When I was growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, I attended Sunday school at our Methodist church every week. My parents were both people of faith, but they expressed it in different ways, and I sometimes struggled to reconcile my father’s insistence on self-reliance and my mother’s concerns about social justice. In 1961 a dynamic new youth minister named Don Jones arrived at our church, and he helped me better understand the role I wanted faith to play in my own life. He taught me to embrace “faith in action” and to open my eyes to injustice in the wider world beyond my sheltered middle-class community. He gave me lots of books to read, and took our youth group to visit black and Hispanic churches in Chicago’s inner city. We found a lot in common with the girls and boys in those church basements, despite our very different life experiences. It was in those discussions that I first became interested in learning more about the Civil Rights Movement. For me and my classmates, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King were names we occasionally saw in a newspaper headline or overheard while our parents watched the nightly news. For many of the kids I met through those church trips, however, they were sources of hope and inspiration.
One day Don announced that he wanted to take us to hear Dr. King speak in Chicago. It wasn’t hard to persuade my parents to give me permission to go, but some of my friends’ parents thought Dr. King was a “rabble-rouser” and wouldn’t let their kids attend. I was excited but unsure of what to expect. When we got to Orchestra Hall and Dr. King began to speak, I was transfixed. The speech was entitled “Remaining Awake through a Revolution,” and he challenged all of us that evening to stay engaged in the cause of justice and not to slumber while the world changed around us.
Afterward I stood in a long line to shake Dr. King’s hand. His grace and piercing moral clarity left a lasting impression on me. I was raised with a deep reverence for the virtues of American democracy. In the view of my rock-ribbed anti-Communist, Republican father, the fact that we had the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Soviets didn’t was a defining feature of the ideological struggle of the Cold War. The promises that our founding documents made about freedom and equality were supposed to be sacrosanct. Now I was realizing that many Americans were still denied the rights I took for granted. This lesson and the power of Dr. King’s words lit a fire in my heart, fueled by the social justice teachings of my church. I understood as I never had before the mission to express God’s love through good works and social action.
I was equally inspired by my early encounters with Marian Wright Edelman. A 1963 graduate of Yale Law School, she was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and worked as a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP in Jackson. When I heard Marian speak during my first semester at Yale, she opened a door for me to a life dedicated to legal, social, and political advocacy for human rights, especially for women and children.
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.
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 of 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.
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 both 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.”
When I became Secretary of State in 2009, I was determined to put this “unfinished business” at the top of America’s diplomatic to-do list. Melanne Verveer was one of my first calls. She had spent the previous eight years running Vital Voices, an organization she and I had started with Madeleine Albright to find and support emerging women leaders around the world. I asked Melanne to serve as the first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and to help me craft a “full participation agenda” and weave it into the fabric of American foreign policy and national security. We had to push tradition-bound bureaus and agencies to think differently about the role of women in conflicts and peacemaking, economic and democratic development, public health, and more. I didn’t want her office to be the only place where this work was done; rather I wanted it to be integrated into the daily routine of our diplomats and development experts everywhere.
The State Department and USAID launched a wide range of global and regional initiatives, including programs to help women entrepreneurs gain access to training, markets, finance, and credit; a partnership with some of America’s top women’s colleges and universities to identify, mentor, and train women in public service around the world; and efforts to help more women use mobile technology for everything from secure banking to documenting gender-based violence. Melanne tirelessly traveled the world, finding local partners and ensuring that these efforts took root in communities as well as capitals. I liked to joke with her that she might be the only person I knew with more frequent-flier miles than I. (If only the Air Force offered them!)
Many years ago on a trip across Africa I was struck that everywhere I went I saw women laboring in the fields, women carrying water, women fetching firewood, women working at market stalls. I was talking to some economists, and I asked them, “How do you evaluate the contributions that women make to the economy?” One of them replied, “We don’t, because they don’t participate in the economy.” He meant the formal economy of offices and factories. But if women across the world all of a sudden stopped working one day, those economists would quickly discover that women actually contribute quite a lot to the economy, as well as to the peace and security of their communities.
I encountered this attitude all over the world. I can’t tell you how many times I sat across the table from some President or Prime Minister whose eyes glazed over whenever I raised the issue of women’s rights and opportunities in his country. I quietly kept track of how many women leaders or advisors ever joined those meetings. It wasn’t hard to do, because there were hardly any.
My most egregious interaction with a clueless leader was in the remote Southeast Asian island nation of Papua New Guinea in November 2010. It’s a mysterious and bountiful country on the verge of progress, but plagued by one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women in Papua New Guinea will be victims of rape or physical violence in their lifetime. At our joint press conference, Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare was asked by an American reporter what his response was to these troubling statistics. Somare claimed the problems were “exaggerated by people who write about us.” Yes, he admitted, there were some cases of violence, but he added, “I have been around for a long time and I know that men and the women, sometimes there are fights, arguments do take place, but it’s nothing very brutal.” There were laws in place, he said. “We have cases where people are drunk. . . . A person cannot control when he’s under the influence of liquor.” I was taken aback, to say the least, and even the jaded American press corps was speechless. Afterward, as you can imagine, Melanne and I got right to work on new programs and partnerships with civil society in Papua New Guinea, trying to amplify women’s voices and provide them with new platforms for participation. I am pleased that in May 2013, a new Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill, formally apologized to the women of his country for the violence and promised to toughen criminal penalties.
