The Rights of Women and Children, Worldwide: The Candidates Differ

   [You can talk] to women — from the Philippines to Latin America to the Middle East — who can vote, own property, or go to school, because Hillary Clinton helped start a global women’s movement for women’s rights. [You can travel] to Africa and Asia, where Hillary Clinton visited countless remote villages to show how the poorest of the poor could become entrepreneurial and self-sufficient when given access to small loans. — Lissa Muscatine and Melanne Verveer, “Hillary’s Unprecedented Experience on the World Stage,” Huffington Post, Dec. 14, 2007

   In 1996, Hillary Clinton addressed the Council on Foreign Relations. Sidney Blumenthal recorded the event in his book about the Clinton presidency: “Hillary was generally associated with the health care program, but she had been traveling worldwide over the previous four years, promoting an agenda of women’s rights and economic development. … she derided the notion [that this was "ineffectual Lady Bountiful 'social work'"]. [O]ne of the most significant factors in the advancement economically of underdeveloped societies was the education of their women. She also talked about microeconomic programs of loans to poor women, which had become a special issue of hers and had proved especially successful. … The reception was overwhelmingly positive.”

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both tout their work for children and women. Yet there are differences in their concentration on the issues, particuarly women’s issues.

This weekend, I searched the “Issues” section of Obama’s official campaign site, but could not find the words “women” or “woman,” either as a main category or under the sub-section, “Strengthening Families and Communities.” Sen. Clinton’s main issues section features “A Champion for Women,” a full-page summary of her views on women’s issues. She also has a “sister” site, “Women for Hillary.”

Now, I am very certain that Barack Obama cares about women’s issues, which he’s mentioned often. On a site sub-page (Learn / AnswerCenter), I spotted a question, “How can I find out more about Senator Obama’s position on women’s issues?” I clicked, and that took me to “Women for Obama.” I didn’t spot a link to “Women for Obama” elsewhere, but didn’t check every sub-section.

In 30- and 60-second debate responses, Sen. Hillary Clinton often says that she has worked for decades for the rights of children and women. It is unfortunate she hasn’t the time to enumerate her considerable hard work — for 35 years. A cursory review of her Senate Web site statements, from 2001 to present, show her concentration on the plight of women and children in countries from Sudan to Northern Ireland to Afghanistan. Here are some of her earliest achievements:

• fresh out of law school, she was a staff attorney for the newly-founded Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts — she was a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children — and she conducted a post-graduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center
• many years later, and for six years (1986-1992), she chaired the national Children’s Defense Fund
• she chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee for 10 years, and put mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size in place
• she established Arkansas’ Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth
• she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children’s Defense Fund
• she chaired the Rural Health Advisory Committee, a presidential appointment
• she served on the board of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Legal Services (1988-1992)
• she chaired the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession — and much, much more

During her eight years as First Lady, she was instrumental in passing many laws and developing programs that addressed the wide-ranging needs of children and women, both in the United States and across the continents of the world:

Along with Senator Ted Kennedy, she was the major force behind the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents were unable to provide them with health coverage.

She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare. (“Hillary convened the first White House conference on breast cancer funding in 1993 with the National Breast Cancer Coalition” – Web site)

She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health.

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.

Together with Attorney General Janet Reno, Clinton helped create the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice.

In 1997, she initiated and shepherded the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which she regarded as her greatest accomplishment as First Lady.

As First Lady, Clinton hosted numerous White House Conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997), Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997), and Children and Adolescents (2000), and the first-ever White House Conferences on Teenagers (2000) and Philanthropy (1999).

Hillary Clinton traveled to over eighty countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-travelled First Lady held by Pat Nixon. 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 China itself. She was one of the most prominent international figures at the time to speak out against the treatment of Afghan women by the Islamist fundamentalist Taliban that had seized control of Afghanistan. She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries.

The New York Times recorded the historic, challenging speech that Hillary Clinton gave in Beijing in 1995 in “HILLARY CLINTON, IN CHINA, DETAILS ABUSE OF WOMEN“:

Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women’s issues here.

“It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights,” Mrs. Clinton told the Fourth World Conference on Women assembled here.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls,” Mrs. Clinton said, or “when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.

“It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small” she continued, or “when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.”

While her comments concerned abuses that have taken place around the world — the burning of brides occurs in India for example, and rape has most recently been a tactic of war in Bosnia — her words took on a special resonance here in China, where the Administration has muted its public criticism of human rights abuses and is struggling to patch up frayed political relations.

China has been widely criticized for forcing women to be sterilized or have abortions as part of its policy of one child per family, and there are wide reports of female infanticide by parents who want a son. [...]

Mrs. Clinton’s gravity and directness seemed to please both Democratic and Republican members of the United States delegation here, and thus the speech may trump the political disputes that have plagued both Mrs. Clinton’s decision to travel here and the Administration’s approach to China.

