One of my first jobs after law school was working for Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund. She asked me to help investigate a mystery: In many communities, a surprising number of young children were not in school. We knew from the census that they lived there, so what was going on? As part of a nationwide survey, I went door to door in New Bedford, Massachusetts, talking to families. We found some kids staying home to care for younger siblings while parents worked. Others had dropped out to work themselves in order to help support their families. But mostly we found children with disabilities who were staying home because there weren’t adequate accommodations for them at the public schools. We found blind and deaf children, children in wheelchairs, children with developmental disabilities, and children whose families couldn’t afford the treatment they needed. I remember meeting a girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house, where we sat and talked under a grape arbor. She so wanted to go to school, to participate and learn—but it didn’t seem possible.
Along with many partners across the country, we collected the data from our survey and sent it to Washington, and Congress eventually enacted legislation declaring that every child in our country is entitled to an education, including those with disabilities. For me, it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to children’s rights. I also remained committed to the cause of people with disabilities, and at the State Department I appointed the first Special Advisor for International Disability Rights to encourage other governments to protect the rights of people with disabilities. I was proud to stand with President Obama at the White House when he declared that the United States would sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act and would be our first new human rights treaty of the 21st century. And I was dismayed when a handful of Republican Senators managed to block its ratification in December 2012, despite impassioned pleas from former Republican Senate Majority Leader and disabled war hero Bob Dole.
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One of my first opportunities to take a stand on behalf of human rights with the whole world watching came in September 1995. As First Lady I was leading the U.S. delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where I was slated to give a major speech to representatives from 189 countries, as well as thousands of journalists and activists.
“What do you want to accomplish?” Madeleine Albright asked me as I worked on a draft with Lissa Muscatine, my talented speechwriter. “I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls,” I replied. I wanted my speech to be simple, vivid, and strong in its message that women’s rights are not separate from or a subsidiary of the human rights every person is entitled to enjoy.
During my travels as First Lady, I had seen firsthand the obstacles that women and girls faced: how restrictive laws and customs kept them from pursuing an education or health care or participating fully in their nations’ economies and politics; how even in their own homes they endured violence and abuse. I wanted to shine a bright spotlight on these obstacles and encourage the world to begin tearing them down. I also wanted to speak for the women and girls seeking education, health care, economic independence, legal rights, and political participation—and to strike the right balance between seeing women as victims of discrimination and seeing women as agents of change. I wanted to use my voice to tell the stories not only of the women I had met but also of the millions of others whose stories would not be heard unless I and others told them.
The heart of the speech was a statement that was both obvious and undeniable but nonetheless too long unsaid on the world stage. “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,” I declared, “let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
I offered a list of abuses, including domestic violence, forced prostitution, rape as a tactic or prize of war, genital mutilation, and bride burning, all violations of women’s rights and also of human rights, and went on to urge that the world should condemn them with one voice. I talked about some of the remarkable women I had met: new mothers in Indonesia who came together regularly in their village to discuss nutrition, family planning, and baby care; women in India and Bangladesh who used microfinance loans to buy milk cows, rickshaws, thread, and other materials to start thriving small businesses; the women in South Africa who helped lead the struggle to end apartheid and were now helping to build a new democracy.
My speech ended with a call to action for all of us to return to our countries and renew our efforts to improve educational, health, legal, economic, and political opportunities for women. When the last words left my lips, the delegates leaped from their seats to give me a standing ovation. As I exited the hall, women hung over banisters and raced down escalators to shake my hand.
My message had resonated with the women in Beijing, but I could never have predicted how far and wide the impact of this twenty-one-minute speech would stretch. For nearly twenty years women around the world have quoted my words back to me, or asked me to sign a copy of the speech, or shared personal stories about how it inspired them to work for change.
Most important, all 189 nations represented at the conference agreed to an ambitious and detailed Platform for Action that called for the “full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life.”
Back at the White House I gathered my team together and said that I wanted to get right to work building on what we had accomplished in Beijing. We began holding regular strategy sessions. Sometimes we’d meet in the Map Room on the first floor of the Residence, where President Franklin Roosevelt tracked the progress of our military in World War II. Most of the maps were long gone (I located one of FDR’s originals showing the positions of Allied Armies in Europe in 1945 and hung it over the fireplace), but it still felt like a good place to plan a global campaign. This time we weren’t fighting fascism or Communism, but our goal was big and bold: advancing the rights and opportunities of half the world’s population.
In this context you could look at a map of the world in a number of ways. It was easy to see one problem after another. Throw a dart at the map, and you were likely to hit a country where women faced violence and abuse, an economy where women were denied the chance to participate and prosper, or a political system that excluded women. It was no coincidence that the places where women’s lives were most undervalued largely lined up with the parts of the world most plagued by instability, conflict, extremism, and poverty.