Even at home in Washington our work on behalf of women was often seen as a parenthetical exercise, somehow separate from the important work of foreign policy. In one Washington Post article about our efforts with women in Afghanistan, an unnamed senior administration official sniffed, “Gender issues are going to have to take a backseat to other priorities. . . . There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” I wasn’t surprised the official was afraid to be named making a comment like that. Melanne and I started calling her shop the Pet Rock Office and kept on working.
I have to admit, I grew tired of watching otherwise thoughtful people just smile and nod when I brought up the concerns of women and girls. I’d been championing these issues on the world stage for nearly twenty years, and sometimes it felt like all I was doing was preaching to the choir. So I decided to redouble our efforts to make a case strong enough to convince skeptics based on hard data and clear-eyed analysis that creating opportunities for women and girls across the globe directly supports everyone’s security and prosperity, and should be part of our diplomacy and development work.
Melanne’s team began combing through all the data that had been collected by institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. They quickly learned that some aspects of women’s participation were well studied, especially the benefits of bringing more women into the workforce and the obstacles that held them back, but others were significantly under-researched. In many parts of the world there was a lack of reliable and regular data on even the basic facts about the lives of women and girls, such as whether they had birth certificates, at what age they had their first child, how many hours of paid and unpaid work they did, or whether they owned the land they farmed.
I’ve always believed that good decisions in government, in business, and in life are based on evidence rather than ideology. This is especially true when it comes to policies that will affect millions of people. You have to do the research and run the numbers; that’s how we minimize risk and maximize impact. And these days we keep statistics on everything we care about, from RBIs in baseball to ROI in business. There’s a saying in management circles: “What gets measured gets done.” So if we were serious about helping more girls and women achieve their full potential, then we had to get serious about gathering and analyzing the data about the conditions they faced and the contributions they made. We needed not only more data but also better data. We needed to make it accessible to researchers and policymakers so it could help them make good decisions. The State Department launched a number of new initiatives to fill the data gaps, working with the UN, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and others.
(In general I was surprised how many people in Washington operated in an “evidence-free zone,” where data and science were disregarded. A senior advisor to President Bush was once quoted disparaging what he called “the reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I’ve always thought that’s exactly how to solve problems. The Bush aide went on, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” That attitude helps explain a lot of what went wrong in those years.)
We didn’t have to wait for all these projects to bear fruit to start trumpeting the data we already had, especially on women and the economy. And you didn’t have to look far. In the early 1970s, American women held 37 percent of all jobs in the United States, compared to 47 percent in 2009. The productivity gains attributable to this increase accounted for more than $3.5 trillion in GDP growth over four decades.
The story has played out in less developed economies as well. For example, Latin America and the Caribbean steadily increased women’s participation in the labor market starting in the 1990s. The World Bank has estimated that extreme poverty in the region decreased by 30 percent as a result of recent gains.
These and similar findings add up to a compelling case that it is in everyone’s interest to increase women’s participation in the economy and to tear down the barriers that still hold them back. In September 2011 I assembled all the data I could and made this argument at a summit of Asian-Pacific leaders in San Francisco. “To achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come,” I told the delegates. “And that vital source of growth is women. With economic models straining in every corner of the world, none of us can afford to perpetuate the barriers facing women in the workforce.”
I was delighted when the Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe announced that increasing women’s economic participation would be a pillar of his ambitious new economic agenda. It was dubbed “womenomics.” He detailed plans to improve access to affordable child care and extend parental leave to encourage more women to enter the workforce. Abe also asked the country’s biggest businesses to each appoint at least one woman executive. We need more far-sighted leadership like that at home and around the world.
Another area where we focused our efforts was the role of women in making and keeping peace. We had seen so many inspiring examples of women around the world making unique contributions to ending conflicts and rebuilding shattered societies in Liberia, Colombia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. I remember vividly my visit to a fish and chips restaurant in Belfast in 1995, where I had a chance to sit and drink tea with both Catholic and Protestant women who were tired of the Troubles and eager for peace. While they may have attended different churches on Sunday, seven days a week they all said a silent prayer for the safe return of a child from school or a husband from an errand in town. One of them, Joyce McCartan, who founded the Women’s Drop-In Center in 1987 after her seventeen-year-old son was shot and killed, said: “It takes women to bring men to their senses.”
When women participate in peace processes, they tend to focus discussion on issues like human rights, justice, national reconciliation, and economic renewal that are critical to making peace. They generally build coalitions across ethnic and sectarian lines and are more likely to speak up for other marginalized groups. They often act as mediators and help to foster compromise.
Yet despite all that women tend to bring to the table, more often than not they’re excluded. Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, fewer than 10 percent had any women negotiators, fewer than 3 percent had any women signatories, and only a small percentage included even a single reference to women. So it’s not too surprising that more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years.
