We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make...that helping others means more than just getting … - Michelle Obama

I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.

Barack insisted that we pay for everything ourselves, using what we'd saved from his book royalties. As long as I've known him, he's been this way: extra-vigilant when it comes to matters of money and ethics, holding himself to a higher standard than even what's dictated by law. There's an age-old maxim in the black community: You've got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than it was.

The size of our hips, our style, our swag, it becomes co-opted but then we are demonised... My advice to young women is that you have to start by getting those demons out of your head. The questions I ask myself — "am I good enough?" — that haunts us, because the messages that are sent from the time we are little is: maybe you are not, don't reach too high, don't talk too loud.