The Book of Gutsy Women

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  Becca Heller

  Chelsea

  Before she was an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, Becca Heller was already good at arguing. Even when she was a little girl growing up in California in the 1980s, her parents could never get away with a simple “Because I said so”—they had to provide compelling reasons why she should listen to them. In high school, Becca skipped the classes that bored her. When her school dropped the debate team, she signed up to compete for another school. Years later, one of her friends would tell a New York Times reporter that in high school, she was voted “most likely to debate with a teacher.” Now, the friend said, “she’s most likely to argue with the president.”

  What makes Becca such an excellent advocate is the same thing that has driven her all her life: She refuses to accept the status quo, especially when it’s arbitrary or unfair. In college at Dartmouth, she created a program to turn extra food from local farms into frozen meals for a nearby homeless shelter. After she graduated, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to work in Malawi on nutrition policy. Then, to the surprise of few people who knew her, she went to law school.

  “What I like about working with refugees is that they are fighting so hard. In other public service work you can spend a lot of time trying to convince people they are worth fighting for. It’s really refreshing to advocate alongside people who are advocating for themselves.”

  —BECCA HELLER

  During her time at Yale Law School, she interned for a human rights organization in Israel. On a trip to Jordan, she met six Iraqi refugee families who changed her life. “I met with these families, and every single one said their biggest problem was legal assistance,” she said later. “They were being processed by the United Nations and the United States, and they didn’t understand the process. It was totally opaque to them.” When she came back to campus, she teamed up with a classmate, Jonathan Finer, to launch the Iraq Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), dedicated to providing legal aid to Iraqi refugees. Soon after they introduced the program at a student activity fair, a hundred of their classmates signed up to help.

  While still in law school, Becca traveled back and forth from New Haven to the Middle East and Washington, D.C. After she graduated, she moved to New York City to focus full-time on her organization, which she expanded and renamed the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). By 2014, there were chapters at dozens of law schools, partnerships with more than fifty law firms, and offices in Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. The program focuses on helping the most vulnerable refugees, from children with medical emergencies to people being persecuted because of their sexual orientation. Within three years, Becca and her team had worked on more than two hundred cases and had a 90 percent success rate; they had resettled as many as a thousand Iraqi refugees in seven countries around the world.

  After the 2016 election, Becca knew that her work had become exponentially more important. When the administration announced its cruel and discriminatory travel ban on Muslims entering the United States in January 2017, Becca was ready. She sent out an email with the subject line “URGENT—protect refugees arriving at airports.” When the order took effect two days later, thousands of lawyers were already standing by. Becca and her supporters headed to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where she helped lead a team of lawyers offering legal help to travelers trying to enter the country. As the New York Times observed, “The public saw not so much a spontaneous reaction as the meticulous preparation of a loud, pugnacious thirty-five-year-old lawyer who is now in the middle of one of Mr. Trump’s biggest policy fights.” One of IRAP’s clients became the first to win a ruling against the ban, which led to a nationwide stay the next day. The pressure against President Trump’s Muslim ban intensified over the next weeks, with protests around the country. Marc and I went with friends to the first #NoBanNoWall protest in New York, and brought our kids with us to the next one. They won’t remember it, but when they’re older, they’ll know they were there.

  In March 2017, I met Becca for the first time when friends asked if I would take part in a conversation at their home with Becca and Farah Marcolla, a former IRAP client and an Iraqi refugee. I was honored to be there with these two brave women to help raise funds to support IRAP’s vital work. Hearing from Farah, who was able to live safely in America thanks to IRAP’s efforts, left me with an even greater sense of urgency around championing this lifesaving organization and opposing the discriminatory policies of the Trump administration.

  In 2018, Becca was recognized for her work with a MacArthur Fellowship. She is still working to support the rapidly growing number of forcibly displaced people around the world, while educating younger lawyers on the importance of this work, especially now. At a time when our government is turning its back on refugees and vulnerable people around the world, it’s good to know that Becca and others are questioning unjust laws and rules—and, even more than that, working to change them.

  Storytellers

  Maya Angelou

  Hillary

  I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings right around the time it was published in 1969. It was a chaotic time for America. Dr. Maya Angelou’s book seemed like a fitting capstone to a decade of assassinations, riots, war, and social change.

  Maya’s book recounts the cruel racism and backbreaking poverty she grew up surrounded by in Stamps, Arkansas, and the horrific rape she experienced in St. Louis at the age of eight, after which she stopped speaking for five years. Yet despite the tragedy and tumult of her own life, she came to embody unconquerable resilience. While I was reading that book, I had no idea at the time that I would one day live in Arkansas, be married to its governor, meet Maya, and become friends with her.