I spent years trying to get generals, diplomats, and national security policymakers in our own country and around the world to tune in to this reality. I found sympathetic allies at the Pentagon and in the White House, including Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy and Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. State, USAID, and Defense got to work on a plan that would change the way diplomats, development experts, and military personnel interact with women in conflict and postconflict areas. There would be new emphasis on stopping rape and gender-based violence and empowering women to make and keep peace. We called it a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security.
In December 2011, President Obama issued an executive order launching the plan. Flournoy and Winnefeld joined me at Georgetown to explain it to the public. Looking at the Admiral in his crisp Navy uniform at an event about women as peacemakers, I hoped we had finally turned a corner, at least in our country.
As my term as Secretary drew to a close, I wanted to be sure that the changes we had made to knit gender issues into every aspect of U.S. foreign policy wouldn’t disappear after I left. In any bureaucracy, institutionalizing reforms is difficult, and that was certainly true at the State Department. Over several months we worked with the White House to prepare a Presidential Memorandum that would make Melanne’s position of Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues permanent and ensure that her successors reported directly to the Secretary of State. It took some pressing to get this through the White House system, but luckily my former Deputy Secretary Jack Lew had become President Obama’s Chief of Staff, so we had a very well-placed ally. On January 30, 2013, one of my last days in office, I had lunch with President Obama in his private dining room off the Oval Office, and, as I was leaving, he stopped me to watch him sign the memorandum. He could not have given me a better send-off.
Our work on behalf of women and girls around the world was embedded in a broader human rights agenda aimed at defending the freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and making them real in the lives of people all over the world.
In 2009, there was no denying that our country’s approach to human rights had gotten somewhat out of balance. On his second full day in office President Obama issued an executive order prohibiting the use of torture or official cruelty by any U.S. official and ordered the closure of Guantánamo Bay (a goal that has not yet been achieved). He pledged to put human rights back at the heart of our foreign policy.
As I’ve described, the United States became a champion of freedom on the internet and stepped up aid to dissidents trying to evade censors and bypass firewalls. We advocated on behalf of journalists thrown in jail for exposing inconvenient truths about repressive regimes, helped survivors of human trafficking step out of the shadows, and made the case for workers’ rights and fair labor standards. Behind these headlines was the daily work of diplomacy: pressing foreign governments, supporting dissidents, engaging civil society, and making sure that our own government kept human rights front and center in all policy deliberations.
One of our first steps was to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council, a forty-seven-member body created in 2006 to monitor abuses around the world. It replaced the UN Human Rights Commission, which Eleanor Roosevelt had helped establish and lead in the late 1940s. Over time it had become a laughingstock as notorious human rights violators like Sudan and Zimbabwe were elected as members. The new organization faced the same problems; even Cuba won a seat. The Bush Administration refused to participate, and the Council seemed to spend most of its time condemning Israel. So why join? It wasn’t that the Obama Administration didn’t see the Council’s flaws, but we decided that participating would give us the best chance to be a constructive influence and put it on a better track.
The Council continued to have serious problems, but it proved to be a useful platform for advancing our agenda. When Muammar Qaddafi was using extreme violence against civilians in Libya in early 2011, I went to the Council in Geneva to rally the world against his atrocities. While there I spoke out against a continuing bias against Israel. I also urged the Council to move beyond a decade-long debate over whether insults to religion should be banned or criminalized. “It is time to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression and pursue a new approach based on concrete steps to fight intolerance wherever it occurs,” I said.
For years some Muslim-majority nations at the Council had pushed resolutions opposed by the United States and others that would have threatened freedom of expression in the name of preventing “defamation” of religion. This was not just a theoretical exercise, considering the firestorms that erupted periodically when someone around the world published a cartoon or posted a video online denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. I thought we could break the impasse by recognizing that tolerance and freedom are both core values that need protecting. To reach a compromise, we needed a partner willing to move past the charged political and ideological questions clouding the debate.
We found that partner in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents nearly sixty nations. Its chair, the Turkish diplomat and scholar Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, was a thoughtful man whom I had met in the 1990s, when he was the director of the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul. İhsanoğlu agreed to work with me on a new resolution at the Human Rights Council that would take a strong stand for freedom of expression and worship and against discrimination and violence based upon religion or belief, while avoiding the broad prohibitions on speech called for in the former “defamation” resolutions. Our teams in Geneva began hammering out the text, and in late March 2011 the Council unanimously adopted it.
Religious freedom is a human right unto itself, and it is also wrapped up with other rights, including the right of people to think what they want, say what they think, associate with others, and assemble peacefully without the state looking over their shoulders or prohibiting them from doing so. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes clear that each of us is born free to practice any religion, to change our religion, or to have none at all. No state may grant these freedoms as a privilege or take them away as a punishment.
Every year the State Department publishes a report detailing cases of religious persecution around the world. For example, in Iran authorities repress Sufi Muslims, evangelical Christians, Jews, Bahais, Sunnis, Ahmadis, and others who do not share the government’s religious views. We also tracked a troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism in parts of Europe; in countries like France, Poland, and the Netherlands swastikas were spray-painted on Jewish tombs, schools, synagogues, and kosher shops.
