It seems I'm not the only one wondering why our female role models have gone all girlie. Emma Duncan in The Sunday Times:

Let’s face it, macroeconomics is a pretty dreary business. Devising contra-cyclical capital requirements for safer banking regulation isn’t the most delightful way to spend a spring afternoon. Why worry about the world economy when you can talk about clothes and make-up?

This was evidently Downing Street’s view of the intellectual level of the G20 wives, for the spouses were packed off on a programme of the sort that the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s social secretariat might have thought up for the third wife of a visiting dignitary. No doubt the schedule was sent in advance to Mr Angela Merkel, a chemistry professor, and Mr Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a former president, for they wisely stayed away.

Downing Street seems to have decided that G20 ladies’ virtue would be endangered if they met any of Britain’s notoriously rapacious menfolk, because their visit was conducted in purdah. Michelle Obama was taken to a women’s cancer hospital and then to a girls’ school, presumably on the grounds that nursing and teaching are the only occupations suitable for ladies. Did she and Sarah Brown meet consultant oncologists to discuss developments in radiology? No, they went to the make-up unit, where Obama shared some top tips.

At the school she told pupils “being smart is cooler than anything in the world”. Quite so. All that was missing was a visit to a college of domestic science; Downing Street probably judged that since cooking had been taken over by male celebrity chefs, it was too sensational.

If the guest list for the all-women dinner at Downing Street represented top British female talent then, by Obama’s measure, this country is doomed. There was Naomi Campbell, a woman who became famous because she is beautiful and stayed that way because she is spectacularly ill-mannered; Emma Freud, who has a fashionable surname, used to do things on television and lives with Richard Curtis, a successful man; Martha Lane Fox, who is rolled out every time somebody wants a young entrepreneur, even though the company she started has been swallowed by a competitor and she is no longer young.

Yes, I know JK Rowling has created an industry single-handedly and Kelly Holmes is a fabulous athlete, but where were Patricia Scotland, the attorney-general, Athene Donald, physicist and fellow of the Royal Society, and numberless other seriously successful women?

I didn’t think it could get worse until I read about the entertainment at the Royal Opera House. There these sensible women were treated to the Stepford-style experience of Rowling, in pink chiffon, reading from her fairy story, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, while their menfolk saved the world. Indeed, it could have been a scene from one of the bard’s tales: the lovely creatures sitting in rococo splendour, while down on the darkling plain their knights swung glinting swords at the hordes of toxic assets.

Surely the press complained at this patronising treatment? Of course not. The torrent of gush about Obama - almost entirely written by female journalists - was restricted primarily to the tone of her arms, her ability to mix’n’match designer with high street fashion, whether her silhouette had been achieved with the help of “magic pants” and the sensitive question of how Sarah Brown might be persuaded, in the interests of the nation, to buy herself a pair of the same for future summits.

I’d like to think that this hideous parody of 1950s femininity was thought up by some twisted misogynist plotting how best to insult women. But I fear it wasn’t so. I think it was principally the consequence of a worrying new way of thinking about political wives that has taken over in Downing Street and the White House.

[...]

If Downing Street and the White House like the idea of political wives being helpmeets and mothers rather than people in their own right, it isn’t surprising. The previous leaders’ wives, Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton, loomed a little too large for comfort. Blair’s professional life at times collided with the government’s interests. She had a bad-tempered relationship with the press that reflected well on neither. Clinton grabbed a huge political role in her husband’s administration - healthcare reform - and botched it. Memories of the hostility she aroused not just among Republicans but also in her own party are still sharp among Democrats.

Yet regressing to the 1950s model of political wife can’t be the right answer. It’s bad for the country, because it sends out a dreadful message about what the government thinks of the role of women. And it’s a waste of Obama and Brown. They’re smart women who have done a lot with their lives. Their husbands should boast about their achievements, not hide them away.

I would take issue with the last sentence. Sarah Brown is fairly smart but she hasn't done a lot with her life, and Michelle Obama is not even all that smart. Both are now mere appendages of famous men and quite unimpressive. Sarah Brown has more class, however - if all you're going to be is a first lady, you should at least be ladylike.