  After Bill was elected president in 1992, I recommended that he invite her to speak at his inauguration. He enthusiastically agreed, and on January 20, 1993, Maya’s voice rang out over the large crowd stretching down the Mall. She recited the poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she had written for the occasion: “Lift up your hearts,” she said, “each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings.”

  Maya was an expert on new beginnings and a champion of the human spirit. During the years she didn’t speak, she read every book in the black school library and as many as she could get from the white school’s. She memorized Shakespeare and Langston Hughes, Longfellow and James Weldon Johnson. Plays, poems, sonnets, passages—all of it fed her imagination. Out of the evil of the rape she suffered, she re-created herself: “I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable,” she explained.

  Maya wrote books of essays, volumes of poetry, and six autobiographies. One of her signature pieces was “Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women,” which she recited and performed all over the world. The words became an anthem of liberation and empowerment. “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute, or built to suit a fashion model’s size,” she began.

  When I ran for president in 2008, Maya hosted me at Wake Forest University, where she first lectured in 1973. There’s a section in a poem she wrote about my campaign that stuck with me: “There is a world of difference between being a woman, and being an old female. If you’re born a girl, grow up and live long enough, you can become an old female. But to become a woman is a serious matter. A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies.”

  Dr. Maya Angelou was not only a wonderful poet—she was a wonderful friend to so many who knew her. Hard times were made easier, joyful times sweeter, because she was on your side. She was a walking, talking work of art. Being in a room with her was a bit like being in a room with the Mona Lisa. She was elegant, arresting, and six feet tall, but she seemed taller to me. And that voice! When she opened her mouth, that extraordinary voice would pour forth: rich, enthralling, making her seem even larger than life. She chose her
words with care. She did not suffer fools, and never hesitated to tell you when she thought you were wrong. When she said that she believed in you, you actually believed her and began believing in yourself. Her sage advice has resonated throughout the years: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

  Part of Maya’s magic was the fact that there wasn’t anyone else like her in the world, but somehow everyone could see something of themselves in her story, her aspirations, and the sheer scope of her life. You’re Italian? Maya spoke Italian. You’re a dancer? So was she. You’re from San Francisco? She conducted a streetcar there. She knew everyone, lived everywhere, read everything, and felt it all. The whole world was her home. All people were her people.

  There’s a scene in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town that almost could have been describing Maya. Emily Webb is saying goodbye to the world one last time, and she asks the stage manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” And he says, “No. The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.” That was Maya. She realized her life while she lived it. And not only that, she savored it—every single second.

  Throughout her life, she was often slotted into subcategories as writers wrote about her: A black writer. A civil rights activist. A women’s leader. Maybe that was the only way people could wrap their heads around who she was. In truth, she transcended all labels. There is, however, one that does stick. She could have been born anywhere in the world, but only in America could she have become who she did. Our country’s triumphs and progress over the past century are written all over her life. More than that—she helped write them. We’re a better country today because of her. She urged, demanded, and inspired millions of Americans to live kinder, braver, more honorable lives.

  It’s hard to imagine a better example to follow.

  Mary Beard

  Hillary

  In 2012, a well-known British television critic took author and renowned Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard to task—not for her arguments, or for the content of the documentary series on Ancient Rome that she hosted on the BBC, but for being too unattractive to appear on television. As she later paraphrased it to me, his message was, in effect: “You look like the back end of a bus. How dare you come into our living room with those teeth?” After listening patiently to her friends’ well-intentioned advice not to take the bait, Mary came to a different conclusion: She took the bait.

  Her response began: “As a classicist, I know a lot about revenge: the Ancient Greeks and Romans were horribly good at it. But not the crude, getting-your-own-back sort; they always ensured their retribution was absolutely appropriate to the crime.” She countered the critic’s ludicrous argument (as well as his time-worn caveat that he was, of course, being neither sexist nor beside the point) line by brilliantly written line. She didn’t shy away from the fact that his nasty comments were hurtful—to her, and to the vast numbers of women around the world who looked like her. “I’m every inch the 57-year-old wife, mum and academic, half-proud of her wrinkles, her crow’s feet, even her hunched shoulders from all those misspent years poring over a library desk,” she wrote unapologetically. “The real point is not what I look like, but what I do.” A cheer went up from women around the world who were all too familiar with the miserable feeling of being told, either explicitly or implicitly: “Go away. You have nothing to say.”

  “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it.”

  —MARY BEARD

  Mary grew up in the 1950s in Shrewsbury, England, the daughter of a school headmistress and an architect. During her summers in high school, she would join archaeological excavations—which offered a thrilling learning experience. After graduating from Cambridge University, she began writing and teaching. She earned her PhD, studying state religion in the Roman republic, and wrote a pioneering work on the Vestal Virgins in 1980. After she and her husband, an art historian, had their two children, she struggled to carve out the time serious research demanded. In 1989, she published her first book written alone in her own name: The Good Working Mother’s Guide. Sharing the practical tips she had learned from experience, she said later, “seemed a fun thing to do.” She then returned to history, publishing books, teaching at Cambridge, and bringing classics to viewers on the BBC.

