Barack Obama’s little sister said the clearest windows into the Illinois senator’s character are the women in his life.

Obama was raised by strong women and now surrounds himself with them, Maya Soetoro-Ng, 37, said in Carroll during a speech and in an interview with Iowa Independent.

Speaking to a crowd of about 20 people, most of them Democratic Party activists, Soetoro-Ng went so far as to refer to her Democratic presidential candidate brother as a feminist.

“I really believe that my brother is a feminist,” she said. “So much of what he does is so he can help to make the world a better place for his daughters and nieces.”


Soetoro-Ng joked that her daughter, Suhaila, 2, refers to Obama as “Uncle Rocky.”

Obama’s sister, a high school teacher in Honolulu, steered clear of major policy issues and talked about growing up with Obama, a decade her senior.

Soetoro-Ng said Obama’s wife, Michelle, a Harvard-educated attorney, is a strong woman involved in key decisions.

“She offers ultimate proof that he is a feminist, that he is an advocate for women,” Soetoro-Ng said. “He wants a real partner.”

Campaigning in western Iowa, Soetoro-Ng also has visited Greenfield, Red Oak, Council Bluffs, Missouri Valley, Onawa, Denison and Harlan.

Obama and Soetoro-Ng share the same mother, the late Ann Dunham. After Dunham divorced Obama’s father, Barack Sr., she married Lolo Soetoro and gave birth to Maya in Indonesia.

Soetoro-Ng reinforced some of Obama’s best-selling writing on their grandmother, Madelyn Dunham of Honolulu.

“She has been the quintessential matriarch in our lives,” Soetoro-Ng said.

Most of all, she said, their grandmother, successful in banking in Hawaii, encouraged her grandchildren to pursue careers based on the “mandates of our hearts.”

In an interview, Soetoro-Ng joked about occasions when she was a teen-ager and her older brother would chastise her for reading People magazine instead of books he bought for her.

“I listened to him and I’m a great lover of literature now and I don’t read people magazine anymore,” Soetoro-Ng.

Even with the age difference Obama and his sister have common interests in books and music, she said.

“We would have long conversations about literature,” she said.

She also recalled a time when Obama placed speakers around her, a sort of makeshift surround-sound, and had her listen to classical music.

Soetoro-Ng said the early deaths of her mother and Obama’s father did not factor into his decision to enter the 2008 presidential race, that he doesn’t feel fated to die young like his parents – a possible motivation for hurrying with life goals or missions.

“The reason he chose to enter it now is because he just really didn’t see anyone out there in the arena who could do it better,” Soetoro-Ng said. “He just felt I think what a lot of people feel – that he’s the right man for these times and that he’s only one who’s going to make us heal.”

If elected, Obama would be the first African-American president. Some members of his own race have told The New York Times they will vote against Obama to protect him from what they believe would be racially based assassination attempts. The Times recently quoted African-American women in South Carolina making those observations.

“My thoughts are that he would never make a decision based on fear and I’ve got to be brave, too,” Soetoro-Ng said. “I think that the focus has to be on the many people who have set aside their differences to embrace him.”