MEET THE U.S PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE-HILLARY CLINTON

HILLARY CLINTON

 Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is an American politician and the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States in the 2016 election. She is the first female candidate to gain that status for a major American political party. She served as the 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, the junior United States Senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, First Lady of the United States during the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, and First Lady of Arkansas from 1983 to 1992.

 

Hillary Rodham grew up in the Chicago area. She attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1969, and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas, marrying Bill Clinton in 1975. In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978, and, the following year, became the first woman partner at Rose Law Firm. As First Lady of Arkansas (1979–81, 1983–92), she led a task force whose recommendations helped reform Arkansas's public schools, and served on the boards of corporations including Walmart.

 

As First Lady of the United States, Clinton led the failed effort to enact the Clinton health plan of 1993. In 1997 and 1999, she helped create programs for children's health insurance, adoption, and foster care. The only first lady to have been subpoenaed, she faced a federal grand jury in 1996 regarding the Whitewater controversy; no charges were brought against her related to this or any other controversies in her life. Her marriage endured the Lewinsky scandal of 1998, and overall her role as first lady drew a polarized response from the public.

 

Clinton was elected in 2000 as the first female senator from New York, the only first lady ever to have sought elective office. Following the September 11 attacks, she voted to approve the war in Afghanistan. She also voted for the Iraq Resolution (which she later regretted), sought to hasten the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and opposed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007 (which she later commended). She voted against the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and voted against John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the United States Supreme Court, filibustering the latter. She was re-elected to the Senate in 2006. Running for president in 2008, she won far more delegates than any previous female candidate, but lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.

 

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, Clinton responded to the Arab Spring, during which she advocated the U.S. military intervention in Libya. While accepting responsibility for security lapses related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, she said she had no direct role in consulate security prior to that attack. Leaving office after Obama's first term, she authored her fifth book and undertook speaking engagements before announcing her second presidential run in the 2016 election.

 

Early life

 

Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.[2][3] She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.[4] Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911–1993), was of Welsh and English descent;[5] he managed a successful small business in the textile industry.[6] Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell (1919–2011), was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French Canadian, and Welsh descent.[5][7][8] Hillary has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.[9]

 

 

 Mementos of Hillary Rodham's early life are shown at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.

She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the school newspaper, and was selected for National Honor Society.[2][13] She won election as class vice president for her junior year, but then lost an election for class president for her senior year against two boys, one of whom told her that "you are really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president."[14] For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965.[13][15] Rodham's mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career,[8] and her father, otherwise a traditionalist, felt that his daughter's abilities and opportunities should not be limited by gender.[16]

Raised in a politically conservative household,[8] Rodham helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age thirteen following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she saw evidence of electoral fraud (such as voting list entries showing addresses that were empty lots) against Republican candidate Richard Nixon.[17] She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964.[18] Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anti-communist), who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw, and afterwards briefly met, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at a 1962 speech in Chicago's Orchestra Hall.[19]

Wellesley College years

 

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[20] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[21][22] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[23] she supported the elections to mayor of John Lindsay (New York City) and to U.S. senator of Edward Brooke (Massachusetts).[24] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[21] In a letter to her youth minister at this time, she described herself as "a mind conservative and a heart liberal".[25] In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it.[26][27]

 

In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.[28] In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969.[26][29] Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty.[28] In her student government role, she played a role in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges.[26][30] A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States.[26]

To help her better understand her changing political views, Professor Alan Schechter assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference, and she attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program.[28] Rodham was invited by moderate New York Republican Representative Charles Goodell to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller's late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.[28] Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. However, she was upset by the way Richard Nixon's campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the convention's "veiled" racist messages, and left the Republican Party for good.[28] Rodham wrote her senior thesis, a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, under Professor Schechter.[31] (Years later, while she was first lady, access to her thesis was restricted at the request of the White House and it became the subject of some speculation.[31]) 

In 1969, she graduated with a bachelor of arts,[32] with departmental honors in political science.[31] After some fellow seniors requested that the college administration allow a student speaker at commencement, she became the first student in Wellesley College history to speak at the event, following commencement speaker Senator Brooke.[29][33] Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.[26][34][35] She was featured in an article published in Life magazine,[36] due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Brooke.[33] She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.[37] That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthful conditions).[38]

Yale Law School and postgraduate studies

 

Rodham then entered Yale Law School. There she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.[39] During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,[40] learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).[41][42] She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital[41] and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free legal advice for the poor.[40] In the summer of 1970 she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. There she researched migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.[43] Edelman later became a significant mentor.[44] Rodham was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.[45] 

In the late spring of 1971 she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.[46] The firm was well known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members);[46] Rodham worked on child custody and other cases.[nb 3] Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in California;[50] the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.[47] The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.[51] She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,[32] having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton.[52] He first proposed marriage to her following graduation but she declined, uncertain if she wanted to tie her future to his.[52]

Rodham began a year of postgraduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.[53] Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973.[54] Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals"[55] and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis.[56] The article became frequently cited in the field.[57]