In China the government cracked down on unregistered “house churches” and the Christians who worshipped in them, as well as Uighur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists. On my first trip to China as Secretary, in February 2009, I attended a service in one of these house churches to send a message to the government about religious freedom.
Our interest in protecting religious liberty and the rights of minorities went beyond a moral argument. There were also important strategic considerations, particularly in societies in transition. When I visited Egypt in 2012, the Coptic Christians wondered whether they would be accorded the same rights and respect as all Egyptians by their new government. In Burma ethnic Rohingya Muslims continue to be denied full citizenship and equal opportunities for education, employment, and travel. What Egypt, Burma, and other countries decide on protections for these religious minorities will have a major impact on the lives of their people and will go a long way toward determining whether these countries are able to achieve stability and democracy. History teaches us that when the rights of minorities are secure, societies are more stable and everyone benefits. As I said in Alexandria, Egypt, in the hot tumultuous summer of 2012, “Real democracy means that every citizen has the right to live, work, and worship as they choose, whether they are man or woman, Muslim or Christian, or from any other background. Real democracy means that no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion, their desires on anyone else.”
Over the years, I have often returned to an argument from my speech at the UN marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Here we are at the very close of the 20th century, a century that has been scorched by war time and time again. If the history of this century teaches us anything, it is that whenever the dignity of any individual or group is compromised by the derogation of who they are, of some essential attribute they possess, then we all leave ourselves open to nightmares to come.” I urged that we learn the lesson and extend the circle of citizenship and human dignity to include everyone without exception.
When I said those words, I had in mind not only the women and girls around the world who continued to be marginalized in so many ways but other “invisibles,” from religious and ethnic minorities to people with disabilities to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. When I look back on my time as Secretary, I’m proud of the work we did to extend the circle of human dignity and human rights to include people historically excluded.
In January 2011, the world learned about David Kato. He was a gay activist in Uganda, well known in that country and in international advocacy circles. He had been threatened many times, including on the front page of a Ugandan newspaper, which had published a photo of David and others under the words “HANG THEM.” Eventually someone followed through on the threats. David was killed in what police said was a robbery but was more likely an execution.
Like many people in Uganda and around the world, I was appalled that the police and government had done little to protect David after the public calls for his murder. But this was about more than police incompetence. The Ugandan Parliament was considering a bill to make being gay a crime punishable by death. A high-ranking government official—the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, no less—gave an interview in which he said dismissively, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.” LGBT people in Uganda were routinely harassed and attacked, and the authorities did virtually nothing to stop it. When I raised these issues with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, he ridiculed my concerns. “Oh, Hillary, here you go again,” he would say. David’s death wasn’t an isolated incident; it was the result of a nationwide campaign to suppress LGBT people by any means necessary, and the government was part of it.
I asked for a briefing on David’s life and work and read an interview he gave in 2009 in which he said he wanted to be “a good human rights defender, not a dead one, but an alive one.” He had that opportunity stolen from him, but others were continuing his work, and I wanted the United States to be firmly in their corner.
Abuse of LGBT people is by no means exclusive to Uganda. As of this writing, more than eighty countries worldwide, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to South Asia, have in one way or another made it a crime to be LGBT. People are jailed for having same-sex relationships, for wearing clothes that go against typical gender norms, or simply for saying that they are LGBT. Uganda’s neighbor Kenya has been sending gay men to prison for years. In northern Nigeria gay men can still face death by stoning. In Cameroon in 2012, a man was sent to jail simply for sending a text to another man that expressed romantic love. I was deeply troubled when Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and Uganda’s Museveni both signed harsh, repressive antihomosexuality bills in early 2014. Homosexuality was already criminalized in both countries, but the new Nigerian law provides for a prison sentence of fourteen years for engaging in a same-sex relationship and ten years for LGBT advocacy, and some acts under the new Ugandan law are punishable by a life sentence.
The regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia has enacted a series of antigay laws, prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by gay couples or any couples from countries that allow same-sex marriage, and making it a crime to promote gay rights or even discuss homosexuality around children. When I pressed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to do more to protect the rights of LGBT people, the normally cool and restrained diplomat turned nasty. Russians don’t have a problem with homosexuals, he told me, just with their “propaganda.” “Why do ‘these people’ have to go around flaunting it? Russians shouldn’t have to put up with that.” Lavrov was contemptuous of the idea of being “on the right side of history” on this issue; that was just “sentimental nonsense.” I tried to explain the steps we were taking to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and open up our military to LGBT service members, and I asked my Defense Department traveling representative Admiral Harry Harris to elaborate. The Russian side of the table started snickering. “Oh, he is gay?” one of them asked in a stage whisper. Harry isn’t and couldn’t care less about Russian jibes, but I was appalled that my sophisticated Russian counterparts were casually and cruelly parroting offensive talking points.
The dismal state of LGBT rights around the world had been on the U.S. human rights radar for some time. Since 1993, when reporting instructions were changed to include sexual orientation, the State Department has highlighted abuses faced by LGBT communities around the world in its annual Human Rights Report and has raised the issue in our dealings with other governments, as I did with Lavrov and Museveni and others. We also did quite a bit of outreach to LGBT populations through PEPFAR, which not only helped save millions of lives but brought people who had been isolated into the public sphere.