She delivered her remarks after joining hundreds of delegates in a morning workshop on “women and health security.”

Addressing the full conference in the afternoon, Mrs. Clinton expanded on a theme that Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, raised on Monday when she told the delegates that violence against women thrives when there is a “crisis of silence and acquiescence.”

As Mrs. Clinton recited her litany from the podium, many delegates applauded, some cheered and others pounded the tables.

Continuing with references to domestic violence, genital mutilation, coercive abortions and sterilizations, Mrs. Clinton told the delegates from more than 180 countries, “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.” …

Yes. Human rights ARE women’s rights, and women’s rights ARE human rights. And thank god for a woman who not only has spoken with courage to challenge age-old discrimination and cruel treatment of women but who has also actually put in place — through hard work and time-intensive negotiation and persuasion — programs that truly help women around the world:

There are so many news stories about her travel and her direct involvement in helping create economic opportunities for women worldwide and in ending discrimination. Here are but a very few, gleaned from the archives of the New York Times:

“ CLINTON IN VIETNAM: THE FIRST LADY; In Northern Vietnam Countryside, a Village Takes to Hillary Clinton,” November 18, 2000

Mrs. Clinton has long championed small loans as a way to lift rural women and their families out of poverty. … Le Thi Luong, 31, a mother of two, showed Mrs. Clinton her thriving business, making tofu and raising pigs, which she built using steadily bigger loans over six years.

At Mrs. Luong put her tofu machine through its paces, Mrs. Clinton gazed at her well-kept courtyard and house, which Mrs. Luong recently expanded and crowned with an impressive railing of stone pillars.

Small children, who had clambered onto the roof, peered through the railing at Mrs. Clinton, laughing in delight when she and her daughter, Chelsea, put on conical straw hats to ward off the morning sun.

”I’m very interested in what you’re doing,” Mrs. Clinton said to Mrs. Luong, while stealing glances at the children.

At a meeting of 160 women who take part in the loan program, [she spoke]. ”For many years I have believed in the power of these small loans,” Mrs. Clinton said, standing in a modest village temple as turquoise ceiling fans whirred over her head. ”You are really making a better future for yourselves, your families, your villages and your country.”

”We very much thank Mrs. Clinton for visiting us,” said Pham Thi Hoa, a neighbor of Mrs. Luong. ”We think her visit shows solidarity for women.”

… ”That’s one of the things that makes us respect her more,” [Nguyen Tra My] said. ”We see that she has a lot of character, that we can learn from her.”

“ The Clintons as Teammates, Dovetailing in Africa,” April 3, 1998

Not just the symbol-conscious but the substantive Clinton & Clinton was on display today. This morning, the Clintons met in Dakar with activists from across Africa to discuss democracy and human rights. It was the last of what seemed an unbroken stream of transcontinental round-table talk, during which the Clintons discussed recovering from genocide with Rwandans, fighting poverty with South Africans, and protecting the environment with Botswanans….

[T]he Clintons appeared in the isolated village of Dal Diam, swept with dust by the hot wind off the encroaching desert, to admire work done there over four years by the Agency for International Development and private groups: a well dug, cattle bought, reading taught, and a village store started with a small loan.

… White House aides acknowledged that the Clinton partnership had been more visible in Africa than it had been since 1994. Mrs. Clinton kept a lower profile at home after the health care plan collapsed, concentrating on less hotly debated issues like foreign development and education. But in her foreign travels, Mrs. Clinton never stopped campaigning on behalf of women, declaring over and over that women’s rights were also human rights. …

Clinton & Clinton became more prominent on this trip simply because, in Africa, Mrs. Clinton’s cherished issues moved to the fore. ”She clearly has been a primary tutor of him” on Africa, said Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary.

Mrs. Clinton, who traveled in Africa a year ago, lobbied her husband to make this trip and guided him to sites she visited before, like a South African housing cooperative and this small island of sandy lanes and pastel-colored colonial houses. …

As is generally the case abroad, Mrs. Clinton has been a political asset to the President here, partly because of her previous trip and her advocacy of foreign development. ”Thanks for visiting us Hillary,” read one sign in the Senegalese village on Wednesday. …

While she spoke at many of the same events as the President, Mrs. Clinton also spoke on her own, always to highlight women’s issues. At a day care center in Ghana, she declared, ”We must speak out to insure that no girl is ever denied an education” and ”to end violence against women in all forms.”

Today, Mrs. Clinton met with a group of activists here to condemn the practice of female genital cutting. …

With his wife beaming nearby, Mr. Clinton was then presented with a baby goat, which he cradled in his arms and kissed repeatedly on its forehead, baahing back as it cried to him. ”What’s the name of this goat?” he asked, and was told, inevitably, that it was Bill Clinton — a Billy goat.

