It Takes a Village

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  My husband met another extraordinarily giving teenager, thirteen-year-old Brianne Schwantes of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he visited Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1993 flood. Brianne suffers from brittle bone disease, which means that her bones have broken so easily and so often that her growth has been stunted. Yet when she heard about the flooding, she persuaded her parents to bring her to Iowa to help fill sandbags. There she was, barely four feet tall, fulfilling her obligations to her fellow citizens.

  It is often said that children are our last and best hope for the future, and that if we want society to evolve, we must teach the next generation the importance of active citizenship. Teaching children how to become good citizens and giving them an appreciation of governance is another way to elicit their natural empathy, compassion, idealism, and thirst for service.

  It is never too early to start on the path of political participation and leadership. My husband and thousands of other American boys and girls have participated over the years in Boys and Girls State and Boys and Girls Nation. I know many young people who have also learned about current events, diplomacy, and statecraft through their participation in the Model United Nations program.

  Another impressive forum for teaching governance was the international conference sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which brought together teenagers from five regions of the world. Called “Tomorrow’s Leaders,” the conference offered these students the chance to hear from world leaders and to try to develop peaceable solutions to conflicts around the world.

  If youth service is, as our collective history demonstrates and as my husband and I believe, “a spark to rekindle the spirit of democracy in an age of uncertainty,” it must not be left solely to individual acts of altruism. We need to create frameworks and contexts that will allow it to flourish and to become habitual.

  I wish every school adopted the model of the Washington Elementary School in Mount Vernon, Washington, where service is integrated into the curriculum. The school’s motto is “Service is a life-long commitment.” Students in every grade perform individual acts of service, from tutoring younger children to serving on safety patrols. Each classroom also plans a class service project. One year, the second graders made a quilt for a homeless shelter and the third graders planted flowers as part of a school beautification project.

  Some individual school districts require community service. Recently, Maryland, whose lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is a longtime champion of the idea, became the first state to do so, making service a learning experience for students as well as a benefit for their communities. At one Maryland middle school, home economics students make outfits for homeless children and deliver them to a local shelter. At another school, students read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, focusing on the theme of poverty, and work with local organizations to provide assistance to needy single mothers and their children. At yet another school, students studying ecology help to clean up and maintain the stream that serves as their “outdoor classroom.”

  Creating a framework for service is the driving idea behind the National Service Corporation, the public-private enterprise that includes AmeriCorps, which gives young people sixteen and older an opportunity to serve their country in return for financial assistance for college or job training and a modest living allowance during their service. Recruits commit to at least one year (with the opportunity to serve two if they choose), during which time they are trained to help communities solve educational, environmental, health, and public safety problems.

  In its second year, AmeriCorps has already recruited more than twenty-five thousand young people. They are working with local churches and synagogues and nonprofit and public organizations in more than twelve hundred communities. AmeriCorps members also help existing charitable and service organizations like City Year, Habitat for Humanity, and the Red Cross to make the best use of part-time volunteers.

  In many cases, AmeriCorps members are filling needs that no other organization or government agency can meet. In Simpson County, Kentucky, for example, they have helped to raise the reading scores of more than a third of the county’s second graders by an average of two or more grade levels in a single year, recruiting more than two hundred parents to join in the effort. In Texas, Iowa, and Idaho, AmeriCorps members have helped to immunize hundreds of thousands of children who might otherwise have remained beyond the reach of state health authorities. In Kansas City, a team of AmeriCorps members has worked with the police department to close down more than two dozen crack houses and set up a score of neighborhood watch groups.

  PROGRAMS LIKE AmeriCorps offer a socially meaningful transition from childhood to adulthood. They also offer a model for bridging private charity and government programs that we can all learn from. It was these rewards—material as well as spiritual, collective as well as individual—that a group of seventeen religious leaders emphasized recently when they asked Congress to support AmeriCorps because it builds and strengthens the bonds that make community possible.

  No matter how well our children learn the ethic of service, there will always be far more needs than individuals or charities can meet. That’s why so many charities—some of which depend on a measure of federal support—have objected to suggestions that they can fill the holes in the social safety net left by cuts in social programs, particularly those affecting children. Neither government nor charitable organizations alone can keep the net intact, but working together, they can manage it.

  Partnerships between government and the volunteer community are most clearly visible when disaster strikes, as my husband and I have observed firsthand following hurricanes and tornadoes in the South, floods in the Midwest, fires in the Northwest, and earthquakes in the West. Volunteers come alone or with friends, as part of church groups or service clubs, all offering their most precious gift, themselves. Government sends experts to help coordinate relief efforts. In tragic situations such as these, people commit acts of extraordinary compassion and readily overcome what might in ordinary times seem to be great differences.