But I decided our human rights efforts needed an upgrade. There was too much evidence that the climate for LGBT people was deteriorating in many parts of the world. This was in stark opposition to the remarkable progress in other places, including the United States. It was a terrible irony: In some parts of the world life for LGBT people was better than ever; in others it had never been worse.
Meanwhile, I looked for ways to make progress closer to home, by better supporting the LGBT members of the State Department family. In earlier generations talented members of the Foreign Service had been forced to resign when their sexual orientation became known. Those days were gone, but there were still plenty of rules in place that made life harder for our LGBT colleagues. So in 2009, I extended the full range of legally available benefits and allowances to same-sex domestic partners of Foreign Service staff serving abroad. In 2010, I directed that the State Department’s equal employment opportunity policy explicitly protect against discriminatory treatment of employees and job applicants based on gender identity. We also made it easier for Americans to change the sex listed on their passport and made it possible for same-sex couples to obtain passports under the names recognized by their state through their marriage or civil union. To support the antibullying movement started by the columnist Dan Savage, I recorded an “It Gets Better” video that went viral. I don’t know if my words of comfort and encouragement reached any at-risk teenagers, but I hope they did.
I supported the State Department’s annual Pride event, hosted by a group called GLIFAA, Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies. As the name suggests, these are LGBT people who work in U.S. foreign affairs, so they have a strong professional stake in improving the climate for LGBT people abroad, as well as here at home. The annual Pride celebration they organized at State was at once joyful and purposeful. At the 2010 Pride celebration, after recapping some of the progress we’d made together in the past year, I turned to the terrible harms still being suffered by LGBT people worldwide. “These dangers are not gay issues—this is a human rights issue,” I said. The room burst into whoops and cheers. I went on: “Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than fifteen years ago in Beijing, that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, let me say today that human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.” Again loud, sustained applause. Of course, I had hoped that my remarks would be well received, but I was surprised by the passionate reaction from the crowd. Clearly this was something people had been waiting to hear even more fervently than I had realized. Later Dan Baer, an active member of GLIFAA, confirmed this. “You need to say this to the world,” he told me.
With that the work began on one of the most memorable speeches I delivered as Secretary of State.
Most of my major speeches as Secretary were, naturally, thick with foreign policy. They laid out multiyear, multipronged strategies on complex issues. Often they included carefully worded caveats, encoded warnings, and at least a few instances of diplomatic jargon. My speechwriters worked hard to make every one accessible to the broadest possible audience, but the fact remained: Foreign policy speeches tend to be wonky, and their most fervent listeners and readers are foreign policy professionals, whether government officials, think tank experts, or journalists on the beat.
I wanted this speech to be different. I wanted it to mean something to LGBT people in lots of different circumstances—not just the activists on the front lines, fluent in the argot of human rights, but also the bullied teenager in rural America, or Armenia or Algeria, for that matter. I wanted it to be simple and direct—the exact opposite of the over-the-top, darkly suggestive language you hear in many antigay jeremiads. I wanted it to at least have a chance at convincing dubious listeners, so it needed to be reasonable and respectful, without backing a millimeter away from its defense of human rights. Most of all, I wanted it to send a clear message to the leaders of countries everywhere: Protecting their LGBT citizens was part of their human rights obligations, and the world was watching to make sure they’d meet them.
Before we started writing the speech, I wanted to figure out where I’d give it, since on a topic this sensitive the location and occasion would matter more than usual. It was early 2011. I had travel scheduled to just about every region of the world in the coming months. Would one of those trips be the right one? I was going to Africa in August, and we briefly considered going to Uganda and giving the speech in David Kato’s memory, but ruled that out pretty quickly. I wanted to avoid at all costs suggesting that antigay violence is just an African problem rather than a global problem, or giving local bigots an excuse to complain about U.S. bullying. I wanted the only story to be the message of the speech itself.
We looked at the calendar; maybe we should choose a significant date rather than a significant location. The 2011 Pride celebration in June? No—if I gave the speech in the United States, it wouldn’t be the speech I envisioned. The press would cover it from a domestic political angle, if they covered it at all. (Talking about LGBT rights during Pride Month isn’t exactly newsworthy.) It just wouldn’t make the same impact.
Eventually Jake Sullivan and Dan Baer both had the same idea: I should deliver the speech in Geneva, at the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council. If my goal was to firmly place LGBT rights within the international community’s framework of human rights, there was no better place to do it.
So we had a place. What about a date? We decided on the first week of December, to mark the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just as I had done back in 1997. The historical significance was meaningful; more practically, I was already scheduled to be in Europe that week for meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Adding a stop in Geneva would be easy.
Writing the speech wasn’t easy. I wanted to refute the most egregious myths that antigay zealots spread as truth, including those that government Ministers had said in all seriousness to me when I pressed them to treat LGBT people humanely. My speechwriter Megan Rooney researched the most outlandish examples. There were so many: that gay people were mentally ill child abusers; that God wanted us to reject and isolate them; that poor countries couldn’t afford to care about human rights; that these countries didn’t have any LGBT people at all. That’s what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an audience at Columbia University in 2007, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.” I’d heard similar things in private many times.