”You must take very good care of this goat!” Mrs. Clinton declared.

“The Next Clinton, May 30, 1999

Far more than in the United States, Hillary Clinton has found her own voice overseas. Abroad, she conducts a sort of shadow Presidency, with advisers borrowed from assorted agencies and an aging 707 whose port engine periodically bursts into flames. She does it with what amounts to her own foreign policy, promoting issues of women’s rights, health care and development that her husband addresses rarely, and almost always with her at his side. …

Clinton has spent more days this year in North Africa than in New York. I went along with her to North Africa earlier this spring and stood nearby in a Moroccan village called Tasselmante as, calling across an empty chicken coop, she questioned one of the locals: ”How many chickens do you have?” Ten. ”And they are healthier than your chickens used to be?” Clinton inquired.

Yes, the woman said through an interpreter, crediting the coop. A nonprofit group, the Near East Foundation, has been promoting its use among the village women. Clinton’s solo international trips — to Africa, Asia, the former Soviet republics, Latin America — seldom generate much attention in the United States, but they are front-page news in the nations she visits. Knowing that, Clinton aims her spotlight at programs that are giving women power, attempting a very gentle advocacy-by-exhibit. …

Clinton has played her advocate’s role more openly within the Administration. She surprised the President’s men, for example, by urging them to consider the effect on child-support payments of bankruptcy legislation now before Congress. Without drawing attention to herself, she has lobbied Congress on issues like adoption.

She made herself a driving force behind one of the biggest-ticket proposals of Clinton’s second term, a $21.7 billion child-care initiative that has yet to win Congressional support. And, as she said at Hofstra, she never walked away from health care, but instead has doggedly coaxed along the President’s incremental changes, including a $24 billion children’s health insurance initiative.

When it comes to children and health care, President Clinton goes out of his way to acknowledge his dependence on his wife. ”I’d also like to thank the First Lady, without whom I probably would not know very much about these issues,” he said in the East Room recently, in a ceremony highlighting the new health care program. ”When I met her in 1971, she was already obsessed with them.” Like the words, the body language emphasized her helpmate role. As the audience applauded, Hillary Clinton, seated on the podium to the President’s right, stared down at the floor, seemingly abashed at all the attention. …

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Hilary Clinton remembers — as do I, rather vividly — what a tough road it’s been since we were young women in the days when women didn’t have the opportunities that they enjoy more these days:

Growing up, there were sports we couldn’t play, schools we couldn’t attend, and jobs that essentially had a “men only” sign on them.

As an eighth grader I was captivated by space-travel. I wrote to NASA asking how to apply to be an astronaut — they wrote back explaining that these positions weren’t open to women. Well today, Iowa’s own Peggy Whitson has been appointed the first female Commander of the International Space Station.

Years later, when I was deciding where I wanted to attend law school, I was coolly informed by a Harvard Law professor, and I quote, “We don’t need any more women at Harvard.” So I went to Yale. [laughter] And my entering class at Yale Law School — where I decided to go instead — had 235 students, of whom just 27 were women.

Today, women are the majority of students in law schools. As a young lawyer, when I told a colleague that I might want to practice courtroom law, he replied that, that was impossible, because I didn’t have a wife. … Read more of her speech on “WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Mary Louise Smith Lecture at the Catt Center for Women and Politics,” Iowa State University, October 24, 2007

There’s a bit of the rebel in Hillary Clinton — which I fully understand because it took a somewhat rebellious nature to fight the inequalities with which both she and I grew up. These stories are delightful but mindful of the challenges of standing up for one’s beliefs and rights:

From her speech in Iowa, October 24, 2007:

I’ll never forget a newspaper advice column that I read in the early 1980s. I was working at a law firm at the time and my daughter was about three years old. Someone had written into this column asking: “I’m about to get a big promotion and I’m going to have my own office for the first time. What kind of decorations are appropriate for my office?”

Well, the advice columnist responded that he needed to know if the writer was a man or a woman because it would affect the answer. If you’re a man, he said, and you have a family, put up lots of pictures of your family because people will think when they come into your office “this is a stable person with a good set of family values.” But if you’re a woman, don’t put any pictures of your family in your office because people will think you can’t keep your mind on your job.

So, of course, I immediately filled my office with pictures of my family. …

Then there’s this story about her standing up to an employer following her college graduation:

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 unhealthy conditions).

