Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama is the very picture of the disciplined climber, an old soul who ascends the ladder one dependable rung at a time, and that is her Capricorn Sun at work. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, the descendant of enslaved ancestors in the Carolina Lowcountry, she was determined from childhood to work well and stay the course, especially after her father's illness. She skipped a grade, graduated salutatorian, followed her brother to Princeton, then Harvard Law, and rose through Sidley Austin (where she met Barack), nonprofit work, and university leadership. Capricorn's ambition and quiet boss energy carried her, in 2009, to become the first African-American First Lady of the United States.

Yet beneath that grounded, dutiful Sun runs a Pisces Moon, the ultimate empath, a sponge of a psyche tuned to compassion, imagination and the feelings of others. It is this watery, saint-like lunar nature that shaped her devotion to poverty awareness, education, nutrition and the wellbeing of children, and that gives her public warmth its unmistakable depth. Capricorn builds the ladder; Pisces remembers who is still climbing it. Together they make a woman of steel and great tenderness.