This was a point lost on many of the men working across Washington’s foreign policy establishment, but over the years I came to view it as one of the most compelling arguments for why standing up for women and girls was not just the right thing to do but also smart and strategic. The mistreatment of women was certainly not the only or even the chief cause of our problems in Afghanistan, where the Taliban banished girls from school and forced women to live in medieval conditions, or in Central Africa, where rape became a common weapon of war. But the correlation was undeniable, and a growing body of research showed that improving conditions for women helped resolve conflicts and stabilize societies. “Women’s issues” had long been relegated to the margins of U.S. foreign policy and international diplomacy, considered at best a nice thing to work on but hardly a necessity. I became convinced that, in fact, this was a cause that cut to the heart of our national security.
There was another way to look at the map. Instead of problems, you could see opportunities. The world was full of women finding new ways to solve old problems. They were eager to go to school, own land, start a business, and run for office. There were partnerships to form and leaders to nurture, if we were willing to step up. I encouraged our government, the private sector, the NGO community, and international institutions to take up this challenge and to see women not as victims to be saved but as partners to be embraced.
I had two Chiefs o
f Staff in the White House who were indispensable traveling companions on my journey. Maggie Williams, who worked with me at the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1980s, is a terrific communicator and one of the most creative and decent people I’ve ever met. She helped set the course for my time as First Lady and remained a close friend and confidante ever since. Melanne Verveer was Maggie’s Deputy in the first term and then her successor in the second. We’ve always had a real mutual admiration society. Melanne and her husband, Phil, had studied at Georgetown with Bill, and she had gone on to be a star on Capitol Hill and at People for the American Way. Her energy and intellect are simply unstoppable, and her passion for working on behalf of women and girls is unmatched.
The years that followed Beijing saw exciting progress. In many countries laws that once permitted unequal treatment of women and girls were repealed. The United Nations created a new body called UN Women, and the Security Council passed resolutions recognizing the crucial role of women in peacemaking and security. Researchers at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other institutions expanded their study of the untapped potential of women to drive economic growth and social progress. As women gained the chance to work, learn, and participate in their societies, their economic, social, and political contributions multiplied.
Yet despite this progress, women and girls still comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unfed, and unpaid. At the end of 2013, women held less than 22 percent of all seats in Parliaments and Legislatures around the world. In some places women cannot open a bank account or sign a contract. More than a hundred countries still have laws that limit or prohibit women’s participation in the economy. Twenty years ago, American women made 72 cents on the dollar. Today it’s still not equal. Women also hold a majority of lower wage jobs in this country and nearly three quarters of all jobs in fields that rely on tips like waiters, bartenders, and hairstylists—which pay even less than average hourly work. Meanwhile, only a small percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In short, the journey toward full participation for women and girls is far from over.
Faced with these grim facts, it can be easy to get discouraged. In the White House after Beijing, at times when I felt daunted by the scope of the challenges we were trying to overcome, I often found myself looking for comfort to a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt that I kept in my office. The example she set as a fearless First Lady and a courageous fighter for human rights inspired and fortified me. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death and the end of World War II, Eleanor represented the United States as a delegate to the new United Nations and helped shape its development. During the first meeting of the UN General Assembly, in London in early 1946, she joined the sixteen other women delegates in publishing “an open letter to the women of the world,” in which they argued that “women in various parts of the world are at different stages of participation in the life of their community,” but “the goal of full participation in the life and responsibilities of their countries and of the world community is a common objective toward which the women of the world should assist one another.” Eleanor’s language of “full participation,” echoed in the Beijing Platform for Action nearly fifty years later, has always resonated with me.
So have many of her other words. “A woman is like a tea bag,” she once observed wryly. “You never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” I love that and, in my experience, it’s spot on. In 1959, by which time Eleanor was a revered elder stateswoman near the end of her life, she used one of her newspaper columns to issue a call to action to the American people: “We have not yet succeeded in our democracy in giving every one of our citizens equal freedom and equal opportunity, and that is our unfinished business.” As I dove deeper into my work on behalf of women and girls around the world, I started describing the quest for equal rights and full participation for women as the “unfinished business” of our time. It was a reminder to audiences—and to me—just how far we still had to go.