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Then there was a remarkable speech that Senator Hillary Clinton made in 2001 on the floor of the U.S. Senate in support of the Patients Bill of Rights — which she worked hard to help pass during the days of the Republican majority in Congress, by engaging colleagues on both sides of the aisle like Sen. McCain and then-Sen. John Edwards:

I really rise today on behalf of the countless New Yorkers, and really millions of Americans across our country, who have been waiting for this day for a very long time. I heard some remarks by the Senator from Texas about the efforts that were made, I guess, 6, 7 years ago now, to try to provide health care coverage to every single American. I was deeply involved in those efforts, and although we were not successful, the goal was one that I think we should still keep at the forefront of our minds and hearts because when we began our work in 1993, there were approximately 33 million Americans without insurance; today we are up to 42 million. This is after the so-called managed care/HMO revolution occurred, where people have been finding it harder to afford coverage, afford the deductibles, afford the copayments, with the result that we have more people uninsured today than when many of us tried to address this problem some years ago.

There are many urgent health care issues before us as a nation, such as sky high prescription drugs for our seniors, too many without adequate coverage, and once they have Medicare they can’t afford the additional coverage that is required in order to give them the kind of health care they should have. There are gaps in our health safety net, a shortage of nurses in our hospitals and nursing homes, and the very difficult conditions under which so many of our nurses now labor. And, of course, there is the growing crisis of the uninsured. So we have our work cut out for us in order to deliver on the promise of quality, affordable, accessible health care for all Americans.

That is why I am urging we proceed without further delay or obfuscation and pass a Patients’ Bill of Rights–the bipartisan Patients’ Bill of Rights that Senators McCain, Edwards, and Kennedy have worked so hard to present, which has bipartisan support in the House.

[...]

In my office I keep a picture of a young, beautiful woman named Donna Munnings. This is Donna. This is a young woman who reminds me every single day when I look up at her picture in my office of what can happen when the system does not respond until it is too late.

Donna’s mother Mary is a school bus driver from Scottsville, NY. She has been lobbying and advocating for this bill for years. Her daughter Donna died February 8, 1997, after having visited her primary care physician repeatedly, only to be told that she had an upper respiratory infection and suffered from panic attacks and that no diagnostic tests were necessary. Had the doctors performed a $750 lung scan in time, they would have seen not an upper respiratory infection but a football-sized blood clot in her lung.

Her mother Mary said:

In my subsequent research I found that HMOs can and do penalize doctors for ordering tests which HMOs feel are unnecessary. But all for the sake of money [all for the sake of a $750 test] we lost a vital, beautiful young lady who had only begun her life.

[...]

Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mrs. CLINTON. I am happy to yield.

Mr. DURBIN. I believe the Senator from New York was at a briefing this morning where we discussed the experience in the State of Texas. In 1997, a certain Governor of Texas, who has now moved to Washington, had a Patients’ Bill of Rights established in Texas. Maybe the Senator from New York can help me with these numbers, but I believe in the 4-year period of time that the State Patients’ Bill of Rights has been in effect in Texas, there have been 1,300 appeals of decisions by insurance companies and only 17 lawsuits filed in 4 years.

So the argument that giving the people the right to go to court will mean a flood of cases brought in court has been disproven in the home State of the President. Does the Senator from New York recall that?

Mrs. CLINTON. Indeed, the Senator from New York does recall that. I appreciate the Senator from Illinois raising that because that, of course, is one of the objections the opponents are trying to throw up, that this bill will open the floodgates for lawsuits. In Texas that has not happened. It has not happened anywhere in the country where these protections have been afforded under State law.

People are not rushing to the courthouse. They want the care that they need. They don’t want a lawyer; they want a doctor; and they want the doctor to take care of them according to the doctor’s best judgment. That is what doctors are telling us. They are not being permitted to do that.

I appreciate my friend from Illinois raising that point because, as this debate proceeds, you are going to hear a lot of arguments about why we just cannot do this. You know, we just cannot take care of Donna and her mother Mary and all the other Donnas and Marys in our country. There will be all sorts of red herrings and all kinds of arguments made that just do not hold water. There is no basis in fact for them, but they sound good. Maybe they will scare some people. But we are tired of being scared and intimidated. This is no longer just a political issue, this goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans.

Are we going to take care of each other? Are we going to let doctors and nurses practice their professions? Or are we going to turn our lives over to HMO accountants and bookkeepers and the like?

I am hoping we will not only proceed to this bill, which deserves a full hearing, deserves a full debate, and deserves a unanimous vote in this Chamber. I hope when we pass this, we will be sending a very clear message to all the mothers and fathers and family members that this will never happen again. This beautiful young woman whose life was cut short tragically would still be with us today if that HMO had just said: maybe we should let you go ahead and have that test.

I look forward to working with my colleagues. This has been 5 years in the making. Let’s end the politics of delay and move forward with the motion to proceed.

The Patients Bill of Rights — intended to “amend the Public Health Service Act and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to protect consumers in managed care plans and other health coverage” — passed the U.S. Senate on June 29, 2001 with a vote of 59-36-5.

Hillary Clinton is in deed a “A Champion for Women.”

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[Emphases mine.]