money from employment that pays for a person’s shelter, food, heat and cooling, yearly two-week vacations and bar tab? Can you see how even gender relations aren’t instantly righted with affluent white women’s entrance in the work field — lurking in the existence of the second shift, the fact that a spouse and family is considered a downside when hiring a woman but a plus when hiring a man?

These things aren’t the fault of women who work. But maybe we shouldn’t treat the importance we give to work-for-pay so uncritically. Maybe we shouldn’t pretend that we actually did wipe that slate clean.

What else do you do in your life? I’ll bet you there’s a lot of things. I get a maximum of five waking hours outside of work on weekdays and even I have many more parts to my life than my work. My husband, my cats, my geographic home, painting, blogging, hockey, design, my love of sweets and grains and tea and homemade stroganoff and mac n cheese and tacos, my family, my husband’s family, my friends, my favorite music, dancing for myself when nobody’s around, the joy of movement and the peace in rest…

I invite you to reflect on your own life. My bet is you’ll find much that challenges this idea that work must be a primary aspect of self for women who strive to be free.

And with that foundation, maybe we can begin to explore the worlds of all the other billions of women who weren’t white enough, financially secure enough, healthy enough, anything enough to be a part of that feminist movement. But it’s ok — I’ll give you some time to digest first.