In another letter, actress and producer Rashida Jones thanks Obama for exhibiting the traditional qualities expected of a First Lady without being “afraid to remind us she is a proud African-American woman, which is, in itself, revolutionary”.

To Jones, Obama represents “the modern, American woman”. “My female friends and I often talk about feeling like we’re ‘too much’,” she writes. “We’re complicated; we want to be so many things… All women struggle to reconcile the different people that we are at all times”.

But if feminism is about choice, Jones writes, Obama makes her feel like “every choice is available. You can go to Princeton and Harvard, you can rap with Missy Elliott, you can be a mother and a lawyer and a powerful orator.”

Ultimately, Obama “was the first first lady to show women that they don’t have to choose,” Jones concludes. “That it’s okay to be everything.”

Image: Rex Features

“Normal, inspirational and many degrees of cool”: in praise of Michelle Obama