First Lady Michelle Obama Excites Democrats in Nashville

First Lady Michelle Obama speaks in Nashville

First Lady Michelle Obama came to Nashville on Tuesday in support of President Obama’s re-election campaign.  Speaking to a packed crowd of enthusiastic supporters, the First Lady discussed the many advances this country has made under President Obama’s leadership, including advances for women in the workplace:

And how about the very first bill my husband signed into law? The very first thing he did as President — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help women get equal pay for equal work. That’s the first thing your President did. He did this because he knows what it means when women aren’t treated fairly in the workplace. He watched his own grandmother -– a woman with a high school education –- work her way up to become a vice president at a little-bitty community bank. She worked hard. She was good at her job. But she watched as she hit that glass ceiling, and watched men no more qualified than she was climb that corporate ladder — men she had actually trained move ahead of her.

So believe me, for Barack, this issue is not an abstraction. This isn’t a hypothetical for him. He signed this bill because he knows that closing that pay gap, that can mean the difference between women losing $50, $100, $500 from every paycheck, or having that money in their pockets to buy gas and groceries and school clothes for their kids. He did it because when so many women are now breadwinners or co-breadwinners for their families, women’s success in this economy is the key to families’ success in this economy. Your President knows that. And he did it because, as he put it, he believes that here in America there should be no second-class citizens in our workplaces. That’s what’s at stake.

You can read the rest of her amazing speech here.