So, according to ABC News, First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were booed at a Nascar rally on Sunday in Miami-Dade, Florida. Well, of course.

Nascar is a good, old southern sport dreamed up by in Florida in the 1930s. It's a sport whose viewing audience is almost entirely made up of white Southerners and the soundtrack is country music and hard rock. Nascar is all red-state – and urban, ivy league-educated, arugula-loving Michelle Obama is all blue-state. So, to some observers, for the African American wife of the first black president to be booed evokes memories of Jim Crow racism and hatred of "uppity negroes". But it may be that another dynamic was at play. The Nascar folk who booed were a discourteous reminder of a more pervasive national ambivalence about strong women and the role they play in politics.

A Nascar rally would be classic Sarah Palin territory: had she strutted on stage in her Levis, toting her hunting rifle, she would have been emphatically cheered as a strong, plain-speaking, all-American woman. But even during the height of her popularity, while Palin's general approval ratings were sky-high, opinion shifted when her fans were asked about her suitability to be president: the majority of Republicans said she was unqualified for the office.

There we have it again, that split attitude. The public's flip from approval to disapproval may be less about the political affiliation of a woman in high office than about the role she plays within it.

In the March 2011 issue of Presidential News Quarterly, researchers reported that the most popular political spouses in the past two decades have been those who had, for most of their lives, performed the most traditional role. Barbara Bush and Laura Bush generated the highest ratings. Laura Bush, a nice, gentle librarian, who, if she had any thoughts, wasn't going to share them with us, heroically managed to hold on to her high rating even as her husband George W's plummeted – thanks to two unpopular wars, his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and a crashing economy.

The original first lady, Martha Washington, was known as Lady Washington, and was treated much like a queen. And for a century and a half, until the 1930s, the first lady's duties were similar to a queen's. She was expected to dress nicely (in clothes by an American designer), lay an impressive table at state functions, and lend a little White House glamour to various functions.

But modern times have created a conundrum for the poor first lady and her husband: most presidential candidates desire and need a shrewd, well-educated spouse; but the office of first lady has not evolved apace. Granted the first lady is not elected by the public, but then again, many important roles in the president's administration: secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, for example, are also "appointments", and not an appointment the public gets a good look at before they vote for a presidential candidate.

Eleanor Roosevelt caused the first blip when her husband took office in 1933. She publicly admitted that she had thoughts independent of her husband's and that she wasn't simply there to be the soft, womanly embodiment of him at official functions. Mrs Roosevelt wrote a newspaper column and hosted a radio show. For this, she was vilified by her opponents, and it's no surprise that Gallup first decided to poll the American public on their opinions of the first lady during Eleanor Roosevelt's tenure. She proved to have been largely an anomaly: after Eleanor, most subsequent first ladies stuck to their hostess duties.

Until Hillary Clinton. Even as an avowed feminist and an independent career woman, Clinton had to change her name, her hairstyle and her whole presentation to please the public as the wife of a presidential candidate. And she still endured huge hostility, especially when she tried to pilot through major healthcare reform during her husband's first term. Now, as secretary of state, she regularly tops lists of the country's most-admired women. But Michelle Obama is also a top choice for most-admired: she finished fourth after Clinton, Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey, according to Gallup's 2010 poll.

I doubt that Michelle Obama was surprised or dismayed by the boos at the Nascar rally: it's not surprising that the national doubtfulness about first ladies and the strong, accomplished women who are coming to hold the role would emerge in boos from some of the Obama administration's fiercest opponents. Michelle Obama holds a law degree from Harvard, a BA from Princeton and was her family's chief wage-earner for many years, first as a lawyer and then as a hospital administrator.

After all, the boos were not unambiguously for Michelle Obama alone: Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president, accompanied Mrs Obama to the rally and shared the stage. A college professor, Mrs Biden is probably the first wife of a vice president to work while in office, teaching at a local community college in the Washington, DC area. They have learned from Hillary Clinton's bruising first-term first lady experience, both choosing safely "non-political" issues to champion while their husbands are in office: Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity her cause, while Jill Biden promotes breast cancer awareness and community colleges.

There may be boos now for Michelle Obama, but if she's a student of history, then she, like former First Lady and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is baking cookies – or pretending to – and biding her time.