Judith's Page

My friend, Marilyn Wiles, sent me the following interview with Hillary, and I send it to you. Woman's Issues, world wide, are the most important for todays world"I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last
great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many
other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’
s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the
oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to
realize people’s full human potential."
HRC

A New Gender Agenda
INTERVIEW by MARK LANDLER
Published: August 18, 2009

Hillary Rodham Clinton staked her claim as an advocate for global women’s
issues in 1995, when, as first lady, she gave an impassioned speech at a
United Nations conference in Beijing. As secretary of state, she pushed to
create a new position, ambassador at large for global women’s issues, and
recruited Melanne Verveer, her former chief of staff, to fill it. And she
has drawn attention to women at nearly every stop in her travels, most
recently on an 11-day visit to Africa, during which, among other things, she
went to eastern Congo to speak out against mass rape. Hours before leaving
on that trip, Clinton discussed women’s issues and the Obama administration’
s foreign policy for 35 minutes in her elegant seventh-floor office at the
State Department. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our
conversation.

Q: In your confirmation hearing, you said you would put women’s issues at
the core of American foreign policy. But as you know, in much of the world,
gender equality is not accepted as a universal human right. How do you
overcome that deep-seated cultural resistance?

Clinton: You have to recognize how deep-seated it is, but also reach an
understanding of how without providing more rights and responsibilities for
women, many of the goals we claim to pursue in our foreign policy are either
unachievable or much harder to achieve.

Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote
doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of
their vote is in question. Which is why when I travel, I do events with
women, I talk about women’s rights, I meet with women activists, I raise
women’s concerns with the leaders I’m talking to.

I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last
great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many
other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’
s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the
oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to
realize people’s full human potential.

Q: I’m curious about what priorities you’re setting. Will the Obama
administration have a signature issue — sex trafficking or gender-based
violence or maternal mortality or education for girls — in the way that
H.I.V./AIDS came to symbolize the Bush-administration strategy?

Clinton: We are having as a signature issue the fact that women and girls
are a core factor in our foreign policy. If you look at what has to be done,
in some societies, it is a different problem than in others. In some of the
societies where women are deprived of political and economic rights, they
have access to education and health care. In other societies, they may have
been given the vote, but girl babies are still being put out to die.

So it’s not one specific program, so much as a policy. When it comes to our
global health agenda, maternal health is now part of the Obama
administration’s outreach. We’re very proud of the work this country has
done, through Pepfar, on H.I.V./AIDS [the President’s Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief was begun by George W. Bush in 2003]. We’ve moved from an
understanding of how to deal with global AIDS to recognizing it’s now a
woman’s disease, because women are the most vulnerable and often have no
power to protect themselves. And it’s increasingly younger women or even
girls.

But women die every minute from poor maternal health care. You know,
H.I.V./AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria — those are all, unfortunately,
equal-opportunity killers. Maternal health is a woman’s issue; it’s a family
issue; it’s a child issue. And for the United States to say to countries
that have very high maternal mortality rates, “We care about the future of
your children, and in order to do that, we care about the present of your
women,” is a powerful statement.

Q: Do you have a point of view about what should come first: Do you empower
women economically and then hope that they seize a political role for
themselves? Or do you seek to give them more legal and political standing
and hope that they can win a place in the economic sphere?

Clinton: That’s a great question, because I think the historical record
would show both routes have worked. Women were not particularly economically
empowered when we finally included the right of women to vote in our
Constitution. So women’s rights were expanded in 1920, and that opened up a
lot of doors to women to see themselves in different roles, including
economic roles, outside the home.

India’s been a democracy for 60 years, and remarkably extended the vote to
everyone, every caste, to both men and women equally. So women have been
given the right to vote, but without economic empowerment, they didn’t have
the influence that their votes should have brought, which is why the
government of India has made such a big point of extending economic and
political opportunity equally to women.

And when we visited SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association [in India],
those women had the vote before they were born, but being economically
empowered, being able to stand up for themselves inside their families, on
the streets of their villages, is giving them a sense of autonomy and
authority that just their vote couldn’t have.