  After the bombing in Oklahoma City, we saw a country united in shock and love. When the first survivors emerged injured and bloody from the federal building, we did not see blacks or whites, Christians or Jews, but fellow human beings and children who might have been our own. Fire and police officers, medical crews, and emergency workers who put their own lives in jeopardy in their search for survivors did not pick and choose whom they would rescue; every life was valued and worth fighting to save.

  Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity? As my husband said in his 1995 State of the Union address: “If you go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of America, as de Tocqueville pointed out when he came here a long time ago, has always been our ability to associate with people who were different from ourselves and to work together to find common ground. And in this day, everybody has a responsibility to do more of that. We simply cannot wait for a tornado, a fire, or a flood to behave like Americans ought to behave in dealing with one another.”

  Men and women acting selflessly in the midst of tragedy remind us what really counts. They also remind Americans of our fundamental goodness, and of the essential strength of our nation. No democracy has survived as long or tried as hard to live up to its ideals. Nowhere on earth do so diverse a people live and work side by side every day, and for the most part get along so well.

  Children can be our conscience, and the agents of the changes that are needed, if we don’t burden them with stereotypes. If we teach them affirmative thinking and feeling, they will learn to live affirmatively—to measure their own lives by the good they do, not just for themselves but for all their fellow villagers.

  Kids Are an Equal Employment Opportunity

  Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked

  into the design of every life, meeting an individual

  need as well as a pervasive n
eed in society.

  MARY CATHERINE BATESON, COMPOSING ALIFE

  Both of my parents loved sports. My father would stand in front of our house and throw a football to my brothers and me as we ran pass patterns around the elm trees. My mother hit thousands of tennis balls over the net, trying in vain to make worthy opponents of us. Each of them spent summer weekends hitting fly balls for us to field, teaching us to dive, and trying to interest us in golf. (At least they succeeded with my brothers on that one.) My father was focused on our excelling and winning, while my mother wanted us to have fun and get exercise.

  Both my parents also cooked. My mother prepared by far the bulk of our daily meals, but most Saturday nights my father made up his special hamburgers. He also had a knack for soups and grilling. My brothers and I did not think it odd that our mother could hit a fastball or that our father could cook. Even within their apparently traditional marriage, we saw each doing things that didn’t fit the stereotypes.

  More than twenty years ago, when I was working for the Carnegie Council on Children, I heard the trailblazing social philosophers Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm discuss the different roles mothers and fathers traditionally played in bringing up children. From listening to them, I concluded that the conventional parental roles could be summed up by saying that men typically acted as breadwinners and rulemakers, while women were homemakers and caregivers.

  What struck me even then was that there are many variations on the traditional parental division of labor that have worked over time and are working today. But it remains true that raising children, like most important work in our society, requires a constellation of skills and perspectives. Children deserve the benefit of what society has traditionally considered to be male and female traits and skills to meet their physical, emotional, and intellectual needs, and to offer them models for a range of human behaviors.

  Even in the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any one of us to raise children alone. And when single parents try, they have to perform roles outside their usual repertoire, or get others to take on those roles. Even families with two parents rely on the village for functions that are beyond their scope.

  Yet as obvious as it is that children’s needs exceed what any individual or pair of individuals can provide, society continues to characterize child rearing as “women’s work.” Even when women with children share the breadwinner and rulemaker roles with their husbands, they almost always bear the primary—and disproportionate—responsibility for caregiving and homemaking. One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is the awareness that these roles can and should be shared more fairly and flexibly. In the meantime, stereotypes about women’s roles persist.

  A recent study done by a University of Michigan psychologist purports to show that young women are exhibiting more “masculine” behavior because they are becoming more assertive, ambitious, and self-confident, while young men are not exhibiting more “feminine” behavior like expressing empathy and caring. Why not consider all these to be human behaviors that both men and women display, depending on their particular temperaments and circumstances?

  Is a mother who is assertive or ambitious on behalf of her children or husband acting “feminine,” while a mother who is ambitious and assertive on behalf of her own career or a public issue she cares about acting “masculine”? Is a father who rocks a crying baby or soothes a teenager’s hurt feelings “feminine,” while a father who refuses to comfort either child “masculine”? Sometimes we fall into the trap of sexual stereotyping as we grapple with new ways of articulating our changing experiences and responsibilities.