In our first draft we listed five common myths and then debunked them one by one. The speech evolved quite a bit over several successive drafts, but we ended up sticking with that basic structure throughout. I knew the speech needed to be exceedingly calm and measured if it had any chance of changing anyone’s mind, so many of my edits were aimed at that; for example, “five myths” became “five issues.” I thought it was important to acknowledge that many views on LGBT people are rooted in religious and cultural traditions that hold great meaning in people’s lives and shouldn’t be treated contemptuously. “I come here before you with respect, understanding and humility,” I wrote. The strength of the ideas were undiminished by the more measured language.
I told Megan to go back to my 1995 Beijing speech and use that as a model. After all, what I wanted to do here was very similar: name the ugly things happening to this group of people and declare that they are human rights violations, for the simple fact is that these people are human beings. That was it: no complex arguments, no thundering rhetoric, just a few unadorned assertions that were long overdue.
There were a few strategic questions we needed to answer. First: Should we “name and shame” countries that had taken steps in the wrong direction? An early draft of the speech called out Uganda, among others. I decided that was a mistake. Any list would be incomplete; plus I knew that any country singled out for criticism would feel obligated to respond, most likely defensively and angrily. After all, the United States has made strides, but we still have work to do on equality for LGBT Americans. I wanted this speech to make leaders think, not lash out.
Instead, we looked for examples of non-Western countries that had made great progress on LGBT rights. What better way was there to refute the myth that supporting LGBT people was a Western, colonialist practice? Happily there were many to choose from. In the end I praised Mongolia, Nepal, South Africa, India, Argentina, and Colombia and quoted the former President of Botswana.
The second question: How should we advertise the speech? If we said it was about LGBT human rights, we knew some people—exactly the people we wanted to reach—would stay away. So we decided to bill it simply as a human rights speech marking the anniversary of the Universal Declaration, and leave it at that.
In the weeks leading up to the speech, once most of it was set, I kept my ears open for stories and ideas worth adding. At a meeting at the White House the Commandant of the Marine Corps shared an anecdote about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. “I was against it and I said so at the time,” he told me. “But once it happened I saw that my fears were unfounded.” The Marines had embraced the change with proud professionalism, he added. Into the speech it went. My Legal Advisor Harold Koh suggested adding something about the importance of empathy, walking in someone else’s shoes. It ended up being one of the loveliest parts of the speech.
Finally, we left for Europe. Switzerland was to be the third country in a five-country tour, one country per day. In Germany I led the U.S. delegation at a conference on Afghanistan. In Lithuania, I attended a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. When we finally arrived at our small, charming hotel in Vilnius, many of my staff headed to the hotel bar for a late dinner of Lithuanian specialties. But Megan and Jake were too nervous about the next day’s remarks to relax. They headed to her hotel room, sat on the floor, and with Dan Baer (who was already in Geneva) on speakerphone, went through every line of the speech. They finished just before dawn.
Early the next morning I learned that the White House had finally approved a policy change that we had been discussing. From now on, the United States would take into account the LGBT human rights record of a country when appropriating foreign aid. This kind of policy has a real chance of influencing the actions of other governments. I was looking forward to adding it to the speech.
On December 6, we flew into Geneva and headed to the Palace of Nations. It was looking even more palatial than usual. The building is impressive enough on a normal day; built to be the headquarters for the League of Nations, it opened in 1936, a last gasp of optimism before Europe disintegrated. Here many of the great questions of 20th-century diplomacy were arbitrated, from nuclear disarmament to the independence of nations emerging from colonialism. Its corridors and chambers are always crowded, but on this day it was thronged with people.
I walked onto the stage and began.
Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.
Some in the audience had a curious look on their faces. Where was this going?
“I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,” I continued.
I was proud to deliver every word of that speech, but a few lines in particular stand out in my memory. Remembering David Kato, I spoke directly to all the other brave LGBT activists fighting uphill battles in lonely, dangerous places worldwide: “You have an ally in the United States of America. And you have millions of friends among the American people.”
Remembering all the conversations I’d had with foreign leaders who threw up their hands and said, “Our people hate gays, they support these laws, what can we do?,” I spoke directly to those officials: “Leadership, by definition, means being out in front of your people when it is called for. It means standing up for the dignity of all your citizens and persuading your people to do the same.”
And in an echo of my speech in Beijing and my words at the State Department a year earlier, I said, “Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”
I woke up the following morning to my first indication that the speech had broken through: the hairdresser who styled my hair that morning, who was gay, theatrically fell to his knees in gratitude. I laughed and told him to get up, for heaven’s sake. My hair, as usual, couldn’t wait.
The ripples created by the speech were bouncing around the globe and back, and my phone was soon crowded with messages. A huge number of people had watched the speech online. I was gratified, for many reasons. Though I had expected a few of the African delegates in the audience that day to walk out, they did not. And as I’ve seen from the many pictures and videos people have sent me from Pride events around the world, the words “gay rights are human rights” have been blazoned on countless posters, banners, and T-shirts. I was proud that America had once again stood up for human rights, just as we had on so many previous occasions.
