Go, Hillary, Go! Fighting for Women and Girls Worldwide

Christian Science Monitor’s article today, The Potential In Hillary Clinton’s Global Campaign For Women tells us “no other Secretary of State has so focused on women’s rights. It’s a powerful shift.” The editorial board of CSM states:

When Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Africa last month, she visited war-racked eastern Congo to speak out against widespread rape by militias. She choked up after meeting with two rape victims and promised more US help – $17 million for medical treatment and security for victims.

Now she’s taking the issue to the United Nations, where the US is leading an effort to shore up a resolution to end sexual violence against civilians during armed conflict. The Security Council passed Resolution 1820 last year, but follow through is sorely lacking.

Women’s rights are becoming a signature issue for America’s top diplomat. In her official travels, Mrs. Clinton talks with women, meets with female activists, and presses the twin challenges of women’s rights and abuse with political leaders. She wants US development aid to focus more on women, and has appointed the first US ambassador for global women’s issues.

The Bush administration, too, championed women’s rights, especially in Muslim countries such as Afghanistan. But no Secretary of State has sought to make women as high a priority as Clinton is attempting. It’s a potentially powerful shift. If she can pull it off.

As Rev. Amy noted in her terrific piece, Well, Isn’t This a Nice Change, the Washington Post started the very short parade to end the virtual press blackout on Clinton by writing a lovely and informative article focused on the woman’s work, not her pantsuits or cackle:

“Amid all the distractions, what is Clinton actually doing? Only overseeing what may be the most profound changes in U.S. foreign policy in two decades.”

Well, if anyone can pull it off…

A more detailed article on this issue appeared in the Washington Times today, noting:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who appeared genuinely moved after her August visit to rape victims in eastern Congo, is expected to chair a special U.N. Security Council session at the end of the month to review U.N. efforts to curb the epidemic.

“Meeting with survivors of rape, which is now used increasingly as a tool of war, was shattering,” Mrs. Clinton told a New York audience Friday. “The atrocities described to me distill evil to its basest form. These are crimes against humanity. They don’t just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. This criminal outrage against women must be stopped.”

In a new approach, two U.N. reports issued last week could lay a basis for war crimes prosecutions against individual soldiers.

…the U.N. Security Council meeting Sept. 30 would review implementation of Resolution 1820, passed last year explicitly to outlaw sexual violence in conflict and afterward. Women’s groups praised the 2008 text for designating rape as a threat to international peace and security.

As Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast recently stated in her otherwise sexist piece Obama’s Other Wife, “Hillary Clinton has been fighting for the rights of women since before it was fashionable.” I applaud Secretary Clinton for making this a priority. The CSM article states that:

Obstacles abound, including the unruly thicket of US aid programs. But the greatest challenge is the deeply rooted culture in countries that oppress women and girls – often violently and even to the point of enslavement, sexual and otherwise. Honor killings, child brides, female infanticide – all of these accepted customs need to be realized as unacceptable.

They wisely point out that Secretary Clinton is doing her best not to fall into the trap of being seen to lecture foreign countries on their treatment of women, or to create social upheaval and note that she is “wisely framing the issue in terms of countries’ own interests”:

Her pitch: Healthcare for women, especially maternal care, makes for healthier children and families. Schooling for girls contributes to economic progress. Microloans to women pay handsome dividends as women pay them off and invest further in businesses and their families’ welfare. (The majority of the world’s small-holder farmers are women.)

Some experts also see a link between the oppression of women and the problems of extremism and terrorism.

“It is a very-well-researched fact that women are key to economic progress and social stability,” Clinton said in India this summer. Global aid groups, the World Bank, the US military, and economists agree. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” reports Goldman Sachs.

Attitudes in male-dominated countries can change once men see the monetary benefits of female empowerment. Writers Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn give a convincing example of this in their new book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn also deserve kudos for drawing attention to this issue. British PM Gordon Brown recently praised their important book in his article Taking Women’s Rights Seriously:

They tell of Saima Muhammad, a poverty-stricken wife and mother near Lahore, Pakistan, who suffered daily beatings from her jobless husband. For lack of food, she had to send her daughter to live with an aunt. When her second child, a girl, was born, Saima’s husband was urged by his mother to take a second wife so he could father a son.

Then Saima got a loan of $65 through a Pakistani group that lends exclusively to women. She started an embroidery business that now employs 30 families in the neighborhood (including her husband). She paid off her husband’s debt (more than $3,000), kept her girls in school, and upgraded her house, adding running water and TV.

The authors write that Saima’s husband is now more impressed with girls. They are “just as good as boys,” he says.

Yep, we are just as good as boys. And once in a while, we’re even better. Sssh. Keep that under your hat. Would have been nice if people figured that out in 2008. But I digress…

In closing, the Christian Science Monitor states that Secretary Clinton has found the best way to frame this issue in order to get the most mileage, since we know appealing on a humanitarian basis has not gotten us very far in the decent and equal treatment of women and girls – either here or around the world:

Of course, women’s rights are human rights. They don’t need to be justified for any other reason than that. But in many countries, the path to that realization may well begin with economic self-interest, and Clinton is right to recognize this.

It is the understatement of the century that I would prefer her leadership as President, yet I appreciate she is making this cause such an important element of her platform as Secretary of State, a cause she promoted in her famous speech in Beijing in 1995, which she delivered in defiance of the U.S. State Dept. and the Chinese government:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

“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. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. 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. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.”

I am so proud to have supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 and to see that she is still working for the issues she holds near and dear, no matter how she is treated, no matter how the American press pretends she doesn’t exist, no matter what else is going on around her. This is an adult who sees the bigger picture.

She’ll always have my vote.