 

Marriage and family, law career and First Lady of Arkansas

 

During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[58] and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children.[59] In 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.[60] Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard W. Nussbaum,[41] Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment.[60] The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.[60]

 

By then, Rodham was viewed as someone with a bright political future: Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career,[61] and Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president.[62] Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked Rodham to marry him and she continued to demur.[63] After failing the District of Columbia bar exam[64] and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose to follow my heart instead of my head".[65] She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington, where career prospects were brighter. He was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, Rodham moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.[66][67]

 

Early Arkansas years

 

At the university, Rodham gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader.[68] She became the first director of a new legal aid clinic at the school, securing support from the local bar association and gaining federal funding.[69] Among her cases was one where she was obliged by request of the court to serve as defense counsel to a man accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl; she put on an effective defense that led to his pleading guilty to a much lesser charge.[70] (Decades later, the woman involved said that the defense counsel had put her "through hell" during the legal process; Hillary has said it was a "terrible case").[70] During her time in Fayetteville, Rodham and several other women founded the city's first rape crisis center.[69] Rodham still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's.[71] 

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry Bill.[72] Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room.[73] A story about the marriage in the Arkansas Gazette indicated that she was retaining the name Hillary Rodham.[73][74] The motivation was to keep the couple's professional lives separate and avoid apparent conflicts of interest and because, as she told a friend at the time, "it showed that I was still me."[75] The decision did upset both their mothers.[76] Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock.[77] There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence.[78] She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law[39] while also working pro bono in child advocacy;[79] she rarely performed litigation work in court.[80]

Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977[81] and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979.[82] The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted.[56] An American Bar Association chair later said, "Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate."[56] Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as "one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades",[83] while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,[84] would allow children to file frivolous lawsuits against their parents,[56] and exemplified legal "crit" theory run amok.[85]

 

 Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton lived in this 980-square-foot (91 m2) house in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.[86]

In 1977, Rodham cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund.[39][87] Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana)[88] appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation,[89] and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981.[90] From mid-1978 to mid-1980,[nb 4] she was the chair of that board, the first woman to do so.[91] During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.[79]

Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–81, 1983–92). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year,[92] where she secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.[93]

In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.[94] From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than that of her husband.[95] During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham engaged in the trading of cattle futures contracts;[96] an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months.[97] The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time.[96] Both of these became subjects of controversy in the 1990s.

On February 27, 1980, Rodham gave birth to their daughter Chelsea. In November 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his bid for re-election.[98]

 
Bill Clinton returned to the governor's office two years later after winning the election of 1982. During her husband's campaign, Rodham began to use the name Hillary Clinton, or sometimes "Mrs. Bill Clinton", to assuage the concerns of Arkansas voters;[nb 1] she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law to campaign for him full-time.[104] As First Lady of Arkansas again, she made a note of using Hillary Rodham Clinton as her name.[nb 1] She was named chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, where she sought to reform the state's court-sanctioned public education system.[105][106] In one of the Clinton governorship's most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association to establish mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and classroom size.[92][105] It became her introduction into the politics of a highly visible public policy effort.[74][105] In 1985, she introduced Arkansas's Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth, a program that helps parents work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy.[107] She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.[108][109]

Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than the other partners, as she billed fewer hours,[110] but still made more than $200,000 in her final year there.[111] The firm considered her a "rainmaker" because she brought in clients, partly thanks to the prestige she lent it and to her corporate board connections.[111] She was also very influential in the appointment of state judges.[111] Bill Clinton's Republican opponent in his 1986 gubernatorial re-election campaign accused the Clintons of conflict of interest, because Rose Law did state business; the Clintons countered the charge by saying that state fees were walled off by the firm before her profits were calculated.[112]

From 1982 to 1988, Clinton was on the board of directors, sometimes as chair, of the New World Foundation,[113] which funded a variety of New Left interest groups.[114] From 1987 to 1991, she was the first chair of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession,[115] created to address gender bias in the legal profession and induce the association to adopt measures to combat it.[115] She was twice named by The National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America: in 1988 and in 1991.[116] When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary considered running, but private polls were unfavorable and, in the end, he ran and was re-elected for the final time.[117]

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988–92)[118] and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–92).[2][119] In addition to her positions with nonprofit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–92),[120] Wal-Mart Stores (1986–92)[121] and Lafarge (1990–92).[122] TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law.[111][123] Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart's board, added following pressure on chairman Sam Walton to name a woman to it.[123] Once there, she pushed successfully for Wal-Mart to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, was largely unsuccessful in a campaign for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.[121][123][124]