  After Mary’s spot-on column in 2012, she received an outpouring of support from women. Queen Elizabeth II made her a Dame of the Order of the British Empire (not for the book, but for her contributions to public life). She kept appearing on television. In one of my favorite appearances of hers, in 2016, she debated politician Boris Johnson for charity on the subject of Greece versus Rome. She explained that, going into the debate, she knew her only chance of winning was to be “fantastically prepared.” That’s something women everywhere can relate to. In the end, her preparation paid off, and she won resoundingly.

  “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”

  —MARY BEARD

  Along the way, Mary has built an appropriately large and appreciative Twitter following. She routinely uses the platform to stand up for facts and stand up to her trolls not with anger but with what she calls “aggressive politeness.” She even publicly shamed one particularly vicious tweeter into taking her out to lunch to apologize. (Dare to dream!) “You just start to care less when you’re old,” she has said. “It’s a great pleasure that I can show younger women that you can stand up to these guys. You can call them out. And life goes on.” (Yes it does!)

  In 2017, Mary published a book that made me want to stand up once again and applaud. Women & Power: A Manifesto chronicles centuries of silencing women who dared to speak their minds, from The Odyssey to the 2016 presidential election. In it, she takes on years of criticism of women’s oratorical style, the complicated dynamics of speaking up in a meeting as a woman, the “first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up,’ ” and more. When I had the opportunity to sit down with her on a visit to London in 2017, I refrained from reading back at her every line that had resonated with me, since we would have been there all day. In her manifesto, she concluded: “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” At every step of her career, Mary has been doing her part.

  Jineth Bedoya Lima

  Hillary

  “On the first day that Jineth Bedoya Lima arrived for work at the offices of Colombia National Radio in Bogotá,” begins an article in the Guardian, “she was assigned to cover a story that would become her life. That day, in December 1996, her task was to report on what is probably the most dangerous prison in the world, La Modelo, infamous as a focal point for trafficking in drugs and arms between the forces of state, cartels, and rival militias.”

  Born in 1974, Jineth grew up in the aftermath of Colombia’s long civil war, with Pablo Escobar and his cartel on the rise. After Escobar was killed, the empire he had built broke into factions, and the country descended into violent chaos. At La Modelo, Jineth saw “complicity by the army in many of the massacres carried out by the paramilitaries, and ways in which the military were arming the paramilitaries,” she told the Guardian. “Some members of the military were even selling weapons to FARC,” a violent rebel group. Her commitment to truth-telling and shining a light on the corruption within the government made powerful people uncomfortable. “I can see now,” she said, “that as well as being furious at what I was writing, they were offended by the fact that I was a woman—young, pretty, petite, but sticking my nose into their affairs.” In 1999, she was the victim of an attempted assassination. Still, she continued her investigative reporting.

  “How did I overcome my fear, when it looked like my life was over? How did I continue as a woman and a jou
rnalist when faced with this black wall? I needed to know what happened. When I leave this world, I need to have known what happened to Jineth Bedoya, to my colleagues and so many other women.”

  —JINETH BEDOYA LIMA

  In May 2000, she landed an interview with a paramilitary leader who was imprisoned in La Modelo. When she arrived at the prison, she was kidnapped at gunpoint as a “message to the press in Colombia.” She was raped, tortured, and left on the side of the road. “My body was destroyed. I was covered in wounds. They had cut my hair as well,” she said. “I knew that the only way to continue living was to continue being a journalist.”

  Within weeks, she had returned to work. She started reaching out to other women who had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted—not for an article, but for herself. “There’s a distinction between what happened to you as a journalist and what happened to you as a woman,” she has said. In 2003, she traveled to the town of Puerto Alvira, which had been taken over by the FARC. She was kidnapped and again held hostage. After her release, despite the constant threats to her safety, she kept working to investigate violence, conflict, drug trafficking, organized crime, and sexual violence.

  Six years later, Jineth launched a public advocacy campaign to raise awareness about the violence against women within the Colombian conflict. She called the campaign No Es Hora De Callar (Now Is Not the Time to Be Silent). In 2012, when I was secretary of state, First Lady Michelle Obama and I honored Jineth with the International Women of Courage Award. In 2017, she received the Hillary Clinton Award at Georgetown, along with several others who were doing essential work in bringing women to the table during the peace process in Colombia. I celebrated her that day as “a journalist who continued her pursuit of the truth and her advocacy for victims of sexual violence in the face of her own horrors.”