Late in my term, I received a letter from a Foreign Service officer stationed in Latin America that has become a treasured possession: “I write you not as an employee of the Department of State writing to the Secretary, but as a husband and as a father writing to thank you, as an individual, for all you have done for our family over the past four years. I had long dreamt of being a Foreign Service Officer, but had never seriously considered it until you became our Secretary of State. The moment that you directed the Department to recognize same-sex spouses as family members, the one thing that had been holding me back was suddenly no longer standing in the way.” He went on to describe the joy of having his husband of seven years be able to join him at his foreign post and that, as a result, they were able to welcome twins into the world as well. He even enclosed a photo of their happy family. “What was hardly imaginable three years ago . . . that we’d be diplomats for our country, that our relationship would be recognized by the government, that we’d be able to be fathers, has all come true.”
When I left the State Department in 2013 and began working at the Clinton Foundation in New York, I knew that I wanted to continue working on “the great unfinished business of the 21st century.” The fast-approaching twentieth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing helped focus my thinking. I was proud of how much had been accomplished in that time. Yet there was no doubt that we were still a long way from the goal of “full and equal participation.”
Melanne had started an academic center on women, peace, and security at Georgetown University, for which I agreed to serve as honorary founding chair. Now that we weren’t flying around the globe every other day, we found ourselves talking and thinking more about the sweep of history and the future of the movement to which we had devoted so many years. I called Maggie Williams and asked her to come strategize with us. Along with Chelsea and our great team at the Clinton Foundation, including Jen Klein and Rachel Vogelstein, who both had played key roles at the State Department, we came up with a new plan.
At the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September 2013, I announced that the Clinton Foundation would mobilize a broad effort to evaluate the progress women and girls had made since Beijing and to chart the path forward to achieve full and equal participation for women and girls. I said it was time for a clear-eyed look at how far we’d come, how far we still had to go, and what we planned to do about this unfinished business.
With partners like the Gates Foundation, we began work on a digital “global review” of the status of women and girls in time for the twentieth anniversary of Beijing in September 2015. I wanted everyone to be able to see the gains we’d made, as well as the gaps that remained. We’d present easily accessible information that could be shared and put to use by advocates, academics, and political leaders to design reforms and drive real change.
I also wanted to build on the Platform for Action the world endorsed in Beijing and lay out a 21st-century agenda to accelerate full participation for women and girls around the world, including in areas that were still over the horizon in 1995. For example, none of us in Beijing could have imagined the ways in which the internet and mobile technology would transform our world or comprehended what it would mean to have 200 million fewer women than men online in the developing world. Closing that “digital divide” would open up vast new opportunities for economic and political participation.
Eventually we started calling our new initiative No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. The name was a playful echo of the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” that became famous at the end of my Presidential campaign, but it meant much more than that. You didn’t have to be at the highest levels of politics or business; women and girls everywhere still faced all sorts of ceilings that held back their ambitions and aspirations and made it harder, if not impossible, for them to pursue their dreams.
Not long after I announced No Ceilings, I heard a surprising story. Stephen Massey, a colleague from the Clinton White House, happened to be in Beijing and wandered into a bookstore. It was a large and modern shop, but quiet and nearly empty. Then Stephen could hardly believe his ears. Over the store’s loudspeakers he heard a familiar phrase: “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” It was my voice. They were playing a recording of the speech throughout the store. What a difference twenty years makes! In 1995, the Chinese government had shut down the closed-circuit television feed carrying my remarks. Now those controversial words had become “background music” for shoppers, part of the fabric of everyday life. Stephen whipped out his smartphone, recorded a video, and emailed it home. When I saw it, I had to laugh. Was that really a good way to sell books? In China?
The message of Beijing and the lifetime of work it represented had become so much a part of my identity it was practically written into my DNA. I was glad that it had permeated into the culture, in places that had once been hostile. The cause of protecting and expanding human rights is as urgent and compelling as ever, and further progress is unlikely without continued American leadership.
In February 2014, the Human Rights Campaign (the other HRC!) invited my daughter, Chelsea, to speak at a conference on gay rights. In her remarks she offered a new twist on a familiar phrase. “My mother has often said that the issue of women is the unfinished business of the 21st century,” she said. “That is certainly true. But so too are the issues of LGBTQ rights the unfinished business of the 21st century.” Of course she’s right, and I could not be more proud of her strong stand on behalf of equality and opportunity for all people.
Earlier I described the work of American foreign policy as a relay race. Leaders are handed the baton and asked to run our leg as ably as we can and put the next runner in the best possible position to succeed. Well, families are like that too. From the moment I first held Chelsea in my arms in the hospital in Little Rock, I knew my mission in life was to give her every opportunity to thrive. As she’s grown up and stepped out into the world in her own right, my responsibilities have changed. And now that she’s expecting a child of her own, I’m preparing for a new role that I’ve looked forward to for years: grandmother. And I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my relationship with my own mom, as an adult as well as in childhood, and what lessons I learned from her.