Q: In your travels as secretary of state, you’ve focused heavily on the role
of microlending. Is there a reason in these early days that you’ve tended to
emphasize the economic over the political?

Clinton: It’s interesting: it’s partly because of where I’ve gone. It’s also
because I’ve worked on microcredit since 1983, going back to Arkansas and
projects that I worked on with my husband there.

I am also struck by every international public-opinion poll I’ve ever seen,
that the No. 1 thing most men and women want is a good job with a good
income. It is at the core of the human aspiration to be able to support
oneself, to give one’s children a better future. Microenterprise is uniquely
designed to empower women because — through the trial and error of its
development, going back to Muhammad Yunus’s invention of it in Bangladesh —
women are much greater at investing in future goods than the men who have
participated in microcredit have turned out to be. And they are also very
reliable in paying back, because they are so eager to have that extra help
and recognition that microcredit provides.

So, I don’t make a distinction between economic empowerment and political,
social empowerment; I think it’s fair to say both need to go hand in hand.

Q: There are counterterrorism experts who have made the observation that
countries that nurture terrorist groups tend to be the same societies that
marginalize women. Do you see a link between your campaign on women’s issues
and our national security?

Clinton: I think it’s an absolute link. Part of the reason I have pursued it
as secretary of state is because I see it in our national security interest.
If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to
groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident
in their treatment of women.

What does preventing little girls from going to school in Afghanistan by
throwing acid on them have to do with waging a struggle against oppression
externally? It’s a projection of the insecurity and the disorientation that
a lot of these terrorists and their sympathizers feel about a fast-changing
world, where they turn on television sets and see programs with women
behaving in ways they can’t even imagine. The idea that young women in their
own societies would pursue an independent future is deeply threatening to
their cultural values.

Q: Many of the countries where the abuses against women are most prevalent
are also countries that have a vital strategic importance to the United
States: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India. How can you aggressively advocate for
women without jeopardizing those strategic relationships?

Clinton: Well, in a number of these strategic relationships, there’s a
commitment to advancing the roles and rights of women. In India, the changes
that have been made are remarkable. There are still tens of millions of very
poor women, but women have assumed more and more responsibility; they are
seen in public positions and increasingly economic ones, where their stature
is accepted by society.

When I meet with the Chinese leadership, as I just did in the Strategic and
Economic Dialogue, they have women who are part of their leadership team,
and women who are assuming greater and greater economic and political roles.

Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the
infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high, and
unfortunately with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to
determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’
d rather have a boy. And those are deeply set attitudes. But at the
governmental level, there is a great deal of openness and commitment that I
am seeing.

In other societies where we have strategic security interests, it’s a
challenge to move the agenda forward in a way that includes women’s issues.
When we did our strategic review on Afghanistan, we said very clearly, We
can’t be all things to all people in Afghanistan. We have to focus on a few
critical concerns. But one of them was the role of women, and women’s
participation in society.

Q: Let me ask you one question about India, where we’ve just concluded a
Strategic Dialogue agreement. I didn’t notice too much emphasis on sex
trafficking on your trip, even though it’s clear India remains the world
capital of sex trafficking. Can you make that case strenuously with the
Indians at the same moment that we’re trying to do so many other things with
them?

Clinton: Absolutely, and in fact, we do it every year with our annual report
on trafficking in persons. It’s a very high priority to me, and it is raised
as part of the ongoing discussions that we have with many countries. In a
democracy like India, there is a challenge of getting the word down to the
local jurisdiction — the local police, the local judges, the local
authorities. But I have no doubt about the seriousness with which their
government takes this issue.

Q: Could some of the billions of dollars the United States has spent on
military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 have been better spent on education and
health care for girls and women?

Clinton: Yes. The answer is yes, and in my meetings with then-President
Musharraf in ’03, ’05, ’07, in this country as well, I raised it all the
time.

I remember visiting a village about 45 minutes outside of Lahore, when I was
in Pakistan as first lady, and we met with a group of mothers and
grandmothers in the village. And they wanted very much to have a school at
the secondary level for their daughters, the way their sons did. But the
school for their sons was not in the village, so the sons had to travel. No
one could even imagine the daughters traveling outside their village to
continue their education.