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Eleanor Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first binding international agreement on the rights of humankind. In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, many nations were pressing for a statement of this kind to help ensure that we would prevent future atrocities and protect the inherent humanity and dignity of all people. The Nazis were able to pursue their crimes because they were able progressively to constrict the circle of those defined as humans. This cold, dark region of the human soul, where people withdraw first understanding, then empathy, and finally even the designation of personhood from another human being, was not, of course, unique to Nazi Germany. The impulse to dehumanize has reappeared throughout history, and it was precisely this impulse that the drafters of the Universal Declaration hoped to restrain.
They discussed, they wrote, they revisited, revised, and rewrote. They incorporated suggestions and revisions from governments, organizations, and individuals around the world. It is telling that even in the drafting of the Universal Declaration there was a debate about women’s rights. The initial version of the first article stated, “All men are created equal.” It took women members of the Commission, led by Hansa Mehta of India, to point out that “all men” might be interpreted to exclude women. Only after long debate was the language changed to say, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
At 3:00 in the morning on December 10, 1948, after nearly two years of drafting and one last long night of debate, the president of the UN General Assembly called for a vote on the final text. Forty-eight nations voted in favor, eight abstained, none dissented, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. It made clear that our rights are not conferred by governments; they are the birthright of all people. It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them.
During the Cold War, America’s devotion to human rights made our country a source of hope and inspiration for millions of people around the world. But our policies and practices did not always match our ideals. At home it took the courage of a woman who refused to give up her seat on a public bus, a preacher who refused to shut up about the “fierce urgency of now,” and so many others who refused to put up with segregation and discrimination, to force America to recognize the civil rights of all our citizens. Around the world our government often prioritized security and strategic interests over concerns about human rights, supporting odious dictators if they shared our opposition to Communism.
Throughout the history of American foreign policy, there has been a running debate between so-called realists and idealists. The former, it is argued, place national security ahead of human rights, while the latter do the opposite. Those are categories that I find overly simplistic. No one should have any illusions about the gravity of the security threats America faces, and as Secretary I had no higher responsibility than to protect our citizens and our country. But at the same time, upholding universal values and human rights is at the core of what it means to be American. If we sacrifice those values or let our policies diverge too far from our ideals, our influence will wane and our country will cease to be what Abraham Lincoln called the “the last best hope of earth.” Moreover, defending our values and defending our interests are often in less tension than it may sometimes appear. Over the long term, repression undermines stability and creates new threats, while democracy and respect for human rights create strong and stable societies.
As you’ve seen throughout this book, however, there are times when we do have to make difficult compromises. Our challenge is to be clear-eyed about the world as it is while never losing sight of the world as we want it to become. That’s why I don’t mind that I’ve been called both an idealist and a realist over the years. I prefer being considered a hybrid, perhaps an idealistic realist. Because I, like our country, embody bo
th tendencies.
One of my favorite examples of how support for human rights advances our strategic interests comes from the 1970s, when the United States under President Gerald Ford signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union. Some commentators in the West dismissed the human rights provisions in the agreements as the height of idealist folly, not worth the paper they were printed on. The Soviets would obviously disregard them.
Then something unexpected happened. Behind the Iron Curtain activists and dissidents felt empowered to begin working for change because the Helsinki Accords gave them cover to talk about human rights. Communist officials were caught in a bind. They couldn’t condemn a document the Kremlin had signed, but if they enforced its provisions the entire authoritarian system would break down. In the years that followed, the shipyard workers of Solidarity in Poland, reformers in Hungary, and demonstrators in Prague all seized on the fundamental rights defined at Helsinki. They held their governments to account for not living up to the standards to which they had agreed. Helsinki proved to be a Trojan horse that contributed to the fall of Communism. There was nothing “soft” about that.
I tried never to forget the wisdom of Helsinki and the strategic impact human rights can have. Any time I needed a reminder, I just looked over at that portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, which I still kept near my desk.
In late 1997, two years after the conference in Beijing, the United Nations invited me to help kick off commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On December 10, which had become known as Human Rights Day, I went to UN headquarters in New York and delivered a speech about our shared responsibility to carry the Declaration’s legacy forward into the new millennium. I praised the progress the world had made since 1948, but noted, “We have not expanded the circle of human dignity far enough. There are still too many of our fellow men and women excluded from the fundamental rights proclaimed in the Declaration, too many whom we have hardened our hearts against—those whose human suffering we fail fully to see, to hear, and to feel.” In particular I called attention to the women and girls around the world who were still systematically denied their rights and shut out from opportunities to participate in their societies. “The full enfranchisement of the rights of women is unfinished business in this turbulent century,” I said, echoing Eleanor’s phrase. “It is because every era has its blind spots that we must see our own unfinished business now while we stand on the threshold of a new millennium with even greater urgency. We must rededicate ourselves to completing the circle of human rights once and for all.”
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