Military Spouse Quotes

We're starting to see, as the economy improves, that the unemployment rate among veterans and military spouses - we're seeing some improvement in those numbers. And that's a good thing.

During the first campaign, one of my jobs as my husband's spouse was to travel around the country and really listen to women. There were voices that were new to me: the voices of military spouses, many of them women, and veterans.... I was overwhelmed by their challenges, and the notion that we as a country don't even know that these women exist, because we live in a country where one percent of the population protects the rights and freedoms of the other 99 percent of us. I thought that if I had the opportunity to serve as First Lady, I was going to use this platform to be their voice.

I was out there meeting with a lot of working moms and whenever I would gather a group of women, there was always a voice that was unfamiliar to me, and it was the voice of a military spouse, oftentimes a woman, oftentimes working, many times in a position where they've had to move every two or three years, where their kids have had to change school multiple times, people dealing - families dealing with multiple deployments, dealing with the stresses of reconnection.

The president [Barack Obama] asked for a commitment of, I think, 100,000 jobs for veterans and military spouses over the next couple of years. And we announced during the tour last week that we have gotten more than 60,000 jobs, and we're well on our way to just crashing that goal out of the water, because what businesses are understanding is that these men and women are some of the most highly trained resources that we have in this country.

I mean, that's the least we should do for these men and women [veterans and military spouses], is to make sure they come back to jobs that pay, to career opportunities, that these spouses are able to add a second income to their households, because these families do not have a lot of resources.