Hillary Clinton received sustained national attention for the first time when her husband became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1992. Before the New Hampshire primary, tabloid publications printed assertions that Bill Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with Arkansas lounge singer Gennifer Flowers.[125] In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill Clinton denied the affair, but acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage".[126] This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign.[127] During it, Hillary Clinton made culturally disparaging remarks about Tammy Wynette's outlook on marriage as described in her classic song "Stand by Your Man",[nb 5] and later in the campaign about how she could have chosen to be like women staying home and baking cookies and having teas, but wanted to pursue her career instead.[nb 6] The remarks were widely criticized, particularly by those who were, or defended, stay-at-home mothers, and in retrospect, were ill-considered by her own admission. Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would "get two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume.[133] Beginning with Daniel Wattenberg's August 1992 The American Spectator article "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock", Hillary Clinton's own past ideological and ethical record came under attack from conservatives.[84] At least twenty other articles in major publications also drew comparisons between her and Lady Macbeth.[134]

 

Role as first lady

 

When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and her press secretary reiterated that she would be using that form of her name.[nb 1] She was the initial first lady to hold a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career up to the time of entering the White House.[135] She was also the first to have an office in the West Wing of the White House in addition to the usual first lady offices in the East Wing.[53][136] She was part of the innermost circle vetting appointments to the new administration and her choices filled at least eleven top-level positions and dozens more lower-level ones.[137] After Eleanor Roosevelt, Clinton is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history.[138][139]

 

 

Some critics called it inappropriate for the first lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters had been well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency.[140] Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents" or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary".[92][141][142] The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a first lady were enough to send Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt.[nb 7] From the time she came to Washington, she also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures.[146][147] Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul"; that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium."[148][149] Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas,[150] to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as first lady,[151][152] to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.[153]

 

In January 1993, President Clinton named First Lady Clinton to chair a Task Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education reform.[154] Unconvinced regarding the merits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), she privately urged that passage of health care reform be given higher priority.[155][156] The recommendation of the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan, a comprehensive proposal that would require employers to provide health coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance organizations. Its opponents quickly derided the plan as "Hillarycare", and it faced opposition from even some Democrats in Congress.[157][158] Some protesters against the proposed plan became vitriolic, and during a July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, Clinton wore a bulletproof vest at times.[157][158]

 Failing to gather enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, although Democrats controlled both chambers, the proposal was abandoned in September 1994.[157] Clinton later acknowledged in her memoir that her political inexperience partly contributed to the defeat, but cited many other factors. The First Lady's approval ratings, which had generally been in the high-50s percent range during her first year, fell to 44 percent in April 1994 and 35 percent by September 1994.[159]

Republicans made the Clinton health care plan a major campaign issue of the 1994 midterm elections,[160] which saw a net Republican gain of fifty-three seats in the House election and seven in the Senate election, winning control of both; many analysts and pollsters found the plan to be a major factor in the Democrats' defeat, especially among independent voters.[161] The White House subsequently sought to downplay Hillary Clinton's role in shaping policy.[162] Opponents of universal health care would continue to use "Hillarycare" as a pejorative label for similar plans by others.[163]

 Along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she was a force behind the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents could not provide them with health coverage, and conducted outreach efforts on behalf of enrolling children in the program once it became law.[164] She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare.[165] She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health.[53] The First Lady worked to investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as the Gulf War syndrome.[53]

Enactment of welfare reform was a major goal of her husband's, but when the first two bills on it came from the Republican-controlled Congress lacked protections for people going off welfare, she urged him to veto them, which he did.[166][167] A third version came up during his 1996 general election campaign that restored some of the protections but cut the scope of benefits in other areas; critics, including her past mentor Edelman, urged her to get the president to veto it again.[166] But she decided to support the bill, which became the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, as the best political compromise available.[166][167] This caused a rift with Edelman that Clinton later called "sad and painful".[167]

Together with Attorney General Janet Reno, Clinton helped create the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice.[53] In 1997, she initiated and shepherded the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which she regarded as her greatest accomplishment as first lady.[53][168] In 1999, she was instrumental in the passage of the Foster Care Independence Act, which doubled federal monies for teenagers aging out of foster care.[168] As first lady, Clinton hosted numerous White House conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997),[169] on Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997),[170] and on Children and Adolescents (2000).[171] She also hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Teenagers (2000)[172] and the first-ever White House Conference on Philanthropy (1999).[173]

Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time,[174] breaking the mark for most-traveled first lady held by Pat Nixon.[175] She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a role in U.S. diplomacy attaining its objectives.[176] A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan.[177] Clinton was troubled by the plight of women she encountered, but found a warm response from the people of the countries she visited and gained a better relationship with the American press corps.[177][178] The trip was a transformative experience for her and presaged her eventual career in diplomacy.[179]

 

In a September 1995 speech before the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Clinton argued very forcefully against practices that abused women around the world and in the People's Republic of China itself,[180] declaring that "it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights".[180] Delegates from over 180 countries heard her say: "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."[181] In doing so, she resisted both internal administration and Chinese pressure to soften her remarks.[174][181] The speech became a key moment in the empowerment of women and years later females around the world would recite Clinton's key phrases.[182] She was one of the most prominent international figures during the late 1990s to speak out against the treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban.[183][184] She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the U.S. to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries.[185] It and Clinton's own visits encouraged women to make themselves heard in the Northern Ireland peace process.[186]

 

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