And when I think about the extraordinarily accomplished Pakistanis in the
professions, in medicine, in education, I think it is certainly the case
that if Pakistan had invested more in the education of children so that poor
families would not have sent their boys off to be educated by extremists, it
might well have made a difference. And it still can, because that’s part of
our approach now.

Q: Because it’s also a question of how we allocate our resources.

Clinton: That’s right, and with the Kerry-Lugar/Berman bill[s] that provide
aid for these kinds of purposes in Pakistan, we hope to try to make up for
lost time. [These Senate and House bills are currently being finalized in
Congress.]

Q: Gender-based violence is an enormous issue in much of Africa, and in
places like Congo, rape, as you know, is an instrument of war. How can you,
or anybody else, hope to combat that?

Clinton: President Obama and I and the United States will not tolerate this
continuation of wanton, senseless, brutal violence perpetrated against girls
and women. We don’t know exactly what we can do, but we are going to be
delivering some aid and some ideas about how to better organize the
communities to deal with it. We’re going to sound the alarm that this is not
all just unexpected and irrational.

These militias, which perpetrate a lot of these rapes and other horrific
assaults on girls and women, are paid well, or realize the spoils of
guarding the mines. Those mines, which are one of the great natural
resources of the Congo, produce a lot of the materials that go into our
cellphones and other electronics. There are tens of millions of dollars that
go into these militias that, in effect, get translated into a sense of
impunity that is then exercised against the weakest members of society.

The ambassador for war crimes, Steve Rapp, has the distinction of being
among the first international prosecutors to win a case on gender violence,
and I specifically wanted him to take on this role, because I want to
highlight this issue.

Q: I’ve been at more than a few women’s events with you overseas where the
men in the audience drift off to their BlackBerrys or into a snooze after a
few minutes. How do you change the mind-set, not just overseas but at home
and in this building, that tends to view women’s issues as a pink ghetto?

Clinton: By making the arguments that I am making here — that so-called
women’s issues are stability issues, security issues, equity issues. The
World Bank and many other analyses have proved over and over again that
where women are mistreated, where they are denied equal rights, you will
find instability that very often serves as an incubator of extremism.

A woman who is safe enough in her own life to invest in her children and see
them go to school is not going to have as many children. The resource
battles over water and land will be diminished. This is all connected. And
it’s an issue of how we take hard power and soft power, so called, and use
it to advance not just American ends but, in advancing global progress, we
are making the world safer for our own children.

Q: Last month in New Delhi, a young woman asked you an interesting question:
How would you view the progress of women in both India and the United
States? She pointed out that India elected a woman as prime minister within
three decades of independence, while the U.S. had yet to elect a female
president. Is there any lesson from your own presidential campaign that you
can use to take to women elsewhere in the world?

Clinton: Well, you’ve heard me talk about this in a lot of settings, from
Japan to South Korea to Indonesia to India to Latin America [laughs]. It is
one of the most common questions I’m asked, along with the question about
how I can now work for and with President Obama, since he and I ran so
vigorously against each other. It is clearly on young women’s minds. And I
find that both exciting and gratifying.

My campaign for many millions of reasons gave a lot of heart to many young
women. It is still the most common comment that people make to me: “your
campaign gave me courage” or “your campaign made a difference in my daughter
’s life” or “I went back to school because of your campaign.” So, it is
unfinished business, and young women know it is unfinished business.

The vast majority of them will never run for political office in any
country. But they may decide to seek an education that their family doesn’t
approve of, or move away for a job that is a little bit frightening to them,
but which they feel they’ve got the skills to do. Or, you know, stand up and
speak out against an injustice they see. And it is all of that ripple that
is building and building — and is unstoppable.

I live for those moments where I see this woman stand up in SEWA — this
poor, uneducated woman — and say, “I am the president of SEWA; 1.1 million
women voted.” I mean, what a great statement that was from her. So, I get a
lot of joy out of doing this work. I think it is so critically important,
but it is also incredibly moving to see these individual lives changed
because of some event or speech that you have no idea why it made an
impression on them.