When I became Secretary of State, Mom was just about to turn ninety. She had been living with us in Washington for the past few years, ever since being alone in her apartment overlooking the zoo on Connecticut Avenue became too much. Like so many Americans of my generation, I felt both blessed to have these extra years with an aging parent and very responsible for making sure she was comfortable and well-cared for. Mom gave me so much unconditional love and support when I was growing up in Park Ridge; now it was my turn to support her. Of course I never would have let her hear me describe it that way. Dorothy Howell Rodham was a fiercely independent woman. She couldn’t bear the thought of being a burden to anyone.
Having her so close became a source of great comfort to me, especially in the difficult period after the end of the 2008 campaign. I’d come home from a long day at the Senate or the State Department, slide in next to her at the small table in our breakfast nook, and let everything just pour out.
Mom loved mystery novels, Mexican food, Dancing with the Stars (we actually managed to get her to a taping of the show once), and most of all her grandchildren. My nephew Zach Rodham’s school was just five minutes away, and he came over many afternoons to visit her. Spending time with Fiona and Simon Rodham, her youngest grandchildren, was a precious delight for her. For Chelsea, her grandmother was one of the most important figures in her life. Mom helped Chelsea navigate the unique challenges of growing up in the public eye and, when she was ready, encouraged her to pursue her passion for service and philanthropy. Even in her nineties, Mom never lost her commitment to social justice, which did so much to mold and inspire me when I was growing up. I loved that she was able to do the same for Chelsea. And I’m not sure if I ever saw Mom happier than at Chelsea’s wedding. She proudly walked down the aisle on Zach’s arm and exulted over her joyful, radiant granddaughter.
Mom’s own childhood was marked by trauma and abandonment. In Chicago her parents fought frequently and divorced when she and her sister were young. Neither parent was willing to care for the kids, so they were put on a train to California to live with their paternal grandparents in Alhambra, a town near the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. The elderly couple was severe and unloving. One Halloween, after Mom was caught trick-or-treating with school friends, a forbidden activity, she was confined to her room for an entire year, except for the hours she was in school. She wasn’t allowed to eat at the kitchen table or play in the yard. By the time Mom turned fourteen, she could no longer bear life in her grandmother’s house. She moved out and found work as a housekeeper and nanny for a kind-hearted woman in San Gabriel who offered room and board plus $3 a week and urged her to attend high school. For the first time she saw how loving parents care for their children—it was a revelation.
After graduating high school, Mom moved back to Chicago in the hopes of reconnecting with her own mother. Sadly she was spurned yet again. Heartbroken, she spent the next five years working as a secretary before she met and married my father, Hugh Rodham. She built a new life as a homemaker, spending her days lavishing love on me and my two younger brothers.
When I got old enough to understand all this, I asked my mother how she survived abuse and abandonment without becoming embittered and emotionally stunted. How did she emerge from this lonely early life as such a loving and levelheaded woman? I’ll never forget how she replied. “At critical points in my life somebody showed me kindness,” she said. Sometimes it would seem so small, but it would mean so much—the teacher in elementary school who noticed that she never had money to buy milk, so every day would buy two cartons of milk and then say, “Dorothy, I can’t drink this other carton of milk. Would you like it?” Or the woman who hired her as a nanny and insisted that she go to high school. One day she noticed that Mom had only one blouse that she washed every day. “Dorothy, I can’t fit into this blouse anymore and I’d hate to throw it away. Would you like it?” she said.
Mom was amazingly energetic and positive even into her nineties. But her health started to fail her; she had trouble with her heart. By the fall of 2011, I was growing worried about leaving her alone. On the evening of October 31, another Halloween, I was preparing to leave for London and Turkey. My team was already on board the airplane at Andrews waiting for me to arrive so we could take off. That’s when I got the call that Mom had been rushed to George Washington University Hospital. I quickly canceled the trip and sped there. Bill, Chelsea, and Marc rushed down from New York, and my brothers and their wives, Hugh and Maria and Tony and Megan, arrived as quickly as they could. Mom was a fighter her entire life, but it was finally time to let go. I sat by her bedside and held her hand one last time. No one had a bigger influence on my life or did more to shape the person I became.
When I lost my father in 1993, it felt too soon, and I was consumed with sadness for all the things he would not live to see and do. This was different. Mom lived a long and full life. This time I wept not for what she would miss but for how much I would miss her.
I spent the next few days going through her things at home, paging through a book, staring at an old photograph, caressing a piece of beloved jewelry. I found myself sitting next to her empty chair in the breakfast nook and wishing more than anything that I could have one more conversation, one more hug.
We held a small memorial service at the house with close family and friends. We asked Reverend Bill Shillady, who married Chelsea and Marc, to officiate. Chelsea spoke movingly, as did many of Mom’s friends and our family. I read a few lines from the poet Mary Oliver, whose work Mom and I both adored.
Standing there with Bill and Chelsea by my side, I tried to say a final good-bye. I remembered a piece of wisdom that an older friend of mine shared in her later years that perfectly captured how my mother lived her life and how I hoped to live mine: “I have loved and been loved; all the rest is background music.”
I looked at Chelsea and thought about how proud Mom was of her. Mom measured her own life by how much she was able to help us and serve others. I knew if she was still with us, she would be urging us to do the same. Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to make the world a better place. That’s our unfinished business.