  We like to think we’ve come a long way from the limited range of roles that were considered “proper” for each gender in the past. Most of the women my mother knew stayed home because society expected them to, and they aligned their own expectations with society’s, even if they wished they had different choices.

  Some of us can recall an aunt who longed to go to college, a grandmother who kept voluminous journals she showed to no one, a female cousin with a head for figures. Much of the fiction written by and about women over the centuries contains an undercurrent of disappointment, dissatisfaction, or simple wistfulness about roads not taken. Part of the reason girls of every generation who read Little Women identify with Jo March is that they see her as unafraid to take action on her own behalf, to turn away from a predictable path and chart her own course.

  In fact, many women defied convention in the past, by choice or necessity. All through our nation’s history, women have worked outside the home as well as in it. Even during the 1950s, plenty of women with and without children were working in factories, offices, schools, and other people’s homes. But because these women’s lives did not match the conventional image, their work remained largely invisible. Often the official portrait of American life has omitted the diversity of women’s experience as well as their needs and desires.

  WHEN I look back on my childhood, I see how my mother and my girlfriends’ mothers worked to push open doors of opportunity for us. They supported our academic and athletic pursuits and ferried us to and from lessons and practices. They held us to high standards, even if they spoke of their aspirations for us mostly in terms of their wanting us to do well enough in school so that we could go to college or get training for a job that could provide a good living if we had to support ourselves.

  Perhaps because my mother’s background dimmed her own prospects for higher education, she was more outspoken in her support of me. From the very beginning she believed that her greatest responsibility to me was getting me prepared to make the choices that were right for my life, even if they weren’t the ones she would have—or could have—made. She shared my dismay when, at fourteen, I wrote to NASA asking how I might become an astronaut, only to be told that women were not being considered for the job (a policy I was delighted to see changed eventually).

  It wasn’t that the mothers I knew growing up did not want to be full-time homemakers and caregivers. Their dedication and discipline reflected how important they considered those roles to be. But they had the wisdom to know that the years devoted to childrearing come to an end, and that divorce or the death of a spouse can leave women on their own, with decades of productive life ahead. And they saw—as their daughters came to see more clearly—that the larger society gave more lip service than real respect or reward to their efforts to nurture families and communities. Because of them, the women’s movement, and increasing economic pressures, more and more women began to take up paid work that the marketplace valued: “men’s work.”

  As with any major societal shift, there have been trade-offs and unanticipated consequences for both women and men. The struggle to give work and family the time and attention they need can be emotionally as well as physically exhausting. By and large, however, as columnist Ellen Goodman observes, “Women still see their lives as better than their mothers’. This is the generation that has traded depression for stress—not a wholly bad bargain. They have more options and more power as well as more obligations.”

  Goodman’s observation is supported by the findings of a 1994 survey of more than 250,000 working women of every income level, job category, and family status, conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. Their responses, which Vice President Gore and I presented and discussed in a public forum, are detailed in a report, “Working Women Count!” For working women with children at home, the number one issue was the struggle to integrate work and family and to find and pay for decent child care. A working mother from Milwaukee spoke for thousands of women when she wrote: “Between balancing home and work and job, you always feel like you are doing four things at one time. You’re doing your job but you’re thinking about what you are going to cook for supper and who is going to pick up the kids.” The women’s descriptions of their lives are peppered with words like “hectic,” “tough,” “hard,” and “rough.” Many women said they were tired all the time.

/>   Mothers working outside the home believe their employers could be more understanding about children’s illnesses and doctor’s appointments. They say they need expanded leave policies to care for children or ailing relatives, but many note that they cannot afford to sacrifice pay for long or at all. In general, women in lower-paid jobs found their workplaces less family-friendly and flexible than women in executive and management positions.

  Before I had Chelsea, I noticed that in all the offices where I worked, most of the female workers began whispering into their phones every afternoon at around three o’clock. Finally, it dawned on me that they were making sure their children arrived home from school safely and were doing their homework or whatever else they were supposed to be doing. They whispered because they felt they might be penalized for carrying out their family obligations.

  Underlying all the survey responses was a familiar refrain: women believe that their work contributions and responsibilities are undervalued, including their responsibilities to children. They know how hard they work for their families, and they believe that other sectors of society, including their employers, should do more to help. Their concern for the well-being of children fuels their opinions on broader issues and their desire to be heard. As the report notes, “They care deeply about their jobs, their co-workers, their workplaces, and the state of the national economy.”